“The Footprint We Have Discovered on the Shores of the Unknown Is Our Own”: On Science as Idolatry … A Physicist Reports on the Truth Behind Scientific Conjuring

Revolution in Science … Shunned: The Dire Import of Scientific Cowardice Regarding Their Own Findings as Relates to Humans’ Continued Existence on Earth … Science as Myth, Part One

The Implications of Matter As Metaphor

Consistently applying the new-paradigm perspective on matter and consciousness — as is attempted in this book … that is, of matter as an epiphenomenon of consciousness and the primacy-of-the-psychic-world postulate — requires a rethinking of theoretical constructions even in the fields of consciousness and psychology, which one would think at first hand to be amenable to this sort of view. However, our cultural context is such, our Western viewpoint so engrained, that even in these fields there seems a huge temptation to bow to the prevailing winds and a consequently understandable reluctance to go out on a limb against those.

Thus, we have many hybrids — theorists who it appears are trying to please too many people, too many former mentors, or whatever; and who find themselves, consequently, unable to go steadfastly forward, following through consistently on the implications of the transpersonal perspective. For example, from a consistent new-paradigm vantage point, Ken Wilber (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983) — the “consciousness” guru of the more intellectual, less experiential wing of the transpersonal movement — appears as inconsistent as pre-Copernican astronomers in devolving his theories.

Therefore, much of this next part will entail addressing the way the perspective presented in the previous part, “Matter As Metaphor,” affects, expands, changes, and reverses the tenets put forth in transpersonal psychology and philosophy — especially those aspects associated with Ken Wilber.

The Revolutionary Import, in Science, of the New-Paradigm Perspective

But let us set aside transpersonal thinking for the moment to focus on the larger picture. It may also be argued that in the larger context of normal science, in general, the new-paradigm primacy of consciousness is simply irrelevant.

However, I take strong exception to that. It is not simply innocuous that scientists refuse to acknowledge the implications of their findings. For in fact the implications of them would require a revolution and an overturning, and in many cases, a throwing out as obsolete of much of what scientists have paid highly for and struggled long and hard to learn.

The Lengths To Which They Go

So it should not be too surprising to observe the lengths to which scientists will go in avoiding the implications of their findings. Their actions and behaviors have all the earmarks of what, in therapeutic circles, is called denial.

For example, Roger Jones (1982), a physicist, in his remarkable book titled Physics As Metaphor, points out how physicists in their day-to-day activities hardly consider the implications of twentieth-century findings in their field. He begins by noting that, “Quantum mechanics, then, may just possibly imply an essential role for consciousness in the scheme of things. . . .” (1982, pp. 6-7).

Nevertheless, he adds that

[T]he real issue is whether or not such ideas figure significantly in scientific research. It is, in fact, the rare scientist who is concerned with such matters. The Copenhagen interpretation may be the prevailing philosophy of quantum mechanics today . . . but it is hardly a hot topic over lunch at the research lab. Most scientists take a rather pragmatic and condescending view of philosophy, and its niceties have no direct bearing on their day-to-day research, thinking, and discussion. . . . Fifty years after the Copenhagen interpretation forced consciousness on an unwilling scientific community, there is precious little to be found in the research literature of physics to suggest any bridging of the mind-body gap.

In fact, in the last fifty years, the trend in mainstream physical science has been away from consciousness and holism and toward the mechanistic and divisible world of the nineteenth century. Fritjof Capra argues that despite the much touted promises of an ultimate unification in physics, modern elementary particle and quark theory is basically a throwback to the atomistic, thing-oriented notions of premodern physics and is contrary to the holistic, process-oriented currents in modern thought. (Jones, 1982, p. 7)

The Emperor’s New Clothes

In fact, Jones (1982) goes so far as to say that in teaching physics and in publicly maintaining its precepts he often felt as if he were living a lie:

I found myself thinking hard about why and how to interest children in science, and this in turn awakened several philosophical issues that had troubled me over the years. As a practicing physicist, I had always been vaguely embarrassed by a kind of illusory quality in science and had often felt somehow part of a swindle on the human race. It was not a conspiracy but more like the hoax in The Emperor’s New Clothes. I had come to suspect, and now felt compelled to acknowledge, that science and the physical world were products of human imagining — that we were not the cool observers of the world, but its passionate creators. (p. 3)

The Footprint We Have Discovered Is Our Own

His implication is that physicists are aware of the subjective and arbitrary nature of the pronouncements and assertions they make about physical reality. It follows that they assert, with such authority and with the certitude of fact, things which they know to be only conjecture, or at the most, conjuring.

Jones (1982) concurs,

I . . . suggest that scientists (and indeed all who possess creative consciousness) conjure like the poet and the shaman, that their theories are metaphors which ultimately are inseparable from physical reality, and that consciousness is so integral to the cosmos that the creative idea and the thing are one and the same.

What else are we to think when the theory of relativity teaches us that space and time are the same as matter and energy, that geometry is gravity? Is this not an equating, an integration, of mind and matter? Is this not an act of poetic, perhaps of divine, creation? And what of the astronomer’s black hole, the perfect metaphor for a bottomless well in space from which not even light may escape? Which is the reality and which the metaphor? And what of quarks, the claimed ultimate constituents of matter, locked permanently within the elementary particles they compose, never able to appear in the literal, physical world? Are they not constructs, figments of the mind, symbols for a collection of unobservable properties?

