The Act Of Being And The Art Of Existence

What you knew before you were born isn’t lost. You only hide it till you’re tested, till it's time to remember. And sure enough when you want, you’ll find some odd funny beautiful way to find it again.

Richard Bach wrote thoughts in his book The Messiah’s Handbook. We don’t usually think about what we knew before we were born. Some of us believe life started with physical birth while others believe we are consciously connected to a stream of wisdom that holds the knowledge of the eons within it. Whatever the belief, it’s safe to say we encounter experiences that verify those repetitive thoughts in one way or another.

Some might say there are many civilizations within the psyche. Some of us might be able to tap into these lost civilizations when we adjust our beliefs about the nature of our own psyche. Most of us do see evidence of these lost realities from time to time, but we tend to develop concepts and theories about these unusual anomalies using the familiar dogmas that are rooted in our belief structure. That structure gives us comfort, and makes the unknown a little more palatable.

Our goals in life are as varied as the life forms that exist around us. Some of us embark on adventures that deal with family situations and children issues. Others immerse their consciousness in earning money, building new material things, fighting wars and searching for the unknown. The adventures we create are endless, and each one is an exploration or excursion that consumes as well as defines our life. Our consciousness is a unique blend of energy that thrives in the act of being.

We find ourselves in a certain reality because the probabilities that developed from the choices we made using our unique belief structure created our experiences. Those experiences teach us something about the act of being, and the art of existence. We test ourselves in certain experiences in order to remember that our existence is not just the sum of what we believe it is. It is the sum of each past, present and future consciousness squared.

Sensible Deck Of Uncertainty

Our present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious of more.

William James, the psychologist, philosopher, and medical doctor, had a major influence on 19th century thought as well as the modern day concept of consciousness. James spent his entire academic career at Harvard. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in 1875. Most of us do sense the wheel of consciousness that keeps turning within us. We may not know how to describe it sensibly, but we do know our field of waking consciousness is just a slice of the consciousness that exists within us.

We want to know more about our subconscious. We search for help in various places. We rely of religion to explain some of it, but having faith in something bigger than us is not an explanation; it is a stopgap. Faith in something outside of the self is the objective way of shuffling our complete consciousness into an unknown, but sensible deck of uncertainty. We allow the cards of faith to be dealt, and then we experience an outcome.

As James points out, our consciousness is insensibly subjective. It does not always conform to the rules of Hoyle or the man-made rules of God. It uses the ego part of itself to be sensible, but the ego often develops its own insensibility, and that free will or intent changes the nature of our complete consciousness. Nothing strange about that in the world of consciousness. Consciousness is the action of energy within each experience. Each experience changes our awareness, and expands a layer or two of our sub-consciousness.

Our fringe consciousness is deeper that we suspect. The subconscious is but one layer in an endless psychic structure. We don’t explore most of these layers because our faith in our sensible deck of uncertainty keeps us focused on the result not the cause.

Figment Of Our Imagination

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy, the mid-century Alabama author, is best known for his philosophical novels. His first work: The Moviegoer won the 1962 National Book Award for fiction. The search to know more about our world, and the worlds that exist in and around it, is getting narrower. Modern technology has opened doors that were sealed shut in the 196os by the glue of religious and political fallacies. We do know a little more about different reality, but we still hang on to the old way of looking at our self. It’s easier to be complacent and suspicious about new discoveries. We find comfort in the familiar, and fear in change.

Percy’s search for answers brought him to a place that relatively few people knew about when he was writing. The fact that our psyche is like a multidimensional TV set is still a hard fact to believe. We think our mind has only one channel, and our inner remote is fixed on that station. The mind can be tuned into more than one station, even though we only focus on one at a time. In a strange way, all the stations within the psyche are latent in the one we usually watch.

Inner coordinates unite all these stations, but these coordinates are foreign to us. At times, we change our channel using these psyche coordinates, and we experience another reality. We usually call this unfamiliar channel a dream or a figment of our imagination. We forget the fact that everything is a figment of imagination. Imagination is the creative process behind our psyche.

Reality has been defined as the focus of our energy and attention. When we focus on another channel within the psyche, like dreams, we become aware of the energy that creates these mental experiences. We begin to realize that we are on to something. That something is our multidimensional realty. That reality is never in a state of despair.

The Awareness Of Understanding

Great understanding is broad and unhurried, Little understanding is cramped and busy.

Chuang Tzu, the 4th century BCE Chinese philosopher, was influential in the development of Chan Buddhism, which is also known as Zen. Two important actions within the human psyche are understanding and awareness. Understanding and awareness have no limits until we create them. Understanding, as we define it, is the knowledge of grasping an idea within our mental process. Awareness is the wisdom within that idea and process. Within the self-created boundaries of our understanding we experience the action of energy within each idea. Each idea expands our mental process, and the perception of who we are. We communicate that perception in several ways.

