Silent Volcano

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers─ under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance brings us a step closer to understanding why we create the contrast we experience. We want to conform to reduce the separation we feel within the self. We want to hear someone tell us we are right, when we believe we are. We want to be a part of a group that expresses our beliefs because fear keeps our individuality under house arrest. We can hide within a group and be like everyone else. We have a cause, a purpose, a truth and we no longer feel separated from the self. We want to feel the energy of unified connection. We give our energy to others in order to sense our self worth, but we find layers of worthless self righteousness within the corridors of conformity. We convince the self to believe in conformity, and we create a reality around this duplicity in order to empower the ego self,

Separation of self is the silent volcano that constantly rumbles through our experiences. Emerson explains the folly of separation and the resourcefulness of those who vibrate with it.

Traceless Beginning

The notion that somebody literally made the world─ that is what is known as artificialism. It is the child’s way of thinking: the table is made, so somebody made the table. The world is here, so somebody must have made it. There is another point of view involving emanation and precipitation without personification.

A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth─ and that’s how the world becomes. The whole universe is included in this first sound, this vibration, which then commits all things to fragmentation in the field of time. In this view, there is not someone outside who said, “Let it happen.”

Joseph Campbell shared those thoughts with Bill Moyers in 1985 and the early part of 1986. Campbell’s book, The Power of the Myth was the result of those conversations. Campbell shared a great deal of wisdom about Myths with Moyers; he explained how we live own myths on a daily basis. Life is a myth that we continually refine and change as new information surfaces physically. Our religious beliefs play an important role in what myths we incorporate, and what myths we dismiss as untruths or imagination. Imagination is the foundation for physical life. Without imagination there would be no thoughts, no beliefs and no unique experiences to incorporate into our daily myth of physical living.

Relived Events

But what shall I dedicate to you, master, say,
Who taught the creatures their ear?
My memory of a day in spring,
Its evening in Russia, a horse. . .

Across from the village came the white horse alone,
On one fore fetlock the hobble,
To be alone for the night on the meadows;
How his shock of mane beat

On his neck in time with his high-mettled spirit,
In that rudely obstructed gallop.
How the springs of his steed’s blood leap!

That horse felt the distances, and how
He sang and heard! ─ Your cycle of myths
Was closed in him.

His image ─ I dedicate.

That work is Sonnet 20, from Rilke’s 1922 Sonnet To Orpheus, First Part. Rilke had just finished Duino Elegies that year. He wrote a letter to his love Lou Andreas-Salome reminding her of an 1899 experience they had in Russia when a white horse with a bad hoof came running toward them on a Volga meadow. The horse made such an internal impression on Rilke he used it as a metaphor in the Sonnet. He dedicated that experience to God; it was an offering of joy and appreciation that came back to him every time he thought of the horse.

What Rilke is describing is appreciation for experiences that are lived over and over again in physical life. We choose to relive events, as well as important happenings and then put them in a section of our body consciousness for reference. We use this storage as recall, and make an association with a present experience, and it becomes familiar to us. When there isn’t any experience to reference in body consciousness, our current experience is an unknown. Unknowns create fear or more separation.

Rilke’s point is to dedicate those unknown experiences to God. Rilke uses his Religious beliefs, but Rilke’s God, as he describes it in many of his poems, is within him. So he is dedicating each experience to the one who created them. The God within his consciousness is the benefactor and he senses the emotional connection to that experience. Appreciation of each experience is the association and lesson from Rilke’s work.

The Mind of One

Solemn Hour

Who weeps anywhere in the world,
Without cause weeps in the world,
Weeps over me.

Who laughs now anywhere in the night,
Without cause laughs in the night,
Laughs at me.

Who goes now anywhere in the world,
Without cause goes in the world,
Goes to me.

Who dies now anywhere in the world,
Without cause dies in the world,
Looks at me.

Rilke’s poem Solemn Hour speaks of a world, that is a manifested creation of matter made of minerals and water. We conveniently mishandle, misread and misinterpret this world. We muddle through misery looking for a laugh, only to find a mirror reflecting our own sense of senselessness. We die in a secluded forest of myopic dreams and at the same time realize there is no death in the reality of appreciation.

The vibrating energy in a cry, a laugh, a move, or a death is life lived through the mind of one and the consciousness of the many.

This Moment

There must be something better,
But I’m satisfied just as I am.

Monkeys spot deer in the forest,
Fish shoot up the mountain stream.

If there’s change, there’s also repose
Which soon must suffer change.

Along the solar orbit of the night,
I feel life’s constant aching:

Smack in the middle of the day,
I found moonlight between a woman’s legs.

Shinkichi Takahashi explains beliefs in his poem, Aching of Life. Religion tells us there’s something better than the life we are living. There is something better in this moment, when we are complete in the moment. There is something special in this moment when we sense when we are born, and why we were born.

Another Cloud

When, outwardly, a man is attached to form, his inner mind is disturbed. But when outwardly he is not attached to form, his mind is not disturbed. His original nature is pure and quiet as it is in itself; only when it recognizes an objective world, and thinks of it as something, is it disturbed. Those who recognize an objective world and yet find their mind undisturbed are in true enlightenment.

Hui-neng, the 8th century Chinese Chan monastic, explains what enlightenment is in simple terms.

Silence

Silently and serenely one forgets all words;
Clearly and vividly That appears. . .
When one realizes it, it is vast and without limit;
In its essence, it is pure awareness,
Full of wonder in this pure reflection. . .
Infinite wonder permeates this serenity;
In this Illumination all intentional efforts vanish.
Silent is the final word.
Reflection is the response to all manifestation.
Devoid of any effort,
This response is natural and spontaneous. . .
The truth of silent illumination
Is perfect and complete.

Those thoughts come from Garma C. C. Chang’s 1958 book, The Practice of Zen. Reaching this state of perfection in objective awareness is an exciting thought. Blending the subjective with the objective is new work for mour Western brains, but it is familiar.

Accepting our duplicity is a step towards reflection, albeit a short step. We are perfect and complete, but we are always changing. Accepting our inner consciousness refreshes the puddle of our peaceful minds and silence sees itself in its reflection.

Outer Perceptions

Let us take outer perception, the direct sensation which, for example, the walls of these rooms give us. Can we say that the psychical and the physical are absolutely heterogeneous? On the contrary, there are so little heterogeneous that if we disregard all explanatory inventions, molecules and ether waves, for example, which at bottom are metaphysical entities, if in short, we take reality naively, as it is given, an immediate; then this sensation which our vital interest rest and from which all our actions proceed, this sensible reality and the sensation which we have of it are absolutely identical one with the other at the time the sensation occurs. Reality is appreciation itself. . . In this instance, the content of the physical is none other than the psychical. Subject and object confuse, as it were.

William James, the 20th century psychologist and philosopher, is explaining reality in an interesting way. Reality is rooted in the psychical, or the subjective consciousness, which is expressed physically as objective awareness. Reality, as James describes it, is appreciation of experiences that we create in order to sense them physically. We separate my self in duality in order to experience what we create.

Our linear thoughts keep our reality on a course that can be altered at any time. We have the ability to change or expand a belief and create another association about it. That happens constantly as we become aware of our subjective consciousness. The more we blend our objective consciousness with our subjective awareness our beliefs expand.

Blending the self into a fluid expression of appreciation is an element in the action of subjective consciousness.

Open Portal

But you now, you whom I knew like a flower whose name
I don’t know, I will once more remember and show you
To them, you who were taken away,
Beautiful playmate of the invincible cry.

Dancer first, who suddenly, with body full of lingering,
Paused, as though her youngness were being cast in bronze;
Mourning and listening, then from the high achievers
Music fell into her altered heart.

Sickness was near. Already overcome by the shadows,
Her blood pulsed more darkly, yet as if fleetingly
Suspect, it thrust forth into its natural spring.

Again and again, interrupted by darkness and downfall,
It gleamed of the earth. Until after terrible throbbing
It entered the hopelessly open portal.