How is the quark more real than figurative? . . . Indeed, as Sir Arthur Eddington said in 1920, the footprint we have discovered on the shores of the unknown is our own. (p. 5)

Science as Idolatry

Finally, Jones goes so far as to equate with idolatry the elevation of such man-made scientific constructs to objective status. And he suggests that such deceptiveness and failure to be completely candid is linked to some of our major modern crises:

For the full elaboration of the idea of science and the physical world as a construct of the mind or a collective representation, I owe a great debt to Owen Barfield and his writings, especially his book Saving the Appearances — A Study in Idolatry. It was Barfield who helped me most to fathom the deceptiveness of science by seeing that when metaphors become crystallized and abstract, cut off from their roots in consciousness, and forgotten by their creators, they become idols. For an idolator is not so much one who creates idols, but one who worships them.

This failure to recognize the central role of consciousness in reality and thus to treat the physical world as an independent, external, and alien object has been a chronic problem throughout the modern era of scientific discovery, since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and has reached a critical stage in the twentieth century with its unconscionable, and largely unconscious, ravaging of the environment. (Jones, 1982, p. 5)

Continue with When Tradition and Religion Break Down, All Truth Is Liable to Erupt: The Center of the Onion Is Nothing … The Last Secret to Be Told Is That There Is No Secret.

Return to Are Aliens Actually Angels Attempting to Midwife Us Into the Next Higher Stage of Our Ascension to hOMe? Matter as Metaphor, Part Ten

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Are Aliens Actually Angels Attempting to Midwife Us Into the Next Higher Stage of Our Ascension to hOMe? Matter as Metaphor, Part Ten

Biblical Prophets Do Not Report Being Probed. Does Our High-Tech Perversion of Birth Account for the Stark Medical Veils Through Which We View Our Modern Angels?

One at First Sees a God as a Demon

This idea that aliens — whether “channeled” or encountered — are somehow connected with our higher or our “future selves” is common currency in UFO circles into which I’ve stumbled. The important point, however, is that we do not see them that way at first. Initially, these forces are imbued with all the pain and “garbage” from our polluted inner worlds, especially with that emanating from our particularly severe birth trauma. Or, as Jung phrased it, one at first sees a god as a demon until one is “wholly” enough to recognize him.

Thus, abductees may color their experiences with elements of being poked and prodded, of having things inserted into them, of being surrounded by alien medical-type beings in a laboratory setting, of having “samples” removed from them for testing, and of being swooped from one place to another without any control or say on their part. Compare this with what might be an infant’s interpretation of their experience upon coming out of the ordeal of birth into a brightly lit room of masked medical personnel and weighed on cold scales, having thermometers stuck up them, having suctions and fingers inserted into their mouth with their jaws stretched wide, having medical samples taken from them for testing for various indicators of health and possible disease, being roughly scrubbed, and then moved to strange places where they are left for periods before being moved around again. And then there are all the other aspects of the perinatal which color the experience as described by Lawson.

I Called it “Grace.” Not “Abduction.”

This is not, however, to say, as Lawson does, that these experiences are not in some sense real, or that they are entirely derivative of birth trauma. I can say this emphatically for I myself have had at least the one experience described earlier — the “Sure It’s Hard!” experience — which contained many of the elements of a UFO abduction. But it had none of the usually reported painful, perinatal-reminiscent elements at all. It was the most unusual experience of my life, and was incredibly profound. But I called it “vision,” and “grace,” not an abduction.

The Cuttingly Stark Medical Tuxedos in Which We Outfit Our Modern Angels

I am not claiming to be special; my experience was not completely without apprehension and fearfulness. Furthermore, from Mother Mary in the Bible to John Lilly and Terence McKenna currently, people have frequently reported encounters with higher entities — whether termed visitations from angels or experiences of “the Other,” “Logos,” or “allies.” It is also possible that the fact that I had been processing my birth, in a deep experiential way, for several years before my “abduction” may have had something to do with the relative lack of perinatal overlay in my experience.

Elijah Wasn’t Probed. Moses Wasn’t Examined.

Reversing that possibility reveals another dimension: The fact that Western culture is the only known culture to have so perverted the natural birthing process — with high-tech and sterile gadgetry, drugs, and machine-like efficiency — may account for the cuttingly stark medical tuxedos in which we outfit our modern angels. It may also help explain why the encounter would initially seem extra-threatening and painful in modern times — and in that particular perinatal-reflecting way. After all, it is said of Jesus’s disciples that they “fell on their face, and were sore afraid” at the time of the Transfiguration and the appearance of Moses and Elijah. But nowhere do we see anything like being medically examined and probed in these earlier visitations.

Perinatal Past Life Perceptions

Compare also the past-life experiences that people report. In one sense, this explanation supports Janov in his pointing out the personal trauma elements of so-called past-life memories. Yet, in the same manner that one’s pain, and especially perinatal pain, colors and “constitutes” one’s encounter with these other foci of consciousness, might it not also color and imbue one’s past-life memories? That is, is it possible that, contrary to Janov, there actually are memories from other times trying to come through, but that unintegrated pain elements from this life are mixed with them. That is, not that the past-life part is not there or is not coming through, but that one’s remembering of it and one’s interpretation of it is not going to be correct until one clears away the competing and interfering this-life elements.

If You Don’t Hear the Heavenly Rhythm, You Need More Spiritual Experience

Look at it this way: It is like when you are picking up a channel on your radio but there is too much static obscuring it, or, maybe a better analogy, when that particular band is picking up from two channels at once, so that you — and I am sure we have all had this experience at one time or other — are hearing parts of both broadcasts intermingled. Thus, you hear, say, a Beatles tune on one channel at the same time as a fundamentalist preacher on the “religious” channel — an irritating combination, no doubt, from either end of the cultural spectrum.

