The Unity Within Consciousness

The Chinese world-view depended upon a totally different line of thought than the Western view of a mechanical universe externally ruled by a political Monarch and Creator. The harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures. Modern science and the philosophy of organism, with its integrative levels, have come back to this wisdom, fortified by new understanding of cosmic, biological and social evolution.

Joseph Needham, the 20th century British academic and sinologist, is well known for his research on Chinese science. “Needham Grand Question,” also known as “The Needham Question,” explains why China was overtaken by the West in technology and science despite its earlier successes. He believed that Taoism and Confucianism played a role in slowing the pace of Chinese scientific discoveries. Those beliefs are based on the spiritual or subjective aspect of the self. Chinese spiritual beliefs were overpowered by the scientific and objective inventiveness of the Western World.

Western education does little to promote the teaching of Chinese philosophers so most of the knowledge we trust and then add to our individual belief structures is rooted in philosophical objectiveness that conforms to our limited idea about Western consciousness. Separation is a mighty weed and it has infiltrated our fundamental spiritual belief system. We tend to use personal and mass religious score cards to catalogue the unity within consciousness, but those score cards are flawed with the hash marks of fear, anger and hatred.

Most of us believe that spiritual unity takes place after death. Death is the end of life as we know it, but in Eastern thought death is another aspect of life. There is nothing dead about being dead. It is a portal where separation is blended with the unity within consciousness. The ancient Chinese masters believed that consciousness doesn’t require a score card to be what it is.

The Intelligence Of Consciousness

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor’s point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. There is no crime to the intellect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is his 1844 essay Experience walks the fine line of judgment when he speaks about the nature of the murderer’s intellect. What makes one man or woman a murderer and others saints? Saints and murderers are born to enjoy the desires and the challenges of physical life, but cryptic thoughts change their individual play and that behavior is label in several ways by humanity.

Saints overcome the burden of their choices and accept and appreciate the experiences they produce. As the actor they lived each life experience with purpose. Saints realize the script is the work of another aspect of the self, which lies just below physical awareness.

Murderers blame their choices on some external chain of events that seem out of their control. They are victims of their own thoughts. The nature of their reality changes and they conform to that change. Murderers perceive themselves as the actors; someone or something else is writing and directing the script.

Emerson reminds us that the murderers accept their experience shattering role until the horrible aftershock crumbles all semblance of normalcy in their perplexing reality. Life becomes a string of vacant perceptions and unfulfilled choices. But in the intelligence of consciousness, the vicious felon is on the same non-physical path as the saint. Consciousness expands from each experience. Both labels choose to experience physical life in order to sense and feel the results of their own thoughts and beliefs. Judgment doesn’t exist within the wall-less form of consciousness; it exists in the framework of our beliefs.

Our beliefs about death make these two physical labels real and personal. We honor saints because we yearn to be like them, and we despise murderers because we fear death and don’t understand them. The death part of the psyche is shrouded in mystery, misconceptions and religious fables.

We create belief labels to physically feel the consequences of being passionate about our desire to be what we already are―a whole in the whole of intelligent consciousness.

The Insanity Of Consciousness

The Insane

They are silent because the division walls Are broken down in the brain, And hours when they might be understood at all Begin and leave again.

Often when they go to the window at night, Suddenly everything seems right: Their hands touch something tangible, The heart is high and can pray, The calmed eyes gaze

Down on this unhoped for, often distorted Garden in this peaceful square at rest, Which in the reflex of this foreign world Grows ever larger, never to be lost.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great 20th century German poet, wrote that poem in the early 1900’s. Rilke spent his days studying people in the parks, gardens, museums and libraries, and at night he would wander around the boulevards of Paris watching the homeless. He felt the confusion that bubbles to the surface of awareness when a transformation takes place in the self. His behavior was labeled insane by some and he was discounted by others. In his mind, the hopeless needed some kind of help from society, but the system was too distorted and not ready to transform itself.

Rilke finally realized that the mental transformation he was experiencing was a road to the insanity within consciousness. He tried to get the message out through his poetry. He realized there is nothing sane about the cloud of nothing filled with everything that exists within the self. Consciousness wanders within itself and expresses itself in many forms. He believed we are insane dreamers that fill our objective world with sanity in order to know the complexity of it. He watched other forms of consciousness sense their insanity by freely living it without the tangled web of misconceptions that wrap us in a world of fear.

We bring our innate insanity to the surface of our reality when we immerse the self in antics of a butterfly or the strength of a spider weaving a web. We experience the insanity of consciousness in every bloom in nature and in every sliver of our being. But, we tend to focus on the follies of the sane and condemn the insane for experiencing another aspect of our own consciousness.

The Genius Of Consciousness

We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order and thus in such way as to be able to see itself. That indeed is amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

G.Spencer Brown wrote those thoughts in the 1969 book, Laws of Form. Brown is describing our innate genius, as well as the genius that exists in other forms of life. Genius is alive and it thrives in all forms of life, but we tend to discount other forms of genius because they do not conform to the standard we established for that word.

For example, butterflies give us insight into our innate beauty. Butterflies are a form of genius, and we are deeply connected to them. We ignore that connection because we believe humans are a separate life form that has no peers. There are countless stories of butterflies arriving after the death of a love one, and getting uncannily close to the grieving individual. No words are exchanged during these interludes, but there is a distinct sense that the butterfly is there to deliver some sort of message. That message is not verbal; it is vibrational.

We see this other world when we pull ourselves away from the rational reality we swear by, and allow our genius to wander through our mental fields of knowing. In that field the butterfly consciousness within us flies through our mind field of misconceptions, and we recognize genius for what it does― it see itself in physical form in order to change.

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