Rilke, from his Sonnets to Orpheus, touches on a sense that we all experience in this physical dimension. Separation from we know not what overshadows us, and we desperately try to discover this pulsating urge through religion, science and several other beliefs that are embedded in our objective consciousness. Trying to identify this playmate that alters reality with whispers and perceptions is a life long task for some, and a pre-conceived notion for others. Rilke refers to it as something beyond this self that wanders through physical life, but as he continues to write about it, he senses how close it is to him. In fact, it is him.

The Not-Self

Suddenly he becomes conscious that his principle is not the principle of the universe that there are things that exist independently of him; he becomes conscious of it in suffering from contact with the world-obstacle. At this moment appears conscious fear of death, of the danger which the Not-self represents for the self.

Hubert Benoit, the 20th century physician, author, musician and philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1955 book, The Supreme Doctrine. The debate to be or not to be has been raging ever since we decided to believe that we are separated from our inner consciousness. Psychologists call it our unconscious, but there is nothing unconscious about it. We are more unconscious in our waking objective state of consciousness than we are in our subjective inner consciousness.

The shift in conscious awareness has been going on for centuries, but a large audience in the the 20th century started to feel it. The shift is misunderstood. Our religious beliefs get in the way and we believe the end of the world is coming or a savior will rise from the ashes and transform the world. The shift that we now sense sense is an expansion of our belief structure.

The transforamtion of beliefs is a combination of innate elements that will change our perception of reality.

The major shift our belief struction will be completely around 2050. Society will begin to collectively feel the merging of subjective consciousness on, before and after that date.

Joyful Brew

She holds a frail jar in her hand
Into which she has poured nothing
No life’s joy or giddying brew. . .
Only a billion worlds!

Shinkichi Takahashi's world is exposed in his work, Statue of Kudara-Avalokitesvara. His world is filled with images of Kwan Yin, Zenko, and Hosho. Those figures are important in Eastern culture, but they are relatively unknown in the Western world. The title of his work comes from Kudara, which was an ancient Japanese clan founded in the 7th century. Avalokitesvara is a statue of compassion, and is often associated with Kwan Yin, who is the Buddhist model of compassion. Takahashi’s work flows in a stream of compassion that surprises, as well as stimulates actions. These actions spring from crevices in our inner consciousness. These crevices are filled with the ancient wisdom, and it hangs in our body consciousness like a sleeping bat.

Compassion of any kind is stimulated by our inner consciousness. It’s always right below the surface of our perceptions, and it patiently waits for us to become aware of it. It needs nothing, but an impulse from us. Once activated, it becomes a flame of unity that joins diversity with strands of awareness. All physical differences melt away, and a billion worlds become one when we express the compassion that is an innate feature of the self.

Compassion is more than an emotion; it is the energy of consciousness flowing through an aspect of our awareness, and notifying us of our own unity. When compassion is present separation disappears, and all life has value and substance.

To hold a frail jar of compassion, and never pour it is not possible in this physical reality. All creation and creators are compassionate expressions of the joyful brew that flows through our subjective consciousness. We live in a billion worlds, but focus on one in order to remember that compassion is a jar of nothing, but our own createful desire to be whole within our objective consciousness.

A Perfect Dark Sky

“Home I have none. Flock I have none. I am Outcast. And we fly now at the peak of the Great Mountain Wind. Beyond a few hundred feet, I can lift this old body no higher.”

“But you can, Jonathan. For you have learned. One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin.”

As it had shined across him all his life, so understanding lighted that moment for Jonathan Seagull. They were right. He could fly higher, and it was time to go home.

“I’m ready,” he said at last.

And Jonathan Livingston Seagull rose with the two star-bright gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky.

That segment is from Richard Bach’s 1970 book of wisdom, better known as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. There is so much wisdom is this wonderful story that it’s difficult to absorb it all in one reading. It's easy to find the self paging through the book from time to time to find a thought that stimulates an impulse within us. We are able to identify that urge and we call it inspiration, as well as insight. Bach is offering us a fragment of his consciousness and we can use it or not.

We make associations about the experiences in the book and create similar experiences in life. We never stop creating. We can fly in a perfect dark sky, and accept the fact that we are that perfect dark sky.

The Essence of a Straw

This World is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
This existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
That work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
Dangerous fear, hope,
Free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
Of straw
Blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words,
And what they try to say swept
Out the window, down the slant of the roof.

The 13th century philosopher and poet Jelaluddin Balkhi, better known as Rumi, wrote that poem about consciousness and never called it that. Rumi used words like emptiness and existence to explain the foundation for the energy we project into physical life. We don’t know how to explain or describe this sensation that singes all our senses. We believe it never touchs them physically so we create other realities to experience in order to find other aspects of the self. Each self arranges energy into understandable forms, and our imagination develops a comfortably existence in the waters of diversity.

The water is a baptism of emptiness filled with the here-and-now self, which creates mountains to either climb or ignore depending on how open and accepting we are. This sea propels us from one mountain to another looking for a straw of remembrance. The deafening sound of nothing drips down the mountain, and forms a cloud of verbal thoughts. The sameness of the words dissipates into a fine mist of wisdom that showers us in awareness. We suddenly sense that the essence of a straw is always within us.

Casual Simplicity

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glow alone
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

Emily Dickinson, the 19th century recluse, understood the vibrations of life. Everything was conscious in Emily’s world; a stone, the trees, the babbling brooks, and the clouds in the sky. All of those physical manifestations appear differently to each individual because they are another quality of consciousness that constantly changes. They are energy that express a form of subjective awareness. They are in our objective focus so we can remember the diversity that exists within consciousness.

What would life be without a rock? What would water do without the rock filled mountains? What would we be if we omitted rocks from our consciousness? A rockless universe would be another dimension to experience.

Rocks are a different intensity of consciousness. We depend on them to rationally form a physical world for us to exist in. Like water, they make our physical world appear whole, and filled with substance. Our life extends through the cracks and crevices of these created vibrations, when we perceive rocks as consciousness. Each rock is a universe of minerals that contain a world of abundance. Void of beliefs and perceptions, rocks expand in consciousness in complete contentment. They are unemotional and have no beliefs. The consciousness of rocks protrudes through the air, and dances with the clouds. Rocks mingle with natural elements and change form in order to express their physical consciousness.

Stones sit quietly, but express a quality of casual simplicity and artistic flare. Fulfilling their absolute decree, stones are content to be rocks of noble indifference.

Primordial Images

Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the manner of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.

It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.

Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, wrote those thoughts in his 1936 book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung is describing what Eastern philosophy has expressed for centuries. As Jung said, we only understand what we perceive and believe. Eastern thought is filled with other beliefs and perceptions that made Western man think, but he was unable to understand his thinking until minds like Jung and those before him made Western sense of it all.

Jung is explaining inner consciousness. He calls it unconsciousness, but the inner consciousness is much more conscious than what we call our consciousness. Inner consciousness, as Jung points out, is the foundation for our ego and body consciousness.

We don't need to reconnect with our inner consciousness; we have never been disconnected from it. It guides our waking consciousness. Our created beliefs, as well as our primordial beliefs, never disappear while we are focused physically.

Jung said that we can only live a full life when we are in harmony with our inner consciousness. What he means is when we are in harmony with our inner consciousness pain and suffering are accepted. We take responsibility for creating them.

The Sid Series

Imagination is the foundation for all reality. Impulses stimulate thought and we create perceptions and beliefs from those thoughts, which become experiences. What we believe we experience and no one understands that better than my friend Yvonne Perry. Trying to create a visual image of Yvonne is not hard to do. She is an author, publisher, freelance writer, editor, business women and a trusting friend. All those titles describe Yvonne’s physical activities and accomplishments, but Yvonne is much more than all those descriptive messages. Yvonne is a whole within our connected consciousness that shares the qualities of her essence using a delightful and educating façade, that captivates our physical, as well as spiritual energy.

Yvonne’s New Collection of Short Stories express those qualities perfectly. Yvonne uses words and symbols that children of all ages can relate too. The Sid Series is a unique collection of short stories that are rooted in imagination and truth. The series is a collection of holistic stories that expand our awareness. The Sid Series tells us something about ourselves. The 12 stories in the collection deal with different topics that children and adults have a difficult time understanding and believing. Yvonne, through her artistic story telling ability, brings those topics into focus, so they can be discussed and experienced in a natural and holistic way.