At times you hear the music clearly, with only some faint rhetorical rhythms in the background; at other times, you hear the heavy pounding of fundamentalist verbiage, with only a sweet yearning harmonious tinge to it.

In this example, if you do not know otherwise, how do you interpret your experience? If you are hearing the pounding rhetoric foremost, let us say, do you not interpret this experience in the cataclysmic, assaultive, and brimstone terms of the punishing preacher talk? Of course you do. Yet does this mean that the Beatles song does not exist? Of course it does not.

Similarly, and this is the way we have observed this process to work, as you clear out and recognize the personal-pain aspects of the bombastic preacher overlay, you are more able to tune-in to and clearly take in and appreciate the harmonious and loving Beatles tunes.

At first all you did was get access to something beyond yourself — that is to say, you turned on the radio. Your interpretation of your radio experience is obviously going to be colored by all aspects of what you pick up at this time. It may be a while before — in looking within, or in gaining access, or in having transpersonal encounters — you are able to discriminate the personal from the transpersonal and to hear the underlying heavenly rhythm.

Demons Can Later Be Seen as Angelic Midwives Helping Us Get Back hOMe

In sum, it is not that the encounters with alien entities or the emergence of past-life memories are either exactly false and derivative of underlying pain — as Lawson and Janov would have it — or that they are entirely accurate, as Mack and past-life therapists would have it. It is possible instead that the truth lies in a “both – and” — a paradox … as is so often the case on these borderlines of the ordinary. It may just be that these realities and memories are real, that these experiences do really happen . . . but that our interpretations and perceptions of them are highly distorted by our individual pain. In the same way Jacob, in the movie “Jacob’s Ladder,” could only see demons hounding him until he had relinquished attachment to his former self and finally saw what they truly were — angels attempting to midwife him into the next higher stage of his ascension to hOMe.

Continue with “The Footprint We Have Discovered on the Shores of the Unknown Is Our Own”: On Science as Idolatry … A Physicist Reports on the Truth Behind Scientific Conjuring

Return to Matter as Metaphor, Part Nine: “One at First Sees a God as a Demon Until One Is “Wholly” Enough to Recognize Him.”

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Matter As Metaphor References

Antler. (1991). Proving what? [poem]. The Quest, 4(3) [Autumn 1991], 61.

Baba, Sathya Sai. (1991). Joy of surrender. Sathya Said Newsletter, 15(4) [Summer 1991], 15-18. [Adapted from Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. VII, pp. 78-86, Second American Printing, 1985.]

Hesse, Hermann. (1951). Siddhartha. Trans. by Hilda Rosner. New York: New Directions.

Judge, Mark Gauvreau. (1993). The outer limits of the soul. Common Boundary, 11(4) July/August 1993.

Jung, Carl G. (1978). Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Laing, Ronald D. (1988). [Interview with R. D. Laing]. Omni, [April 1988].

Lawlor, Robert. (1989b). Sexuality and the universe evolving. New Frontier, November, 1989, 9-10, 43.

Lawlor, Robert. (1992). Voices of the first day: Awakening in the aboriginal dreamtime. New Frontier, April-May, 1992, 19-20, 22, 48.

Lawson, Alvin H. (1985). UFO abductions or birth memories? Fate, 38(3) March 1985, 68-80.

Lawson, Alvin H. (1987). Perinatal imagery in UFO abduction reports. In T. Verny (ed.): Pre- and Perinatal Psychology: An Introduction. New York: Human Sciences Press.

Mack, John. (1992). The UFO abduction phenomenon: What does it mean? Presentation at the Twelfth International Transpersonal Conference, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 25 June 1992.

Mack, John E. (1992). Other realities: The “alien abduction” phenomenon. Noetic Sciences Review, No. 23, Autumn 1992, 5-11.

McKenna, Terence. (1991). The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco: Harper-Collins.

Schiff, Francine. (1991). The mystical experience: An interview with David Spangler. The Quest, 4(3) [Autumn 1991], 8-14.

Terry, Sara. (1992). Alien territory. The Boston Sunday Globe, The Boston Globe Magazine, October 11, 1992, 20-27.

Thompson, Keith. (1989). The UFO encounter experience as a crisis of transformation. In S. Grof and C. Grof (eds.): Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Thompson, Keith. (1991). Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Uhlein, Gabriele. (1991). Hildegard of Bingen. The Quest, 4(3) [Autumn 1991], 48-85.

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Continue with “The Footprint We Have Discovered on the Shores of the Unknown Is Our Own”: On Science as Idolatry … A Physicist Reports on the Truth Behind Scientific Conjuring

Return to Matter as Metaphor, Part Nine: “One at First Sees a God as a Demon Until One Is “Wholly” Enough to Recognize Him.”

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Continue with “The Footprint We Have Discovered on the Shores of the Unknown Is Our Own”: On Science as Idolatry … A Physicist Reports on the Truth Behind Scientific Conjuring

Return to Matter as Metaphor, Part Nine: “One at First Sees a God as a Demon Until One Is “Wholly” Enough to Recognize Him.”

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“One at First Sees a God as a Demon Until One Is ‘Wholly’ Enough to Recognize Him”: We See Our “Angels” Through the “Fog” of Our Individual Vapors of Pain.“

Entities Might Be Seen as Frightening Assailants, They Are Later Seen as Guides: Matter as Metaphor, Part Nine — Are They Aliens or the “Hounds of Heaven”?

And Pleiadiens Are Stars, Too!

A fascinating extrapolation of this we-are-stars idea is the fact that much of the channeling/UFO stuff that is emerging concerns those “aliens” coming from “the Pleiades.” That is, that these “beings,” who are able to come to us by mechanical means or psychically, depending upon our ability to accept the inner world, might be considered other foci of consciousness within the “inner” psychic universe that are reflected in the outside universe as the star system Pleiades.

