Marinated Mixture Of Consciousness

Across centuries and cultures transpersonal experiences have been regarded as vitally or even supremely important. In our own time the transpersonal vision and transpersonal disciplines are crucially important for many reasons. They draw attention to a neglected, misunderstood family of experiences; provide new understandings of ancient ideas, religious traditions, and contemplative practices; offer more generous views of human nature; and point to unsuspected human possibilities.

Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughn wrote those thoughts in their 1993 book, Paths Beyond Ego. Our beliefs structure is rooted in transpersonal experiences. Our belief about religion is a good example. All religions are based on transpersonal experiences that have been accepted as fact. The amount of transpersonal information that we accept as fact is considerable. There is a constant stream of non-verifiable impulses flowing into our reality, and all of them have value. We tend to analyze these impulses using an academic epistemology. That practice filters out some pertinent experiences. Those experiences are banished to an isolated mental contour in our psyche until our epistemology changes. The standard way we accept impulses is to marinate them in a selective mixture of associations and influences. That process makes some impulses pliable as well as hard to swallow mentally.

Ancient cultures accepted most transpersonal experiences as real. They became beliefs. All beliefs are valid to the believer. Beliefs have no expiration or do not use date. Some obsolete modern world beliefs are still valid in areas where there is an antiquated view of life. All beliefs are influenced by awareness, and can be expanded by new transpersonal experiences. Our transpersonal impulses restructure antiquated beliefs, and we experience that new structure using our own marinated mixture of consciousness.

Mysteriously Enchanting

Magical is a word that we all have used at one time or another to describe an event or a person that crosses the boundaries of our physical and scientific understanding. We believe the word means mysteriously enchanting in a non-ordinary sense. Magical can describe the world of the unknown as well as the art of being unreal in some way. There is an element of beauty attached to any magical world. We all love the stimulation we feel when a magical event takes place before our eyes. We stretch the corners of our brain to find an answer for not knowing why or how something exists. In most cases we throw these unanswered questions into a vacant lot in our conscious mind, and mark them ‘magic’ or ‘not-normal.’

Most of us are too busy to watch the magic that unfolds around us every day. The rigors of work and family responsibilities take up most waking hours so there is little time to enjoy the natural magical beauty that surrounds us. As the great Sufi poet, Rumi said: “Beauty surrounds us, but we usually have to be walking in a garden to appreciate it.” The quest to stay afloat in our economic pool of ‘what’s next’ takes a toll on what we see and experience in our individual reality, and the other natural realities that are constantly occurring around us.

We are conditioned to overlook our own spiritual magic. It sits in specialized compartments in our psyche while we idolize and worship other compartments that tend to fill the void we have within us. We have been conditioned to believe magical beauty belongs to an exclusive club and most of us don’t have a membership card. The quest to be more than we think we are is hindered by our thoughts about our own beauty and our creative imagination.

My book, The Butterfly Ball, is about the magical mystery of change. Who better than a butterfly to tell a story about change? Just like butterflies, the people in the story awaken from their metamorphic state in their own way.

Butterflies are living metaphors, but we are not educated to see them in that way. To most of us they are strange insects that become beautiful flies. We don’t usually focus on them as they flirt with bushes and flowers and spend their physical time drinking, eating and having sex. Their world is unknown to us, but when all the frills of life are extracted from our lives, we discover that we live just like butterflies. Our physical lives are exaggerated versions of the beautiful mystical magic that flows through butterflies, and all forms of life. The free will of butterflies represents the nature of our true beauty. Like all other aspects of consciousness they are here to imitate the multiplicity that exists within our conscious mind. When we bring that beauty into our awareness, life is less of a mystery and more of a journey of discovery.

Another Version of Consciousness

To conceive the truth as something external which is to be perceived by a perceiving subject is dualistic and appeals to the intellect for its understanding, but according to Zen we are living right in the truth, by the truth, from which we cannot be separated.

D.T. Suzuki is still considered the world’s leading authority on Zen Buddhism. Reading Suzuki’s work is an eye-opener for anyone who wants to know more about the nature of consciousness. If our inner consciousness used words to communicate with the ego the word Zen could be used to describe that process.

But consciousness is not restricted by words or specific thoughts about its nature. Consciousness expands in unique ways as we experience different elements of the psyche. The psyche is deeply immersed and extremely active in several regions of consciousness, but it is also consciousness acting as a free agent in this reality. The spokesman for this free agent is Zen. Zen gives us a clear view of the self as it absorbs other elements of consciousness. Several elements of consciousness create an energy mixture that flows in and out of Zen while the ego functions in time.

When consciousness is examined using rational thought it projects itself as an unknown. We measure this unknown using with various fabricated truth. Those measurements are man-made and have little to do with the truth that flows from our inner voice. Zen is not defined by religious beliefs; it is only identified using the language of those beliefs.

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We concoct our own version of Zen consciousness and truth so they conform to our beliefs. Everything we experience in physical life is consciousness and is rooted in the quality and truth of Zen. This other quality of consciousness is an important aspect of the psyche even though we consider it irrational as well as undefinable.