The Sid Series is an insightful look into the world within all of us. Yvonne identifies with that world and brings it to our physical reality, so we can appreciate who we are and why we are experiencing the beauty and the wonders of physical life.

For more information about Yvonne’s work and her services visit: http://www.TheSidSeries.com or www.writersinthesky.com

Children Have Much to Teach Us About Past Lives

Does your child talk about when she used to be someone else? Listen to her. Write it down. She could be talking about a past life. Children are a lot more aware of the spirit realm than most adults realize. When a soul comes into a body, it brings with it cellular and/or conscious memory of where it was before coming to earth.
Without prompting, many children as young as two years of age remember and speak of their past lives. Some describe details, people, and events of that life that they had no way of learning in this life. The Sun Newspapers in Sri Lanka has a short documentary on YouTube (http://ow.ly/y4z2) about a young girl who remembered living and dying in a village not more than six miles from her current home and life. When taken to the village, she instantly recognized her home, called the names of her siblings, and went directly to the cabinet where her toys were stored in the past life. Fortunately, both sets of her parents accepted this phenomenon and she is allowed to spend time in both homes.

ABC News shares a story about a boy named James Leininger who recalled details of his past life as a World War II Navy pilot who was shot down and killed over the Pacific. James had terrible nightmares about a plane crash; and he knew details about airplanes and a pilot named James Huston Jr. that he couldn't have known at such a young age. Once his parents researched and found evidence supporting the boy’s claim, they believed that he was the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr. and his nightmares stopped. http://ow.ly/y4zY

Some parents either don't notice what their child is saying or don’ believe it's possible that the child is remembering a past life. They may discount the experience and think the child is making it all up. If you child wants to tell you who they were or how they died in a past life, please listen. Children have much to teach us, and these experienced souls have come to us for a reason. Not only are past life experiences real, they affect us in our present journey. Having knowledge of your past life may explain some behaviors, habits, or health challenges we encounter in this life.

Reincarnation was once an accepted belief, but thanks to the Second Council of Constantinople in A.D. 553, many people were led to believe that humans only have one life or one chance to get it right in order to avoid eternal damnation of the soul. Even today, according to Dr. J. Chiappalone’s book Keys to Reality, more than 60 percent of the world's population still believes in reincarnation. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, only 20 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation.

While my book, The Sid Series ~ A Collection of Holistic Stories for Children, does not directly mention reincarnation, it does allude to it in “Puppy Love ~ Dealing with the Death of a Pet.” As a child, I had no one to help me understand some of the paranormal things I experienced. Naturally, I feel it is very important to give parents and grandparents a comfortable starting point for discussion on topics that aren’t easily explained to children. Reading my book to a child is probably going to spark some questions from your little ones, but it the stories are written to reassure children that it’s okay to talk about spiritual things. I invite you to take a look inside the book at http://TheSidSeries.com
Additional reading
http://www.childpastlives.org/
http://paranormal.about.com/cs/reincarnation/

Sameness

In the words of Dante:

The Now is the moment to which all times are present.

Aristotle said it this way:

If the before and after are both in one and the same Now, then what happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what is happening today and nothing would be before of after anything else. . . Then
Everything would be in anything and the universe is in a grain of millet only because the grain of millet and the universe are both existent at the same time.

Putting the Now in a linear context is what we do physically. We only focus on what we are doing in a linear fashion. Experiencing simultaneous manifestations is more that the brain can handle in our present state of awareness, but that state is constantly changing. Our subjective consciousness is always in action; non-physical energy shapes our perceptions and beliefs. Thanks to quantum physics we are able to understand that space does not exist without an object. Objects must be surrounded by space to exist. Space has features that allow it to curve around objects, so space is actually a form of consciousness and so is time. Objects must endure to exist, so time is the duration of objects. Without objects there would be no time, so time and objects are one. That would mean that space, time and objects are one consciousness expressing itself in different forms. Newtonian physics was the door that opened our objective awareness to Quantum physics, because Newtonian physics remained the same in our objective awareness.

Not only are we the same, but different physically, our non-physical essence is the same, but chooses to express itself in a variety of conscious forms. We express these energy forms in time and space, but time and space is different depending on what form or object we choose to manifest.

Dante and Aristotle and an assortment of other Eastern and Western philosophers say that the world, as we perceive it, is actually one consciousness, expressing itself in different forms. That thought can send the imagination into overtime. Our diversity creates expansion from the sameness of consciousness. Without subjective diversity, we would stagnant in objective sameness. There would be no action other than the same action.


We constantly relate to sameness, but we crave diversity and challenge in order to expand physically. We immerse the self in groups and networks, to feel the sameness, but when they become too similar we choose diversity in order to continue the process of objective awareness. Social groups want to keep us the same.

Physical group members get caught in the trap of complacency. Members convince themselves that their mission and goal is true. They use partial truths to fuel their intentions. Those intentions usually have economic motivations and expectations.

Words like real, authentic, true and spiritual are used to influence perceptions and beliefs within a group. Political and religious perceptions and beliefs that are ego motivated under the guise of truth try to control, rather than expand the individual.

A Composite Of Opposite Thoughts

The world is a unity of opposites,
From the Formed towards the forming, is essentially a world
From present to present, this moment of the eternal present
is the unity of opposites.

Kitaro Nishida, the 20th century Japanese Philosopher, incorporates both Zen and Western thought in his writing. His thoughts about unity within our world of opposites are from his 1958 book, Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness.

We are taught to believe that opposites are not related. We believe they are dangling participles of life and they function independently. But moments as we think of them are a composite of opposite thoughts. We create a framework of opposites so the nonphysical self can form a corporeal reality. In Eastern thought Ying and Yang are united to express physical reality. There is no night without a day; no good without an evil. Right is the bedfellow of wrong. In every moment we have the ability to choose an opposite and form an experience.

Physical consciousness is a gestalt of beliefs. Our beliefs are filled with opposites. We rely on them. They are road maps for our choices. Our choices alter the present, future and the past. We are always forming and then moving our conscious mind toward form in this physical reality. Reality is the unity of opposites. The unity of opposites can be considered a definition for nature. As part of nature we are the thesis, antithesis and the synthesis of it.

Time

The Poet
Farther from me, o hour, you grow.
Your wingbeat wounds me upon its way.
What would I do with my lips, though?
With my night? With my day?

I have no beloved, no shelter,
No homestead at which to be.
All things I lavish my self on
Grow rich and lavish me.

Rilke, the master poet of 20th century Modernism, was born in Prague. His poetry expresses the inexpressible within us. He hand dips early 20th century thought in a bowl of questions, and molds it into a timeless mixture. His words are tumbled and then dried in a vat of emotions and a fragile reality emerges.

Rilke understands time for what it is. Time frames experiences. Time blends night and day into hours, and we wrapped those hours lavishly around our minds and count them. Our beliefs and perceptions slip through the invisible halls of time and they form our experiences.

The art of time is etched in our conscious mind, and we play with it in our unconscious. We become what we believe and blame time for spending the hours to dress itself in minutes. Our reality floats through the cracks of consciousness and we constantly stuff it into a personal memory capsule.

Our capsule accents our conscious mind with the glow of time. The glow grows rich in our capsule, but we berate it for being so limited. But, time is not the culprit. Our beliefs about it creates the limits.

We Already Know

We have to construct the world in terms of the general functioning of the world. Thus as disclosed in the fundamental essence of our experience, the togetherness of things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. In some sense or other, this community of actualities of the world means each happening is a factor in the nature of every other happening. . . We are in the world and the world is in us. . . This fact of observation, vague but imperative, is the foundation of the connexity of the world.

Alfred North Whitehead, the 20th century English mathematician and philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1968 book, Modes of Thought. Whitehead does make an interesting observation. All our experiences are connected in some way. We may not relate to that thought unless we take the time and focus on our beliefs and perceptions. We choose to experience people and places at different points in time in order to expand our awareness.

