A Natural Choice

It may be normal, darling, but I’d rather be natural.

Truman Capote wrote that thought in his book, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The difference between normal and natural could be a matter of debate, but physical life is measured in normal not naturals, especially when it comes to human expression.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention one in every thirty-three babies is born with some sort of birth defect. The CDC also reports 1 in every 691 babies is born with Down syndrome. That means almost 7,000 babies are born every year with Trisomy 21, and we label them Down syndrome babies.

Over 350,000 people in the Unites States are living with Down syndrome and since they don’t fit into the norm we call ‘acceptable’ we label them disabled. Disabled means a lot of things. The dictionary defines it as a condition that weakens and destroys or it renders people legally incapable. The World English Dictionary defines it as lacking one or more physical powers that allows people to walk or coordinate movements as well as perform certain functions that require average mental performance.

The word disabled automatically sends a red flag up the pole of awareness in the minds of some folks. People are judged for what they can’t do rather than what they are capable of doing. Disabled people are put in a box of sympathy and wrapped with a bow of pity. Our sensitive emotions overrule natural common sense. We isolate them and build walls around them that only innately sensitive and natural people penetrate.

People living with some sort of physical challenge are feared; we are not educated to understand why these brave souls chose to experience physical life in a truly unique way. Just like the masses, which we call normal, they are connected to a non-physical stream of consciousness that every religion describes in a plethora of ways. But, that connection becomes distorted by our egos that separate the self from the inner self, which vibrates in natural love.

In that natural stream there are no words that describe choices made by individual consciousness. There is only an assortment of connected aspects of consciousness that have the desire to express their awareness physically. That awareness is manifested physically, and we experience it in the massive explosion of unique forms that cover the surface of the planet.

All we have to do is look around us at natural expression and we become aware that our consciousness is more than we believe it is. Some experts are discovering that Down syndrome, like other physical conditions, is a subjective choice and that choice is manifested objectively.

Other scholars believe that children and adults living with Down syndrome come into this physical world to teach us something we forgot about ourselves when the ego took control and said we are a ‘normal,’ and a separated consciousness. Everyone who spends time around a person living with Down syndrome experiences an aspect of innate knowing that is hard to ignore. That knowing is natural and is dipped in complete love.

But, why would a person choose to live with Down syndrome in a world that offers material luxuries to those that conform mentally and physically to our judgmental systems? The answer may lie in what Quantum physics is unraveling in this world of multiverses. We all may live separate but connected lives in more than one reality at a time, although that fact is hard to swallow when our ridged beliefs about religion and science are reinforced by our own ignorance.

Physicists explain that we actually do live in more than one reality at a time, and in each of those realities we appear and act differently. We are able and generally do communicate with these other selves, but we are trained to ignore the messages since we believe there is only one of us experiencing physical life.

The notion that children and adults living with Down syndrome may be closer and more connected to these counterparts and realities is gaining credence in the distorted world of normal. When DS children and adults tune out the normal world they may be communicating with those counterparts with a portion of the mind that may not be registering in the normal brain since it’s overloaded with the desire for physical worth.

Some researchers believe that people living with Down syndrome are much more aware of their multiplicity, but can’t express it physically. They do however express that fact by their actions. There is a bubble of love surrounding DS children and adults, and every time we interact with them tiny bubbles of that love permeate our own separatism so we can sense the connection we have with them and with all form of consciousness.

The nature of the self is like the nature of all other forms of consciousness. The self is non-physical energy before it becomes physical. Down syndrome humans don’t move as far away from that energy, but normal people do.

The New Zealand author Vincent O’Sullivan in his story, The Next Room summed up our normal actions this way:

If you’re different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.

What we fail to realize is we’re disabling another aspect of our self when we label another member of our flock as incapable. In more ways than one, they are much more capable than we remember, and innately more competent than our normal inflated egos.

Objective Agreement

Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading—leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from eccentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere, which somebody’s ideas have copied.

William James in his 1906 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth does make sense of some of our senselessness. Leading from impulses and ideas creates physical truths and they are put together and form the foundation for reality. Those blocks seem solid until others ideas manifest between the blocks and we discover that our objective truth is a partial expression of another whole. It seems we automatically mix influences and associations with these ideas and a reality of contrast manifests.

We believe our concepts and actions are the result of a random pattern or they are a culmination of religious doctrines that have been etched into our ego. But,the leading process as James explains is a product of the creative energy within us. Source energy is constantly spewing out the ash of truth using our own active volcano of consciousness. That ash is constantly offering us parallel developments and we incorporate that energy in our time perception.

All physical manifestations are the outside structures of inner structures that lead us to our own value fulfillment. As James points out, all these inner structures lead us to the same place, which is freedom from the self- created contradictions that produce the partial truths.

We seem to be separated from everything and we clash in the effervescent water of our own perceptions, but beneath these temporal perceptions there are interwoven electromagnetic patterns that interact with each other. These patterns eventually produce a verifying process as we move through time. Our objective agreement with the self is to become aware that all ideas originate in the stream of consciousness where we create and experience those creations.

The Spacious Present

The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.