The Pleiadeins Are More Directly Seen Within Us … And Much Easier to Get to That Way

In other words, rather than being humanoids like us who happen to have flown in spaceships from other planets in that part of outer space (a very anthropocentric view), they may actually be the star system itself, or more correctly, they may be the psychic foci in the That Which Truly Is of consciousness that gets reflected as a “star system” which we label Pleiades, in the way we create all the rest of the physical world out of the pure “mind-stuff” of the universe.

Abducted by Angels?

An interesting sidelight on this has to do with how this interpretation helps explain the UFO abduction phenomenon. If these are, indeed, psychic forces that are attempting to aid us and will come to us in any way that makes any sense to us, then it is understandable that they can come as spaceship jockeys for the technologically and materialistically minded Westerner, but they can also appear as the Mother Mary to the devout Catholic (these sightings are also on the upsurge), can appear as any of a number of gods or sages to the Hindu; or can appear as a grandfather figure or as some sort of supernatural being in an indigenous culture, and so on.

Herein we have a parallel to what Castaneda expressed in his descriptions of the allies who in reality are just forces or “lights” but can be seen as everything from monsters to “leering men.” We also see parallels to John Lilly’s descriptions of the allies that came to him in his experiences.

An important aspect of this, again using the example of Castaneda, is how we manage to distort these encounters. It follows from our fallenness from grace into physical form that whatever we experience will be framed within the parameters of limitations imposed by our separation from the All That Is in this particular set of delusions which we call the biological body of the species human. But we know that our encounter with these foci of consciousness will be further distorted by our cultural apparatus (representing the second separation . . . second fall from spiritual grace) and thus, not only will they come in some way physical or humanoid or form-like to us, representing that first instance of the fall as depicted in the creation of a physical species constitution, but they will also come colored with our cultural paintbrush … and therefore appear as Mother Mary, space pilots, or Trickster, depending.

But finally, and extremely importantly, they will be further distorted and clothed by our personal experience in this separated state and, thus, very profoundly by our traumatic experiences here, especially our earliest ones. What I am saying is that these spiritual foci of consciousness will be further colored by our individual pain. It is in this sense that Castaneda talks about the allies appearing like monsters to one person (in this case, himself) and to another person (la Gorda) as lecherous men who want her as a woman. In other words one’s personal fears, borne of one’s experiences of pain and trauma pervade our perceptions of these helping “psychic spots”; we see them through the “fog” of our individual vapors of pain.

This understanding is important because it explains how these encounters — in the form they are taking in our culture currently, that is, as UFO “abductions” — contain so many reflections of birth trauma (see Lawson, 1985, 1987).

Yet, as John Mack (1992) makes clear, there is a tendency for a kind of evolution in the understandings of some abductees concerning what is happening to them as they go about therapeutically processing their feelings about the experiences. What was initially traumatic becomes transformative; what was frightening turns into an intensely meaningful experience of powerful bonding. Therefore, while these entities might be seen at first as frightening assailants, they are later seen as guides toward a greater role and an expanded identity, often centered around an ecological mission.

This has interesting correlations with Campbell’s well-known portrayal of the “refusal of the call” during the “hero’s journey.”

Thompson (1989) saw this connection to the abductees as well. As he put it,

“Refusing the call,” writes Campbell, “represents the hero’s hope that his or her present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages might be fixed and made secure through the act of denial.” But no such luck is to be had: “One is harassed, both night and day, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one’s own disordered psyche. The ways to the gates have all been locked: there is no exit.” (p. 127)

One at First Sees a God as a Demon

This idea that aliens — whether “channeled” or encountered — are somehow connected with our higher or our “future selves” is common currency in UFO circles into which I’ve stumbled. The important point, however, is that we do not see them that way at first. Initially, these forces are imbued with all the pain and “garbage” from our polluted inner worlds, especially with that emanating from our particularly severe birth trauma. Or, as Jung phrased it, one at first sees a god as a demon until one is “wholly” enough to recognize him.

Thus, abductees may color their experiences with elements of being poked and prodded, of having things inserted into them, of being surrounded by alien medical-type beings in a laboratory setting, of having “samples” removed from them for testing, and of being swooped from one place to another without any control or say on their part. Compare this with what might be an infant’s interpretation of their experience upon coming out of the ordeal of birth into a brightly lit room of masked medical personnel and weighed on cold scales, having thermometers stuck up them, having suctions and fingers inserted into their mouth with their jaws stretched wide, having medical samples taken from them for testing for various indicators of health and possible disease, being roughly scrubbed, and then moved to strange places where they are left for periods before being moved around again. And then there are all the other aspects of the perinatal which color the experience as described by Lawson.

I Called it “Grace.” Not “Abduction.”

This is not, however, to say, as Lawson does, that these experiences are not in some sense real, or that they are entirely derivative of birth trauma. I can say this emphatically for I myself have had at least the one experience described earlier — the “Sure It’s Hard!” experience — which contained many of the elements of a UFO abduction. But it had none of the usually reported painful, perinatal-reminiscent elements at all. It was the most unusual experience of my life, and was incredibly profound. But I called it “vision,” and “grace,” not an abduction.