That notion may be hard to swallow for some people. Some folks believe there is a divine order that programmed us to choose certain beliefs. Others might believe that we are pawns in the game of life. They believe some higher power is doing the thinking. All beliefs are valid to the believer.

The world we create is always changing and we become aware of other aspects of the self in each experience. It’s not just one self creating diverse realities, other aspects of our psyche help the process along.

In a world that is a whole part of another world, any energy form can manifest at any point in time. The point is, there is no exact way to experience physical life; it is an individual creation that is connected to a whole, but the whole accepts and allows what is express.

Non Conformity

There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most requests is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance awakens us from a deep sleep and we find my self spinning with agreement. How did society get to the point of being a sharp judgmental instrument that cuts into the psyche of the individual? We allowed it to happen, no doubt. All the bickering about what is right and just and what is fair and honest are empty words that are thrown from one person to the next for control purposes. We give up control of my mind to a society that takes it to a mountain top filled with fear and anxiety and then it is immersed in the dark holes of religion, politics, history, war and science. We form a belief structure based on our distorted opinions of the self and we live those distortions through the experiences of society.

Conformity is our badge of honor. It is verification that we have handed over the keys to our objective consciousness to others who will use it for material gains and self righteous accomplishments. We find my self bowing down to a group of peers that have become lawmakers by their own dedicated design to serve, but then change that design to serve their own needs. We see a country that is unaware and belligerently conforming to values with no substance and laws with no compassion. We wonder why the diversity within this group of ignorance abuses itself with violent acts of separation that create more of what it fears. We ask the self why we are experiencing this blatant hypocrisy and then realize we want to feel the intensity and the emotions that boil over in this pot of emptiness.

Emerson famous statement, nothing is more sacred than the integrity of my own mind reminds us that we want to experience society in this form. We want to lose control and then regain it. We crave diversity and want to fight it, so we know what it feels like to be cut in half by our consciousness. We bring this reality into awareness and expand from it. Without it, we would not be who we are. We would not sense the meaning of life in every moment of it. We would drift into complacency only to be jolted back into another society that expresses the same lessons in a different way. This is our life and we choose to be physical at this moment in order to expand from the consciousness we accept in it.

Change, as the politicians say, is the answer, but change is not a hose pipe that is turned off and on. We exist in the action of change. Change is a quality of consciousness that assists us when we become aware of what it is and what it is not. Society and the fragmented groups within it are constantly changing in order to become aware of who they are and we are aware of those changes, so we can expand in our awareness.

Awareness is not conforming; it does not control or seek approval. It has no laws or judgments to express. Awareness brings another aspect of consciousness into being and we become that aspect. We accept what Iwe have created and will change it when we choose too. We live in a joint-stock company not to reap the rewards of conformity and power; we live it to become aware of the folly in it.

Life Is A Flux Of Thoughts

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add, that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not what you have done or forborne, but, at whose command you have done or forborne it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered one of the most influential figures in 19th century Victorian America. His 1842 essay, Experience confirms his perceptions of life. Emerson has been defined in many ways. Some of those definitions describe him as a metaphysical anomaly because of his beliefs about the multiplicity of man. He identified other aspects of the self, and he wanted to experience those aspects

Religions tell us that our actions are the result of God’s hand or lack of it. We are taught to believe that we have no say in what happens in our life. We are at the mercy of a judgmental being that considers us flawed until we die. This being controls our destiny in ways that are rooted not only in mystery, but in fables, myths and distorted truths. We accept them because we believe in the truth of the past.

Religion exists to control and that system will be in place for some time. Religious believers will experience what they want to experience through the church. Even when truth is distorted, the message is still there. Responsibility for expressions and experiences rests within us. If we want to believe that a certain religion will open the door of awareness, it will. If we believe that religion is not the path that allows us to experience our beliefs in life, we will experience what we perceive without religion. If we believe that we create our own reality through our perceptions, we will experience those perceptions in some way. As Emerson points out, it is not what we have done or forborne, it is our awareness that expands consciousness.

A Thought Be Found

Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew

Emerson the proficient philosopher, poet and minister of the 19th century, included that poem in his 1842 essay Experience. Trying to sense the senselessness in his thoughts is worth the effort.

The truth that now or yesterday never began cannot be translated using rational thought. In our dualistic world, everything must conform to a beginning as well as an end, especially if we believe we are experiencing something tangible. Tangible items have a beginning or at least we are taught they do. But, do they really have a beginning? If we are creating those tangible items through thought, where did that thought begin? We can say it started in our brains, but nothing starts in our brains. The brain merely transfers information and signals from the mind. The thought was there before our brain was there.

We could say the thought came from an idea. We can ask when did the idea start? The answer is it started in our consciousness. Then we ask, when did our consciousness start, and we may say it started with God. We bring our religious belief into focus in order to justify the story of beginning. Religion tells us among other things, that we are created in God’s image, which can mean we are an aspect of God’s consciousness, which had no beginning. So if we follow that reasoning we can say that tangible items have no beginning now, or yesterday. They are an expression of God’s consciousness. That means all physical manifestations are expressions of God’s consciousness in different forms or if I take the Word God out of this exercise, I can say all physical manifestations are expressions of consciousness vibrating in different frequencies of thought.

Fit For Use

Beyond the universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity, in this that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature, and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes every thing fit for use.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak to Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all purposes of expressing thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, The Poet. Emerson gets to the root of things, no matter what they are by expressing himself using different aspects of his consciousness. He looks at the rational and calls it insanity. He sees words and symbols and realizes they are half baked attempts to express perceptions and beliefs about the natural of being. Emerson finds truth in nature’s expressions and he vibrates with them as he thinks and writes. When we take a moment and look around us, we sense the senselessness of our learned behavior. It is a shell game with no shell.

We pay attention to great words and symbols and let the small words pass through the open drain of unawareness that seems to follow us through our physical illusions. Emerson says it all when he reminds us that the poorest experience is rich enough for all purposes of expressing thought. Experiences are thoughts manifested physically.

Playgrounds

Death is great.
We are in his keep
Laughing and whole.
When we feel deep
In life, he dares weep
Deep in our soul

Rilke always has something to say about topics that are usually left unsaid. Death is one of those topics. We tend to avoid it until it presents itself in our reality in one form or another. Rilke didn’t feel that way. He faced his demons, especially death by writing about how he perceived it. He spend days and nights watching and listening to depressed and desolate souls that were anxiously knocking on the door of death and waiting for a reply.

In his work Coda,translated by Walter Arndt, we can sense his perceptions. Just like death, the poem comes from nowhere and awakens another aspect of our reality. As Rilke points out, death is very much alive. We give it life in the hallways of our beliefs.

The playground for death is called life.Death laughs on the playground. We want to sense and feel death physically using our thoughts and emotions. We want to taste loss in order to remember nothing is lost. We want to experience trauma, so we can know the self in its diversity. We want to accept the self as a whole, within another whole in the act of death.

The Golden Bowl

Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole?
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or love in a golden bowl?

William Blake, the immortal poet of myth and mysticism, wrote Thel’s Motto in 1789. Blake has a way of asking questions and never expecting answers, for they are obvious once the cob webs are cleared from our minds. The eagle in us already knows what’s in the pit, there’s no need for us to search, That exercise results in self-separation, which is the dis-ease that creates all disease.

Energetic Vibrations

The sparrow sleeps, thinking of nothing.

Meanwhile the universe has shrunk to half.

He’s attached by a navel string, swimming

In a sea of fluid, amniotic, slightly bitter.

The center is severance; not a sound at all;

Until the navel string is snapped. All of which

Was told by her as she sat astride Pegasus,

The poet on a circuit of the universe.

The sparrow came at her, bill like a sword,

And suddenly from her buttocks, the sun!

The sparrow carried the stained sheetsTo the moon.

On drawing the clouds apart,

He discovered the cold corpse of Mars.

Not once had he disclosed the secrets of his life.