We may perceive understanding causes pain and suffering. If we do, our awareness of who we are sits in a pool of doubt. We may perceive understanding as power. If we do, our awareness of who we are is enriched by that perception. Either way, our perception of understanding and awareness changes who we think we are.

The world, as we know it now, is separated by our understanding of it. To some of us, the world is cramped and busy, and for others it is broad and unhurried. Each perception is valid to the perceiver. Each perception expands the awareness of understanding in some way.

As Chuang Tzu said: There is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so.

We think we understand what we are aware of now, and tomorrow we think we will still be aware of what we understood yesterday. But awareness and understanding are not really measured in time. They are measured by our perception of the energy within our experiences. Who we think we are changes when the action of energy within our understanding and awareness is altered by our perception of the energy experienced in each action.

Dream Journey

All night long I think of life’s labyrinth Impossible to visit the tenants of Hades.

The authoritarian attempt to palm a horse off as deer Was laughable. As was the thrust at The charmed life of the dragon. Contemptible!

It’s in the dark that eyes probe earth and heaven, In dream that the tormented seek present, past.

Enough! The mountain moon fills the window.

The lonely fall through, the garden rang with cricket song.

Betsugen Enshi, the 14th century Japanese monk, wrote those interesting thoughts. Enshi takes us on one of his dream journeys, and we discover an action filled world that exists without a beginning or an end. Our dreams don’t begin or end. It is our awareness of dreams that has a beginning and an end. We become aware of a dream, and then we leave it. In terms of time, we dream a dream tonight, and then we leave it tonight. But the dream continues in its own form of electrical intensity.

Our dreams are not a reflection of our physical being. They are a by-product of the inner self and our physical being. Dreams are part chemical reaction, and part transformed energy that moves from one state to another. Our dream world, and the ideas that develop in that state, ensure the survival of each individual. In the dream world, we experience death as well as an altered version of physical life. We move from one layer of dream energy to another in order to experience the value fulfillment of manifesting our ideas and desires.

Our dreams are filled with endless actions, and images that act with uncanny mobility and incredible speed. We can experience a lifetime within a minute in this electrical charged world, and never age. We do all of that each night as the crickets sing, and the moon fills our multi-dimensional window.

A Deep Cleaning Process

Self-honesty is a tool without which you will find it very difficult to grow. Without it, you find that you disguise and dress up the reasons for your actions and reactions. It is part of your fear that you are not worthy and fear of judgment by others; in other words, having to be 'seen to be' more than you think you are.

By being honest with yourself you have the most wonderful tool to discover your secret fears and hidden beliefs about yourself and your reality. In the embracement of those fears you become centered and strong. This is called sovereignty, from whence comes your creative choice points, to grow into your own power.

Jani King wrote those thoughts in her book, The Gift. Self-honesty is a hard tool to find, especially when it is covered by years of fear, guilt and judgments. We all come into the world with self-honesty, but we soon discover that the people around us don’t use it, so we put that important tool in a file in our mind, and mark it obsolete. We become another person for the sake of conformity, balance and most of all fear. We modify our thinking so half-truths, and false assumptions become our standard truths.

Digging self-honesty out of the rubble of superficial acceptance is a deep cleaning process. It’s a process that takes the courage to face our self-dishonesty, and forgive our altered self for using it. We used self-dishonesty in place of self-honesty for a purpose. We want to conform and have meaning in our world of facades. Self-dishonesty gives us a false sense of worth, until we discover our innate worth. When the light of self-honesty is turned on, we activate the power to honestly be who we expect to be.

Self-Created Lessons

Ethical people recognize their mistakes as simply mistakes. They heal the past and themselves by correcting their errors, forgiving themselves, and learning as much as they can in the process. In this way they gradually become free of the past, their minds cease to be junkyards of painful memories and guilty secrets, and they come fresh and clean to each new moment of experience.

Guilt ridden people see their mistakes as unforgivable sins and punish themselves unmercifully. They do not heal or learn from the past; rather, they continue to punish themselves for it and thereby remain tied to it.

Roger Walsh M.D. PhD wrote those thoughts in his 2010 book Essential Spirituality. Dr. Walsh does have a knack for explaining human behavior in simple terms. We all have felt the pain of guilt, and the freedom of forgiveness in one way or another. The big question is: Why do some of us hold on to the guilt, and create a life of suffering? The answer is not a simple one. Some of us don’t want to release the pain. The guilt is our cross, and we are willing to drag it until our bodies break down under the stress.

Other people know how to forgive themselves. They know that every experience is rooted in the action of our consciousness. They realize mistakes are self-created lessons in awareness. Our consciousness operates within a code system. That code system helps direct our focus. We bring in experiences and assign a specific significance to each one of them. Other data is blocked, but that data can be, and usually is, significant in other code systems.

Consciousness code systems are rooted in molecular construction, and they function within a certain frequency within the spectrum of light. Light values are the alphabet of every code system. We are unfamiliar with this spectrum within consciousness, but at some point all of us will understand it, and use it to make sense of our mistakes.