Continue with Are Aliens Actually Angels Attempting to Midwife Us Into the Next Higher Stage of Our Ascension to hOMe? Matter as Metaphor, Part Ten

Return to The Earth Is the True Bible, Matter Is a Language, The Universe Is a Book of Deity and Philosophy, Ever Teaching Us: Matter as Metaphor, Part Eight

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The Earth Is the True Bible, Matter Is a Language, The Universe Is a Book of Deity and Philosophy, Ever Teaching Us: Matter as Metaphor, Part Eight

The Universe Is Explored Through Internal and External Experience of Self: It Is Not That We Project Human Characteristics Onto the World, It Is That in Us Are Reflected Universal Ones

“The Dewdrop Slips Into the Shining Sea”

This is the stage described in Buddhism as the waterdrop becoming one with the ocean (“the dewdrop slips into the shining sea”). It is expressed by Sathya Sai Baba as a stage when the individual disappears into God, or becomes one with God. And it is exemplified everywhere in Zen Buddhism, especially in Zen art, which likewise depicts naked Nature — that is to say, a consciousness truly reflecting, in an undistorted way, that which is, or, one might say, the still lake that perfectly reflects the sky and moon. It is also wonderfully depicted in the ninth frame of the ten ox-herding symbols, where neither ox nor herder is visible, and all that is, is Nature Unsullied.

So it is in this sense, at this stage, that we see ourselves not as the center of the Universe, and not even as babes (our “inner child”-ren) in the Universe.  But we have physically disappeared from the center of the circle (the center of consciousness). We are then simple awareness, simple foci of consciousness in the vast expanse of the Universe.

Furthermore, it is interesting that the evolution of this symbol — viz., from man in the center of the circle to the Universe in the center of the circle (or life force or consciousness in the center of the circle) — appears to have gone through the stage of “birthing into the Universe.” This is exemplified, for example, by the symbol at the conclusion of “2001″ wherein the fetus is seen as suspended in the Cosmos, like a star.

Thus, at this stage — before we actually become one with the Universe . . . and become just foci of light in the vast universe of consciousness, i.e., become stars — we go through a process of focusing on our perinatal origins. In other words, we go through our personal, pain-driven reality constructions — a product of our earliest experiences in the womb and at birth — we place them in the center of the universe, the center of consciousness, and we clear them out. We do this so we might truly see the Universe as it is, not distorted by our personal psychic overlay.

Later, in the stages of evolution of our consciousness, we no longer are even “babes” (or fetuses) in the universe, but instead have transcended even that.  In this stage the personal disappears . . . we disappear (in the symbol) . . . and then the Universe alone exists.

We Are Much Like the Stars 

We are much like the stars in the vastness of the sky . . . points of light, or awareness, with the awareness from each of us in this gigantic hologram of What Is traveling everywhere else in the Universe, to everyone else of us and interconnecting us all and participating us all in the reality of the whole; just as the light from the stars travels everywhere in the Universe, to all the other stars in the Universe, interconnecting, through every-traveling and infinite light, each and every one of them.

The Universe Is Ever Teaching Us

So it is, once again, in the example of the stars and our individual points of awareness, that the physical universe again reflects the spiritual/metaphysical reality of us . . . ever teaching, as it were, ever showing, and demonstrating to us . . . ever hoping, so to speak, that we will just look up and see . . . and in so doing come to realize our true nature, our true place in the universe of awareness, free, once again, from the limitations (and suffering) of attachment to form (of attachment to reflection, of attachment to delusion).

We Don’t Anthropomorphize the World, It Has Deified Us 

It is not that in looking at the world we project human characteristics onto it; it is that the world has looked at us and reflected its universal characteristics. We don’t anthropomorphize the world, it has deified us. 

The Earth Is the True Bible

Or, as Lawlor (1992) phrased it, in describing the worldview of the indigenous Australian Aborigines:

While the Aborigines refer to the forces and powers that created the world as their Creative Ancestors, they believe all creatures — from stars to humans to insects — share in the consciousness of the primary creative force, and each, in its own way, mirrors a form of that consciousness. In this sense the Dreamtime stories perpetuate a unified world view. This unity compelled the Aborigines to respect and adore the earth as if it were a book imprinted with the mystery of the original creation. (p. 20)

You might say to the Aborigines, the Earth is the true Bible, upon it is printed the knowledge of the ages, the story of our beginnings and our nature, and the guidance for how to live and how to find our way back to our source. We can read the Earth; everyone can. It is a book of God and philosophy that cannot be hidden and hoarded by any elite and is available, always, to each and every one.

Matter Is a Language

Further:

The Dreamtime stories extended a universal and psychic consciousness not only to every living creature, but also to the earth and the primary elements, forces and principles. Each component of creation acts out of dreams, desires, attractions and repulsions, just as we humans do. Therefore, the entrance into the larger world of space, time and universal energies and fields was the same as the entrance into the inner world of consciousness and dreaming. Exploration of the vast universe and a knowledge of the meaning of creation was experienced through an internal and external knowledge of self. (p. 20)

The Dreamtime creation myths of the Aborigines guided them to see the physical world as a language, as a metamorphosis of invisible spirit, psychological and ethical realms. In this way, the Aboriginal involvement with the physical world includes and resonates with all other aspects of human experience. (p. 22)

And Pleiadiens Are Stars, Too!

A fascinating extrapolation of this we-are-stars idea is the fact that much of the channeling/UFO stuff that is emerging concerns those “aliens” coming from “the Pleiades.” That is, that these “beings,” who are able to come to us by mechanical means or psychically, depending upon our ability to accept the inner world, might be considered other foci of consciousness within the “inner” psychic universe that are reflected in the outside universe as the star system Pleiades.