The work of Shinkichi Takahashi is dressed in the colorful expressions of a connected consciousness. His 1970 work Disclosure from Afterimages: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi, is an amazing example of how Takahashi lives in more than one reality. The sparrow is not just a bird it is another portion of the conscious mind. It is not controlled by our beliefs and perceptions. Mars is as fresh and solid as the earth in the reality experienced by this portion of the self. Takahashi’s work. We could say part of our conscious mind is daydreaming on a star, and the moon winks at its presence.

Finding the right words in English to express the thoughts of Takahashi is the work of our sparrow, which is a portion of our inner self. That self finds truth between the lines, not in the print itself. These energetic vibrations of our inner self are present in several realities. If we move our vibrations a few megahertz in either direction using the portion of the conscious mind attached to the brain, we find our sparrow waiting to share secrets with us.

The cold corpse of Mars is heated and floating in the sea of our own consciousness. When we let go of one self, we find another self suspended by an embryo of another sparrow.

The Truth Of Fear

The big cities are not true; they betray
The day, the night, animals and children.
They lie with silence, they lie with noise
And with all that lets itself be used.

None of the vast events that move around you
Happen there. In city streets and alleys
Your great winds falter and churn,
And in frenzied traffic grow confused.

Rilke’s 1905 Book of Hours is an incredible look into the consciousness of this fascinating individual. His insight and expressions are structured in a way that can only be described as innately active. He stimulates thoughts from the inside, and we sense how complex yet simple this world was and still is. Rilke's work goes beyond typical thoughts of truth. It touches on deep-rooted truth, and twists it around a world of words and symbols that form the foundation for 21th century thought.

Some big cities do lie. They are built by citizens that believe in a foundation of lies. Lies set the mood for agony and the suffering that exists within them. These cities silently lie and add more silence to each layer of redundancy that creates a fear ridden society that knows no justice, but the justice of retribution. The vast events that move around a city are tangled in a web of accepted entrapment, and that hammer-lock breaks down the ethics of a culture.

The great winds of consciousness churn in a cycle of madness, and some city-dwellers find a distorted world that knows itself in separation, not in unity. The frenzied traffic of nervous beliefs creates experiences filled with the muddy water of senselessness. Citizens wander through city after city looking for the key that unlocks a faint spirit of being within being. But Rilke's thoughts are just that; thoughts from one aspect of consciousness to another. The only string that ties them together is the belief in a world that has no truth, but the truth of fear.

Will of Life

The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve, an arch of time-experienced subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life. The outward movement of this curve, Evolution, the Path of Pursuit is characterized by self-assertion. The inward movement, involution is characterized by increasing self-realization. The religion of men on the outward path is the religion of Time; the religion of those who return is the religion of eternity.

Ananda Coomaraswamy, the 20th century Sri Lankan philosopher, expressed those thoughts in his 1957 work, The Dance of Shiva. 

The Will to Life is consciousness in action. We sub-divide life into two distinct aspects of awareness. Our physical self expands using time and space. They serve as the foundation for our creations, and those creations expand our inner energy personality's awareness.

The physical self eventually unites with the inner energy personality as we create experiences. When that happens, all physical experiences open the door for dual or multiple self-awareness.  

The Ego

The ego is the dark spot where the rays of the intellect fail to penetrate; it is the last hiding-lair of Ignorance, where the latter serenely keeps itself from the light. When this lair is laid bare and turned inside out, Ignorance vanishes like frost on the sun. In fact, these two ideas are the same thing, Ignorance and the idea of ego. We are apt to think that when Ignorance is driven out and the ego loses its hold on us, we have nothing to lean against and we are left to the fate of a dead leaf blown away hither and thither as the wind listeth.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his 1949 book, Essays in Zen Buddhism. The ego is a word that seems to contain both a negative, as well as positive meaning. The ego is an aspect of consciousness. It is a pliable and a moldable aspect of the self. It plays different roles as we move through different realities.

Ignorance is an essential aspect of our ego. We tend to be ignorant of when and how we use this quality of consciousness. The power of ego is greater than the power of the atom bomb.

But, that energy is only a pittance of the energy that is a quality of our inner consciousness. When we turn our ego inward, as Suzuki mentions, we connect with that power.

An Idea Of Self-Nature

What comes first in importance in the philosophy of Hui-neng is the idea of self-nature. But self-nature, I must warn the reader, is not to be conceived as something of substance. It is not the last residue left behind after all things relative and conditional have been extracted from the notion of an individual being. It is not the self, or the soul, or the spirit, as ordinarily regarded. It is nor something belonging to any categories of the understanding.

It does not belong to this world of relativities. Nor is it the highest reality which is generally ascribed to God or to Atman or to Brahma. It cannot be described or defined in any possible way, but without it the world even as we see it and use it in our everyday life collapses. To say it is to deny it. It is a strange thing.

D.T Suzuki is explaining Hui-neng's concept of self-nature in his book, The Zen Doctrine of No Mind. Hui-neng was the Sixth and Last Patriarch of Chan Buddhism. What Hui-neng identified as self-nature 13 centuries ago is now called consciousness. Suzuki describes self-nature by telling what it isn’t, not what it is. There are no words that adequately describe consciousness except the words energy in action. The atoms and molecules in our cells are consciousness. Our bodies contain consciousness and our minds function thanks to our unique quality of consciousness. There are forms of consciousness, aspects of consciousness, qualities of consciousness and regions of consciousness. But there are many other types of consciousness that we can't describe.

Our cells act like miniature brains. They contain a memory of all personal experiences even though they are constantly being replaced. The cells contain an innate record of the body's full history. That history includes the past, present and future. A change in one cell is immediately noted by our body consciousness. Body consciousness is the combined consciousness of all our cells. All changes impact the present condition of the body as well as a picture of the future condition of the body.

A Sip of Rosewater

When Abu Bakr met Mohammad, he said,
“This is not a face that lies.”

Abu Bakr was one whose bowl
Has fallen from the roof.

There’s no hiding the fragrance that comes
From an ecstatic. A polished mirror
Cannot help reflecting.

Muhammad once was talking to a crowd
Of chieftains, princes with great influence,
When a poor blind man interrupted him.

Muhammad frowned and said to the man,
“Let me attend to these visitors.
This is a rare chance,
Whereas you are already my friend.
We’ll have ample time.”

Then someone nearby said, “That blind man
May be worth a hundred kings. Remember
The proverb, Human beings are mines.”

World-power means nothing. Only the unsayable,
Jeweled inner life matters.

Muhammad replied, “Do not think that I’m concerned
With being acknowledged by these authorities.

If a beetle moves towards rosewater, it proves
That the solution is diluted. Beetles
Love dung, not rose essence.

If a coin is eager to be rested
By the touchstone, that coin
Itself may be a touchstone.

A thief loves the night.
I am day. I reveal essences.

A calf thinks God is a cow.
A donkey’s theology changes
When someone new pets it
And gives it what it wants.

I am not a cow, or thistles for camels
To browse on. People who insult me
Are only polishing the mirror.”

The immortal Rumi, in his 13th century thoughts, opens windows where consciousness waits to express other qualities of itself. Rumi, like most of us, uses his religion to express his beliefs about the reality that he called his. Every man lives a reality created by beliefs and perceptions. When those beliefs and perceptions are expanded other metal enzymes create forms of consciousness that dip into hidden dimensions and realities. Like the calf who thinks the cow is God, we expand in awareness and sense the God that lives within us. Every aspect of energy that swirls in this moment gives us what we want.

Rumi quotes Muhammad, but it’s not Muhammad talking, it’s Rumi’s inner consciousness spewing energy, and creating a reality to experience. A thief does love the night and during the day the thief finds a path filled with separation and fear. That path is our path, until we realize that we are a beetle that loves rosewater and dung in the same moment. We hold a mirror up to reality and wait for others to polish it, when we create the fog.

The Perceived

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe any thing but the perception.

David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work, Treatise of Human Nature, Hume is saying that whenever we look for our true self all we find is perceptions. There is always a space between the subject and the object of our perceptions. Perceptions become beliefs and beliefs become choices and choices become experiences. We call that processed life, but that reality, or any reality built on that foundation is rooted in separation. There is another self that is creating these perceptions. We believe through our perceptions that there is another entity involved in creating our perceptions.