Before the immerse possibilities of man, all mere experiences, all past biography, however spotless and sainted shrinks away. Before the heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history; no record of any character or mode of living, that entirely contains us. The saints and the demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade.

The soul gives itself alone, original, and pure to the Lonely, Original, and Pure who on that condition gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then it is glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stones fall by a law inferior to, and dependant on, its nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, The Over-soul brings another reality into focus that has been hidden under the blankets of religious, social, and political authorities. The soul is not limited by the authority of man, but man is limited by the belief in religious salvation and authority. Man has created a stage of illusions and has wandered away from the nature of the soul. We are lodged in the fear of a separated consciousness where authority rules the awareness of self.

The mind and soul do not take up space, but their value gives power to the brain. Our power is on auto-pilot thanks to ideas of space where emptiness has to be filled. True inner space is vital energy that’s alive and possesses the ability to transform and form all existences even the existence we call our camouflage reality of religious authority.

The mind and soul exists in the value of psychological reality where all consciousness exists. The main attribute of this value is spontaneity in the spacious present. The spacious present has the quality of duration as well as the quality of expansion, which is not connected to space expansion. The laws that exist in our camouflage universe do not exist in our inner universe, but the laws of the inner universe apply to our physical universe. Value fulfillment is one of those laws and all consciousness follow it. Energy transformation, durability, and spontaneity are the three other laws of the soul and the mind.

All consciousness exists in the spacious present in simultaneous harmony, and in a spontaneous manner with durability and needs nothing to worship. It only needs appreciation to expand in awareness.

In this realty, the theory of evolution and the theory of biblical creation might agree with their own systems and justification, but in the inner reality they are thoughts created by man’s quest to label himself within the limits of space and time. That label is a partial description of the self since life bursts apart in all directions just like the soul and the mind. The stream of consciousness is not like our physical streams; it follows its own spacious present.

Ordinary Consciousness

If enlightenment were just this seeing or having insight, it would not be so spiritually enlightening as to bring about a complete riddance of evil passions and the sense of perfect freedom. Intuitions could not go so penetratingly into the source of life and set all doubts at rest and sever all bonds of attachment unless one’s consciousness were thoroughly prepared to take in the All in its wholeness as well as its suchness. Our sense and ordinary consciousness are only too apt to be disturbed and turn away from the realization of truth.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1926 essay Enlightenment and Ignorance explains something about consciousness that were are not trained to recognize. There is an aspect of our consciousness that is always flowing in the stream of awareness where all physical experiences develop. We ignore this stream or we label it as something outside of ourselves. Our beliefs are rooted in separation not in wholeness.

The belief in separation alters the main line of probabilities. Christian theology teaches the end of the world in certain terms with a grand God coming to reward the good and punish the evil-doers. That system allows for no other probability. Others see the world as a great disaster and man finally ruining the planet. There are others that see peace and expansion. The interesting fact about those thoughts is they all exist somewhere in reality. But, there's another group that believes another dimension of selfhood exists where consciousness is fully explored, and the potential of each soul is uncovered and experienced. That is a facet of some sort of reality as well.

All these beliefs hint at the degree of separation that exists in ordinary consciousness. We have been taught to focus and believe in one self. The huge differences we see in the beliefs of others are rooted in the fact that we are meant to judge our physical reality. We are meant to realize that our experiences are the materialization of our thoughts, feelings, and images that the inner self forms and then manifests.

In order to experience other dimensions we must sense the greater power of our objective feelings and thoughts. We think we destroy, but we don’t destroy anything. We might imagine we can annihilate a reality, but we only assault it as we know it. All realities continue to exist in some form, but our ordinary consciousness is conditioned to be disturbed. We turn away from inner truth and feel the end of something is coming based on our beliefs, which are influenced by objective associations. We still have a partial awareness of a greater self or religion would not exist in this reality.

In Practical Talk

In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricities, his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.

William James in his essay Pragmatism and Common Sense reminds us that we have become so hypnotized by a one-level thought process that anything outside of that level seems impractical as well as not real. We believe events happen and are beyond our control simple because we’re out of touch with the inner self. As James points out lobsters and bees never disconnect from the consciousness that forms the events they experience.

We view ourselves as pawns of fate so the idea of probable action seems like complete nonsense. Events seem inevitable and when this thought process is carried to excessive lengths it looks like we have no hand in our reality. We become victims in our self-created prison. There is an unknown reality or several unknown realities and our psychic, psychological, and spiritual essence functions in those realties and from them our physical experiences manifest.

This inner all-pervasive reality begins to present itself as we grow more responsive to it and accept our inner environment for what it is— Real. There’s no need to mediate for hours, or give up your day job, or study your own thought process with such focus that you ignore other activities. It simply means we are aware of our own expansion and become aware of our ability to self-create physical experiences. That means closing the separation that exists between the ego and the inner self.

When we begin to sense who we really are, we realize there are different species of selves just like there are different species of worlds. In practical talk when we identify with only one level of our thought process, our other thought processes appear alien. We feel threatened by them and we fight to uphold our ideas of selfhood.

One leaf does not threaten the existence of other leaves and the plant is not threatened by its foliage. Nature shows us our own multiplicity, but we are too conditioned and firmly rooted in our belief structure to understand the real nature of the self.