The Pleiadeins Are More Directly Seen Within Us … And Much Easier to Get to That Way

In other words, rather than being humanoids like us who happen to have flown in spaceships from other planets in that part of outer space (a very anthropocentric view), they may actually be the star system itself, or more correctly, they may be the psychic foci in the That Which Truly Is of consciousness that gets reflected as a “star system” which we label Pleiades, in the way we create all the rest of the physical world out of the pure “mind-stuff” of the universe.

Continue with “One at First Sees a God as a Demon Until One Is ‘Wholly’ Enough to Recognize Him”: We See Our “Angels” Through the “Fog” or Our Individual Vapors of Pain.“

Return to “We Are then Simple Awareness, Simple Foci of Consciousness in the Vast Expanse of the Universe”: Matter as Metaphor, Part Seven: We Are Stars Are Us.

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“We Are then Simple Awareness, Simple Foci of Consciousness in the Vast Expanse of the Universe”: Matter as Metaphor, Part Seven: We Are Stars Are Us.

Because of the Impending Ecological Crises, “Man” Is No Longer the Center of the Universe. As With Primal Peoples, Nature Is Assuming Primacy in Consciousness.

Therefore the physical world cannot be anything but a manifestation of the psychic in its basic rootedness and concurrence with the psychic. It follows that the messages that one discovers in contemplating the phenomena, as “given,” of the physical world are endless. And they are messages both universal and personal, corresponding … exactly, one might guess … to the fact of there being shared physical realities as well as individual physical realities—that is, spaces which one sees in one’s unique way, or in which one has sole or near-sole dominion.

We Are Stars/ Stars Are Us

Now, as shown by Lawlor especially, this sort of perception of Reality is the common view of those peoples who we indicate with pejoratives such as “primitive,” “savage,” and “uncivilized.” Displaying our fear of our own primal roots in this way, we cut ourselves off from a perception which has been our birthright for possibly ninety-nine percent of our existence as a species. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, it is a viewpoint our science is beginning to give back to us.

As similarly pointed out, this is the common perspective of mystics — who we also commonly denigrate and even persecute, thereby displaying those same things about ourselves in relation to them.

We do these things on the basis of an extremely recent (in the grand scheme of things) Western hubris and anthropocentrism which began to reach a peak at the time of the Renaissance in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Placing ourselves on pedestals comprised of our ethnocentric beliefs in an overweening ego and of an all-powerful — a supreme and superior but unfortunately anthropocentric — “rationalism,” we presumed ourselves unto gods.

The symbol of this Renaissance “humanism” — from da Vinci’s sketch originally — is that of man, arms and legs wide, in the center of a circle. And while it is widely acknowledged that this symbol depicts humanism, it is totally unacknowledged that this is a perfect representation of anthropocentrism as well. For, in da Vinci’s symbol, “man” is placed in the center of the circle, thus, in the center of the Universe . . . the world revolves around “him.” This depiction is so much a part of our experience, so much a part of our pedagogy and culture, that it is only by looking to other cultures, with other perspectives, that we might by contrast see its significance.

In many parts of the world, the center of the cosmos, as depicted in a rendering of the center of a circle, would no doubt be a figure or symbol of Nature, or of the Divine. It might, for example, be a tree in the center of a circle — e.g., the “tree of life” — in a great many other, less-dissociated cultures, for example, the vast majority of the indigenous ones. For those cultures see Nature and the interconnectedness of Nature as the center of the Universe and themselves as a part of that larger whole.

Lawlor (1992) says of the Australian Aborigine, for example:

The subjugation and domestication of plants and animals and all other manipulation and exploitation of the natural world — the basis of Western civilization and “progress” — were antithetical to the sense of a common consciousness and origin shared by every creature and equally with the creators. To exploit this integrated world was to do the same to oneself. (p. 22)

By contrast, our Western symbol of humanism — and we see now, anthropocentrism — coincided with vast advances in technology and science . . . but also — we are only now finally acknowledging — it coincided with extermination of indigenous peoples (by these same, so-called, “renaissance” peoples) and with the beginnings of the rape of nature, which we are now seeing the fruits of in the global environmental crisis.

Nevertheless — no doubt because of the impending ecological crises — this is changing; and more and more this anthropocentrism/”humanism” is on the wane. The deep ecology movement is the perfect example of this, but the renewal of interest in primal, indigenous cultures and in their perspectives is also evidence of this change.

With this change, “man” is no longer the center of the circle, the center of the Universe. Instead, the Cosmos, or Nature, is returning to the center of the focus. God is once again becoming the focus of consciousness and “man’s” ego is taking a powder, so to speak, or, at the least, is stepping aside a bit.

This is the stage described in Buddhism as the waterdrop becoming one with the ocean (“the dewdrop slips into the shining sea”). It is expressed by Sathya Sai Baba as a stage when the individual disappears into God, or becomes one with God. And it is exemplified everywhere in Zen Buddhism, especially in Zen art, which likewise depicts naked Nature — i.e., a consciousness truly reflecting, in an undistorted way, that which is, or, one might say, the still lake that perfectly reflects the sky and moon. It is also wonderfully depicted in the ninth frame of the ten ox-herding symbols, where neither ox nor herder is visible, and all that is, is Nature Unsullied.

So it is in this sense, at this stage, that we see ourselves not as the center of the Universe, and not even as babes (our “inner child”-ren) in the Universe. But we have physically disappeared from the center of the circle (the center of consciousness). We are then simple awareness, simple foci of consciousness in the vast expanse of the Universe.

Furthermore, it is interesting that the evolution of this symbol — viz., from man in the center of the circle to the Universe in the center of the circle (or life force or consciousness in the center of the circle) — appears to have gone through the stage of “birthing into the Universe.” This is exemplified, for example, by the symbol at the conclusion of “2001″ wherein the fetus is seen as suspended in the Cosmos, like a star.