The contrast from our experiences influences our perceptions. The notion that the seer is different from the seen is an element of our distorted perception.

The history of physical reality is based on the fact that we are more than we believe, but we doubt this innate belief and create another belief system. In linear time there will always be space and time between us the seer, and the seen.

Hume goes on to say:

The now-moment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which the last man will disappear, and the Now-moment in which I am speaking are all one in God, in whom there is only one Now. Look! The person who lives in the light of God is conscious neither of time past nor of time to come but only one eternity.

Purpose

An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climactic purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture, may have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually know in this world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details.

Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen changes into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse that what was purposed, but it is always more complex and different.

William James in his 1906 lecture, The One and the Many is explaining what we all experience in physical life. We forget that our purpose is experience, and we use perceptions and choices based on our belief system to expand in each and every experience. The method of this expansion is never the same. One day we could have a designed purpose and experience what we desired and the next day performing the exact same acts, the purpose changes in substance and form. We may blame the difference on time or some variable that was not present the day before, but the underlying cause is our own consciousness.

Within purpose there is a vast wonderland of choices and perceptions and each one can change an aspect of purpose slightly or radically based on the actions that manifests from our beliefs, perceptions and choices. Within a moment there is a universe of choices and they can take on a life of their own.

Portion of Life

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experiences with them. And so the reliance on property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that have have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they depreciate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has and not by what each is.

But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he sees that it is accidental; came to him by inheritance, or gift or crime; then he feels that it is not worth having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the mans breaths.

Caliph Ali said:

Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest for seeking after it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance, fills us with with common sense, as well as un-common sense. He skillfully holds a mirror up to us and gently moves it closer, so we can feel the energy of expanding consciousness. That energy is not just our worldly possessions and accomplishments; part our belief system is based on that perception. We tend to measure the self by what is stored in ego awareness, and discount other aspects of the self in order to conform to our image of religious righteousness, and political correctness.

Society is a wave and we ride it like foam in a misty sea. But, we gradually begin to sense that as foam, we are connected to bubbles of awareness that constantly manifest around us. One by one we merge with various bubbles and taste the essence of our own salt.

The days of external power and rational ruthlessness is sinking below the foam, and merging in the water that continually moves onward. The water is not a place or an activity. It is consciousness blending and separating in order to experience the nature of diversity. That blending is a portion of life that manifests without any effort from us. We create realties from the bubbles in our own foam, but discount them until we allow the bubbles to become what they have always been- us.

As the 7th century cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, Caliph Ali, said:

I can be at rest from seeking after anything, because I hold everything of value within me.

.

Value is always present in one experience after another in linear time, and we own it regardless of our scope of awareness.

Necessity

Necessity
Then back once more, to what the stars had fated:
Conditioning and law; and wish from willing
Can only come since we are obligated,
Our will then all our fitful fancies killing;
Its dearest from the heart is extirpated,
Hard ‘Must’ prevails, both will and fancy willing,
Thus, though we seem free, yet constrictions bind us
More closely still than those that first confined us.

The fourth stanza of Goethe’s poem, Primal Words Orphic, is interesting not only for its meaning but for its innate message. Goethe wrote the poem to identify different stages in life and to sense the perceptions created by those stages. This stanza is about adulthood and what we believe about it. Goethe realized that the word freedom is not free in the act of experiencing it physically. Conditioning and laws create a distorted sense of freedom. Freedom dances in and out of our life as we move through these stages. Adulthood is a state of wishing and willing, where we live for the future, not the present.

Obligations taint our perceptions. Our choices vibrate in a sea of fitful fancies that manifest as we create them. We tend to believe in fate until we sense our own ability to change the cause and effect of our destiny. There is no prophetic declaration that says we must conform to rigid linguistics that affects our efforts to be truly free from the insipid rationality of duality. We are the oracle, as well as the audience, as we move through linear illusions. Believing in our extirpation, we look at the heart, and not the organs that support it. We wallow in sickness until we find the desire or willingness to open another door of awareness in the ruble of our self created contrast.

Goethe’s 18th and 19th century world was filled with a churning and knurling of consciousness that consistently opened portals of energy that magically appeared. They were labeled fate or destiny, and was extirpated in the bowels of unawareness. Restless and groping for new awareness, the energy of consciousness expressed adulthood in bondage with no relief or extradition. The solution or ultimate change was the unacceptance of death.

Chance Is A Word

TYXH, Chance

But easing chance gets round that stern constriction

As with and round us change is all-imbuing;

No more alone, you grow through social friction

And do such deeds as any man is doing.

This life’s an ebb and flow, a contradiction,

A toy that’s toyed with, play for our pursing.

The years have quietly formed the circle’s essence,

The lamp awaits the flame of incandescence.

That’s Goethe’s second stanza in his epic poem Primal Words, Orphic. The poem addresses different stages of human development. This stanza is written about growing in diverse ways. His words are a combination of logical observations and elements that lie beyond those observations. Goethe understands that change is the only constant, but we put change on the back burner of our brains, while it’s sizzling before our eyes. We grow not only through social friction, but through the expression of consciousness within that friction. We find comfort in our social behavior, but discomfort in its restrictiveness.

Life then is an ebb and flow of consciousness. Each experience creates a wave that ebbs in awareness and flows in energy. We travel in a physical circle; we move in rotating cycles and never leave the center of our essence. This self sacrificing struggle climaxes as we enter other phases and begin to see the cracks within our perceptions.

The lamp of awareness is always illuminated, even though our flame vacillates through time. Chance is word with no meaning in the lamp of awareness. Perceptions create the experience of chance. Choices are anointed by our beliefs, and cover by the flame of egoism.

Eternal Admissions

Primal Words Orphic
When you were granted here your brief admission,
As sun and planets met that day they charted
For evermore your growing to fruition
According to the law by which you started.
This must you be, from self there’s no remission,
Thus long sibyls, prophets this impaired;
Nor any time nor any power can shatter
Imprinted form informing living matter.

Goethe’s immortal poetry has many different voices, but no obvious distinguishing marks. Most of his work was considered untranslatable so he was unrecognized by the English speaking world during his 18th century life. His poetry resonates in several areas of consciousness at once. Goethe’s work is philosophical as well as scientific. Those elements are woven through his belief system.

His work touches other truths, which sit outside of those beliefs. His 1817 work, Primal Words Orphic is divided into five stanzas: Fate, Chance, Love, Necessity and Hope. The stanza above is Fate. Fate is the first step in Goethe’s Orphic birth. The rest of the poem is about growing up, entering adulthood, being an adult and then old age. He creates a complex whole within the whole of his consciousness.

Goethe expresses birth as an admission that was granted by someone else. His religious tone paints a vivid picture of reality. He mentions the laws of physical life, but there are other elements within his belief system that makes his reality valid to him. The self, as Goethe describes it, is answerable to these laws even though the witches and the prophets chose to believe otherwise. Matter to Goethe is living, and is formed by another form which imprints it with identical properties of knowing.

There Is No First

Human personality is a multi-leveled manifestation or expansion of a single consciousness, just as in physics the electro-magnetic spectrum is viewed as a multi-banded expression of a single, characteristic electro-magnetic wave. More specifically the Spectrum of consciousness is a pluridimensional approach to human identity; that is to say, each level of the spectrum is marked by a different and easily recognized sense of individual identity, which ranges from Supreme Identity of cosmic consciousness through several gradations or bands to the drastically narrowed sense of identity associated with egoic consciousness.

Ken Wilbur in his essay, Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness is explaining that the self as we know it, is much more than we believe it is. Ken breaks human consciousness down in five levels: The first level is the Shadow level, which is the identification of a distorted self image. At this level, we confuse the self with our own beliefs about the nature of our essence. The second level is the ego level. At that level we act out our distorted images through our personal beliefs. The existential level is the third level. We begin to blend one aspect of our consciousness with another, and take responsibility for what we perceive and create. The fourth level is the transpersonal level. At this level the spirit meets the flesh,and that mixture is expressed in metaphysical expressions. The fifth level is the level of mind. At that level there is a homogenization of the inner, body, and ego consciousness. There is a heightened awareness of other aspects of self so the inner universe begin to manifest both physically and non-physically.

