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.