Thus, at this stage — before we actually become one with the Universe . . . and become just foci of light in the vast universe of consciousness, i.e., become stars — we go through a process of focusing on our perinatal origins. In other words, we go through our personal, pain-driven reality constructions — a product of our earliest experiences in the womb and at birth — we place them in the center of the universe, the center of consciousness, and we clear them out. We do this so we might truly see the Universe as it is, not distorted by our personal psychic overlay.

Later, in the stages of evolution of our consciousness, we no longer are even “babes” (or fetuses) in the universe, but instead have transcended even that. In this stage the personal disappears . . . we disappear (in the symbol) . . . and then the Universe alone exists.

Continue with The Earth Is the True Bible, Matter Is a Language, The Universe Is a Book of Deity and Philosophy, Ever Teaching Us: Matter as Metaphor, Part Eight

Return to The Transformational Element of UFO Abductions and Its Blow to Materialism: We Are Being Booted Into a Higher Awareness and a Need to Save the Planet.

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The Transformational Element of UFO Abductions and Its Blow to Materialism: We Are Being Booted Into a Higher Awareness and a Need to Save the Planet.

Matter As Metaphor, Part Six — UFO Abductions: Are Abductions an Attempt by Higher Others to Instill Us with a Heightened Spirituality and Environmental Concern?

More recent understandings of the phenomenon of UFOs also bring us to conclusions such as these. Psychiatrist and UFO abduction researcher, John Mack, is insistent about the radically new view of reality that comes out of our encounter with UFO abduction phenomena. In his work with treating the trauma caused in abductees by such “alien abductors,” he discovers consistent affronts to our common-sense views of reality.

As he put it,

One man, for example, says, “When we witness their coming it is like scrim [a piece of fabric used in a theater to create the illusion of a solid wall or backdrop], or a movie screen. When they arrive you are looking at ordinary reality as a movie screen in the optic nerve. When they come it is like someone shines a bright light behind the movie screen and obliterates the scene. What we perceive as the movie screen, what we call reality, they burn through, proving it’s only a construct, a version of reality.” (Mack, 1992, p. 10)

Terry (1992) explains further concerning Mack’s findings and viewpoint:

Mack argues that abductees’ reports point . . . to a world that exists not somewhere out there in the physical universe, but in an entirely different dimension.

“In the experience of the abductees,” he says, “the aliens seem to come from another dimension. They seem to break through our sense of the reality of this space-time physicalist world, to come from some other place. Abductees will describe the sense of space and time collapsing, or of coexistent multiple time dimensions.

“They have the feeling that they have been introduced to another universe which is just as real as this one, but which is other-dimensional,” he says. “It’s as if it’s a dimension that seems to enter our physical world but is not necessarily of our physical world.”

Although he admits that such possibilities have yet to be proven by the physical sciences, Mack laments what he calls “the unwillingness of the official intellectual community to be open-minded about a reality that doesn’t fit their world view.”  As he sees it, the abduction phenomenon could ultimately present mankind with a “fourth blow” to its collective ego.  The first, he says, was the Copernican blow, which proved that man and Earth were not the center of the universe; the second blow was administered by Darwin, whose findings on evolution proved that man did not spring from “some higher level of spiritual biology”; and the third blow was delivered by Freud, whose explorations of the unconscious revealed that man’s conscious mind was not all that was in control of his life.

. . . . Mack sees a more transformational element to the abductions: an attempt to alert humans to the need for change in their lives.

Abductees frequently report that during their time on alien spacecraft, they are shown powerful visual images of environmental destruction on Earth.  Many return with a passionate commitment to protect the planet.  Mack interprets the warnings, and the increased awareness among individual abductees, as an attempt to reconnect humans with a heightened sense of spirituality. It’s a quest, he says, best summed up by the poet Rainer Maia Rilke, who wrote:

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death and all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses by which we could have grasped them are atrophied.  To say nothing of God.”

Other civilizations, including Eastern and native cultures, have been far more fluent than the West in communing with experiences that defy understanding in terms of physical reality, says Mack.  He argues that the Western world of the past few hundred years may have reached a dead end of sorts — and that the abductee experience may be part of a move away from the strict confines of materialism.

“It may be that we’re on the brink of some kind of major opening to our proper place in the universe,” muses Mack.  “I think, in this society, we’re involved in a major epochal shift.  I don’t know what the purpose of all this is, but it certainly is some kind of profound connecting of us beyond ourselves.”  (Terry, 1992, p. 27)

Therefore the physical world cannot be anything but a manifestation of the psychic in its basic rootedness and concurrence with the psychic. It follows that the messages that one discovers in contemplating the phenomena, as “given,” of the physical world are endless.  And they are messages both universal and personal, corresponding … exactly, one might guess … to the fact of there being shared physical realities as well as individual physical realities—that is, spaces which one sees in one’s unique way, or in which one has sole or near-sole dominion.

Continue with “We Are then Simple Awareness, Simple Foci of Consciousness in the Vast Expanse of the Universe”: Matter as Metaphor, Part Seven: We Are Stars Are Us.

Return to Are Crop Circles Messages from Our Higher Self Urging Us to a Primal Return to Nature to save Ourselves? Crop Circles, UFOs, and the First Fall from Grace in Nature

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The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

“Listen Better!”: Physical Reality Is as Symbolic as the Images in Dreams… and Can Be as Readily Interpreted for Understanding Oneself and for Guidance on One’s Path

“Listen Better!”

The physical world and all its events are metaphor for consciousness; they are indirect spiritual perception, as we are seeing. We are taught in observing and letting the world and our Experience teach us. But, as Vasudeva encouraged Siddhartha, we must “Listen better!”