Ken concept about consciousness has been greatly expanded since he wrote that essay in 1975. Consciousness is difficult to define in psychological or rational terms. Assigning levels of consciousness is the result of the hierarchies that exist within our dualistic belief structure. Consciousness is not a thing. It is the action of energy. Within that action there are different intensities, differnet focuses, different families, different links, different qualities, different fragments, and different tones.

Within the action of consciousness lies a vast field of nothing, and we are an element of that nothing expressing ourselves in physical form. All physical consciousness is the manifestation of non-physical energy or consciousness. We are essence as well as a focus of that essence. We are connected to families of consciousness, and those families continue to manifest new focused to experience physical life in this and other dimensions.

We cannot explain consciousness. We are experiencing a dualistic dimension where we believe that there must be a first and a last, a higher and a lower. We experience this dimension and ask questions like: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? These natural questions develop from a distorted view of the self and consciousness. The essence that is creating the manifestation of the chicken and the egg came first, but since consciousness is one in all dimensions there really is no first.

Experience

By experience it is meant to get at the fact at first hand and not through any intermediary whatever this may be. Its favorite analogy is: to point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon; a basket is welcome to carry our fish home, but when the fish are safely on the table why should we eternally bother ourselves with the basket? These are idle distinction fictitiously designed by the intellect for its own interest. Those who take themselves too seriously or those who try to read them into the very fact of life are those who take the finger for the moon. When we are hungry we eat; when we are sleepy we lay ourselves down; and where does the infinite or the finite come in here? Are we not complete in ourselves and each in himself? Life as it is suffices.

It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow. The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with; for the moment your hands are dipped into it, its transparency is disturbed, it ceases to reflect your image, which you have had from the very beginning and will continue to have to the end of time.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki writes about Zen thought. Not only has D.T. studied original works in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese and Japanese, he has expressed that knowledge in Western thought using French, German and English. Suzuki never became a priest of any sect, but was honored by every temple in Japan during his lifetime. Suzuki's words about experience are especially poignant.

Suzuki points out that experience is always flowing through a stream of consciousness and when we try to stop it using ego consciousness, we feel the separation that keeps us in a state of fear. When we blend the ego with inner consciousness and allow it to flow we become it.

Focused Aggression

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all geography and all the government of the world: He must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent.

He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thence forward to all nations.

Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London, Paris and New York must go the same way. “What is History,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon.” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands; the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words in his 1842 essay History. The world exists thanks to our focused aggression at birth. The conscious mind is forever eternal. It is constantly moving and changing as we master our creative aggression in the flesh. Energy is aggressiveness in action. We create exotic adventures, and file them in a category marked history in our body consciousness. We use that history to confirm as well as change our belief structure. Normal aggressiveness flows like a stream in the action of our energy, and that stream powers our thoughts. We can restrict or restrain energy or we collect it and file it in our body consciousness, and then release it through some aggressive form of action.

Eventually we discover that everything in and around us vibrates in a magnetic field of aggressive energy. Our challenge is to recognize agressivenss when it is ignored, unexpressed and denied over an extended period of time. When aggressive energy is ignored it changes from natural aggression to explosive, and distorted repressed aggression and that energy changes our thoughts and experiences.

An Uncalculated Life in the Present

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer in the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing in question.

George Spencer Brown wrote that in his book Laws of Form,which was published in 1969. The book has never been out of print. It seems our thoughts look to the past for substance, and look to the future for consequences. The present is where the spirit meets the flesh, but we rarely stay in that moment. We always want to ask a question and find an answer about a past event or a future probability. The present now is a question-less answer-less point of awareness where the all of everything is manifesting within us. Our unconstructed and uncalculated life in the present is exactly where we exist, but we create other moments to see this moment, and we lose the present in the process.

The now is where as D.T. Suzuki says:

That is to say, the question is answered only when it is no more asked. . . The real answer lies where the question has not yet been asked.

There is nothing else to do because there is no time to do it in the now. All manifests from the desire to get somewhere else from the present and we live a dualistic life of questions and answers in order to satisfy our own state of consciousness, and to expand in that quality or state. This mystical state is not received or given nor does it escape or elude us. We arre always in it and it exist in its oneness.

As Hui-neng put it:

In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth and death to be brought to an end. Wherefore there is absolute tranquility in this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight.

Radical Unintelligibility

Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.

Bernard Lonergan, the 20th century Canadian Jesuit priest, taught at several colleges including Boston College. His work A Study of Human Understanding was published in 1957, and his work Method in Theology was published in 1973. His philosophy is called the Generalized Empirical Method (GEM)or critical realism. Realism means true judgments are made using facts and values. The word critical means knowing and valuing using a critique of consciousness. He also coined the phrase Radical Unintelligibility. That phrase means we can act against our better judgment. We constantly refuse to choose what we know is worth choosing for one reason or another.

Lao-tzu explains knowing this way:

Without going outside, you may know the whole world

Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.

The farther you go, the less you know.

Thus the sage knows without traveling.

Reality waits for us to experience it. How and when we choose a reality is based on our beliefs. Individual reality is rooted in a time when we focused on another reality. That fact can be considered critical realism. We overlook the fact that we existed before physical birth, and will continue to exist when we change our focus, and leave our body. Our existence before birth and after death are as normal a phenomenon as our present reality. There are different kinds of nature within consciousness of Nature. We limit the nature of our reality. We believe we have a beginning and end, but energy has no beginning or end; it just changes forms. We are a specific form of energy. We are composed of atoms, molecules and cells. Those energy forms translate into other living forms when we change our focus, but we choose radical unintelligibilty instead of inner knowing to define ourselves.

The Object is The Subject

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees and at least one other state which is seen.

G. Spencer Brown's best known work Laws of Form was published in 1969, and has never been out of print.

Reality, as Brown describes it, is constructed to see, as well as to be seen. As a whole within the whole of the self we do the same thing. We create our own reality. The unseen self is a mystery until we realize that it manifests our thoughts and they become experiences in some way. Our thoughts are energy. Thoughts are generated by the duality of the conscious mind. The conscious mind is connected to the brain, but a portion of it is free from the brain. That portion looks at the inner self and sees other realities.

Wei Wu Wei thought about the conscious mind's role in reality and wrote:

Has one not realized that the physical self is only one’s object, perceptual and conceptual, that it could not be what we are?

To know that one self has no objective quality whatsoever, has absolutely nothing objective about it, is devoid of any trace-element of objectivity, is surely to know what one is, which, in metaphysical terms, is just the absence itself, the very absence of the absence, the total lack of any objective character, nature, or quality.

The Gifts I Give My Self

Now, you are fully aware of the suffering. Is that suffering apart from you and therefore you are merely the observer who perceives the suffering, or is that suffering you?

When there is no observer who is suffering, is the suffering different from you? You are the suffering are you not? You are not apart from the pain, you are the pain. What happens? There is no labeling, there is no giving it a name and thereby brushing it aside, you are merely that pain, that feeling, that sense of agony. When you are that, what happens? When you do not name it, when there is no fear with regard to it, is your center related to it? If the center is related to it, but different from it, then it is afraid of it, then it must act and do something about it. But if the center is that, then what do you do? There is nothing to be done, is there? If you are that and you are accepting it, not labeling it, not pushing it aside; if you are that thing, what happens? Do you say you suffer then? Surely, a fundamental transformation has taken place. Then there is no longer, “I Suffer,” because, there is no center to suffer. . .

As long as I have no relationship to or no separation from the thing outside me, the problem is not; the moment I establish a relationship with it outside me, the problem is. As long as I treat suffering as something outside. . . I establish a relationship to it and that relationship which is the primary dualism is fictitious. But if I am that thing, if I see the fact, that the whole thing is transformed, it all has a different meaning. Then there is full attention, integrated attention and that which is completely regarded is understood and dissolved and so there is no fear and therefore the word sorrow in non-existent.

Krishnamurti was a renowned 20th century writer who focused on the nature of the mind, meditation, human relationships and the psychological revolution. His words about suffering come from his 1954 work, First and Last Freedom. His message is not a new one. It conforms to the teachings that have been passed down from generation to generation in Eastern beliefs. The physical world is a separated world.

The first step in knowin is knowing the self.Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, creed, dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security; religious, political and personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas and beliefs. The burden of beliefs dominate man’s thinking, relationships and his daily life.

Polar Privacy

There is solitude of space,
Solitude of death of sea,
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.

Emily Dickinson, a 19th century poetic genius, spent a great deal of her time upstairs in her father’s house after she graduated from Amherst Institute and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She died a recluse at the age of fifty five, but she lives on through the wisdom of her poetry.

Solitude can be a lonely and a remote place where there is no human activity, but solitude can also be a place filled with consciousness that expresses itself in other ways. There is solitude in space, but space is not alone, nor is it remote. Space is overflowing with energy and there are dimensions upon dimensions that interact with each other, but go unnoticed because we focus somewhere else. Solitude can be isolation or a retirement. It can be a state of separation and desertion. Solitude first and foremost is a state of mind that dangles on emotions and feelings of loneliness.

Emily does express the solitude of the soul. The infinity of the soul emerges and then dissipates in mental enzymes and is completely immersed in the action of being without form, but is filled with substance.

Like the sea, we move in rhythmic waves that touch the self in formlessness, as well as form. White caps of solitude create a mystical awakening that drench us in the sea of expression. Propelling the self to the shore of eternity, we reach and touch what we already have and retreat to be a wave again.

Interconnectedness

God cannot be a being beside other beings. To insist that he is a being “above” or “below” all others still makes him a being apart from all other beings, some ‘greatest being’ we posit in the universe existing among the stars. If he is a thing, some other things in the universe must be outside of his control, and he must be subject to the structure of the whole. A whole hornet’s nest of absurd problems is opened up, such as the question, “How did God spend his time before he created the Earth?” Paul Tillich told us once the answer for that given by his students in Germany: “Thinking up punishments for those who ask such questions.”

Rollo May was a 20th century existential psychologist and a close friend of Paul Tillich a 20th century theologian. May defined certain stages of human development like innocence, rebellion, decision, ordinary and creative. They are not stages in the traditional sense; all of these stages can be experience during any phase of an individual’s life. May emphasized caring for each other and believed that anxiety was the result of a threat to a value, which an individual holds essential to the existence of the self.

May’s words about God are not meant to change anyone’s beliefs about the consciousness we call God. Everyone will choose a belief within a basket of religious and scientific beliefs and make one or more of them a reality to be experienced. Humans have been fighting about God long enough to realize that our separation is the issue, not the association of being right or wrong about the nature of God’s physical existence. It seems separation creates independence. Independence is the opposite of dependence, which is viewed as something with little value. Independence is associated with freedom, but rarely are we free by being independent; there is always a lack of freedom in independence.

Independence is more about separation than it is about freedom or dependency. Separation is the catalyst that fuels conflicts and wars. We fight for independence and we find ourselves more dependent on something else, which creates a plethora of contrasting perceptions to experience. What we need to sense and to cultivate is our interconnectedness, not our independence.

My Integral Inner Universe

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life. That I feed the hungry that I forgive an insult that I love my enemy in the name of Christ; all these are undoubtly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, the enemy himself are within me and I myself stand in the need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved, What then?

Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychiatrist, brings up an interesting point. All of the enemies that we encounter are nothing more than creations that express the nature of our separated consciousness. No one is doing anything to us; we create the shadow and project it externally in order to physically experience the contrast it manifests. We have blind spots in our belief system. There are things in that system that we refuse to admit about the self. The war's we rage externally have their roots in our inner world. We create ideas and instigate emotions that reach our ego and a dualistic projection occur. We believe those ideas and emotions are the work of an external energy or situation.

As Fritz Perls another 20th century psychiatrist explains that by taking responsibility for every thought and emotion, every movement we make and not transferring responsibility to anyone else,expands our awareness.

Even illness is created by us according to Perls:

As long as you fight a symptom, it will become worse. If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence; the very moment you get in touch with yourself, growth begins, integration begins.

Formal Ignorance

Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite being and then weep that you are a finite creature. Hence I say know that you are really the infinite pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never really be ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance.

Sri Ramana Maharshi was a 19th century Indian Sage. He believed the purest form of teachings was silence; the silence that radiated from his presence. He only taught verbally when students could not understand his silence. He practiced non-dualism and Jnana Yoga, but he understood the value of all paths and practices.

One important message that surfaces from Sri Ramana teachings is the awareness of the inner self and what it means to be aware of that self. Our objective thoughts hinder us from associating with our subjective self. Our focused reality seems to take precedence so we create experiences using the beliefs of others. Our beliefs are elements of group beleifs. When we realize that our thoughts, emotions and imagination create our experiences, we begin to change our distorted beliefs. We realize that what we call the unconscious part of us is much more conscious than we believed.

In The Shadows as Well as in the Light

One dog barks at a shadow and a thousand dogs take it for reality.

That’s an ancient Chinese proverb. We don't know what a dog's reality is but it's safe to say that they focus on things we don't focus on.

We do associate human behavior with some dog behavior. We bark at shadows all the time. One group of humans may bark one way and other groups join in without understanding why they are barking. One group may believe that religion is worth fighting over, and millions of people go to war to defend that belief. We call it our truth and defend it at all costs.

Politics seems to work the same way. One individual calls himself the right wing of government, and another calls herself the left wing, and millions of people defend their position even when they don't totally agree with the doctrine set in motion by the original bark. There are hundreds of things we bark at because someone else is barking, but we really don’t know why we barked in the first place. Conformity rules in our society, so we bark to help create our reality.

There are countless realities so consciousness by nature is non-conforming. When inner consciousness freely flows through physical experiences, it changes the pitch of our bark. Politics, religion, and war are all beliefs that cast large shadows. Light is truth, but it is shadowed by our beliefs, influences and associations.

Manifestations Of Consciousness

At the age of thirty-nine Hui-neng left his home in the mountains and decided to go out and experience the world. He came to the Fa-hsing Temple in the province of Kuang, where he saw some monks arguing on the fluttering pennant; one of them said, ‘The pennant is an inanimate object and it is the wind that makes it flap.’

Against this it was remarked by another monk that ‘Both wind and pennant are inanimate things, and the flapping is an impossibility.’ A third one protested, ‘The flapping is due to a certain combination of cause and condition’; while a fourth one proposed a theory, saying, ‘After all there is no flapping pennant, but it is the wind that is moving by itself.’

The discussion grew quite animated when Hui-neng interrupted with the remark, ‘It is neither wind nor pennant but your own mind that flaps.’ This at once put a stop to the heated argument.

D.T. Suzuki tells that story in his 1927 book, Essays in Zen Buddhism. Hui-neng, the sixth and last Patriarch of Chan Buddhism was born in China in 638. He is considered the founder of the Southern school of Buddhism. Most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to pay attention to how a pennant flaps in the wind. We don't even pay attention to a pennant unless someone or something motivates that action. Our lives are filled with similar occurrences. We are more concerned with matters that attract our interest, especially when it comes to personal and material growth. The simple things that manifest around us are useless and immaterial in a material wealth world that's filled with rational rules and material confinements.

We conform to a system of beliefs that makes it difficult to understand that we create what we notice and then experience. Our beliefs tell us that the world around us is created by an unknown entity that grants wishes based on performance. We transfer our responsibility and power to an external force when we believe that a higher power is controlling our experiences. Separation is avoidance. It’s much easier to avoid or fight than it is to unite and accept.

The monk’s in Suzuki’s story probably would have continued arguing about the pennant, but he introduced information that was known, but forgotten. He instigated thought and their level of awareness changed. He reminded them that the wind and the pennant were not separate inanimate objects, they were manifestations of consciousness set in action by our limited belief system.