The Spiritual Code Written Into Our Reality

Mushrooms and Butterflies

When we do take in the world’s messages, we see that even the tiniest details of reality—of its architecture and components—are instructive to us on our journey. One example of how such teaching is to be found in even the most trivial of details of the physical world is discovered by reflecting on the shape of the “lowly” mushroom.

While the explanation to follow came to me on my own, many decades ago, I was to find confirmation of it years later in the thoughts of another writer as such:

Everyone knows that a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and for ages the chrysalis process has been a charming metaphor for transformation. But what does a mushroom turn into, except for the ground?

A mushroom, as Alice discovered, can turn us into all kinds of new forms. But whether we shrink or expand, grow as tall as the sky, or become as short as a blade of grass, isn’t as important as the process of turning inward — the spiritual conversion of turning toward and into the inner life. What really matters is this inner change, a changing of attitudes, spirit, perception. In this light whole worldviews can be transformed in an instant.

The mystical experience has been described as “becoming one with the ground.” (Schiff, 1991, p. 9)

Thus, mushrooms, in their umbrella shape, are symbolic of the U-turn that is necessary in our spiritual evolution in returning to the ground of existence. They are “road signs” for the way hOMe.

This is interesting, more so, because mushrooms do in fact have psychedelic properties and they do, indeed, return us to the “ground,” as McKenna (1991), among others, so poetically explains.

The point is that not only is this U-turn necessary in spiritual evolution but that physical reality teaches us this, that physical reality, if we notice it, is constantly teaching us and guiding us . . . physical reality is metaphor and is as symbolic as the images in dreams. Indeed, one’s physical reality can be interpreted as readily as dream images in understanding oneself and seeking guidance on one’s path.

Fire

Another example is that of fire. Fire is a changing of matter into energy. It is no coincidence that it has become a universal symbol for the process of transformation wherein one goes from one’s personal, ego-based, desires and programs to transpersonal concerns and rootedness. For, indeed, is this not also a kind of going from matter (sensory awareness) and ego (body focusing) to spirit (consciousness) and energy (feeling awareness)?

Morphogenetic Fields

It should not be surprising, considering the foregoing, that when there are changes in psychic structures, there will often be noticeable physical changes which correspond to the psychic ones.

Brain Is the Tip of the Iceberg of Consciousness

In a way, this is the implication of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory. On the simplest level of this, scientists tell us that when learning takes place, evidence can be found of corresponding changes in the physical brain. Not surprising. Scientists are not able to reduce learning to physical changes in the brain: They cannot locate specific memories in the brain, and will never be able to completely do that, if we are not completely mistaken here. For the physical changes observable in the brain are merely the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of learning/memory. The real stuff is going on “below.” Or more correctly, the events of learning/memory/consciousness go on “inside” or “within” — which is, actually, even more correctly, the true “outside,” the true “without” or “objective” reality.

What Occurs in Psychic Reality Manifests Physically

On grosser levels of physical reality—other than brain—in the world, this is also true, according to Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. For every physical form … in the explicate order (borrowing from David Bohm‘s terminology) has its morphogenetic field or pattern in the implicate order. And since this implicate order is identical with what we normally call “consciousness” … as we have been establishing … a subset of which is thought or psyche or the mental, then what occurs in the realm of the psychic will often manifest (to us) in physical reality.

This perspective is fruitful for understanding many common but otherwise unexplainable events, such as synchronicity.

In Observing the World, We Are Observing Mind

Further, the idea that physical reality is comprised of psychic events means something astounding. What this means is that Reality has the same substance as do dreams: Material Reality has psychic substance. And literally, as the mystics say, life IS a dream. When we look at Reality we are observing the workings of Mind.

Or as some people would say, the workings of God.

Continue with Are Crop Circles Messages from Our Higher Self Urging Us to a Primal Return to Nature to save Ourselves? Crop Circles, UFOs, and the First Fall from Grace in Nature

Return to The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

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The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

The Teachings of Some Insect Planetmates: Knowing the Truth Doesn’t Make You Paranoic, It Makes You Pronoic.

While not approaching the profundity of the above revelation from Hermann Hesse, I have an example of this sort of teaching coming from the physical world occurring in my own life recently. The previous section on Siddhartha was written a while ago, but this event of mine happened only days ago and, by strange coincidence, at the same time that I was contemplating the posting of the section from Hesse.

A week ago, my wife and I picked up our trailer on our annual sojourn South for the winter. It had been stored on a friend’s rural property, deep in the California farm country, three hundred miles North of our eventual destination and six hundred miles from our origin.

We discovered soon enough that not quite a family of wasps, an actual nation of wasps had taken up abode in our trailer.

Now, my wife and I are both spiritual and pacifists, totally uninclined to kill anything, even insects. The death of other things is inevitable in living … we are not fools about it … but we try to learn a different attitude from what we were taught and try to see if peaceful coexistence, if not outright harmony and love, is possible with all that exists.

So our first inclination was to see how the wasps would react if they were simply left alone. We were not deluded in our efforts. Where they were clustered in spots we needed to use, I had to kill off entire families. As near as I can make out … and I’m still not sure … their nest is in a vent above the stove, accessible from the outside and allowing entrance to the inside. But it is not something I can get at to dislodge it. Still, they left us alone and were mysteriously absent except when we were in direct sunlight, when they would become agitated and would come out.

So after our minimal mopping up campaign, we continued down the road the hundreds of miles to our destination. You would think the little invaders would be swept away by the sixty mile per hour winds blowing through their home. But they were not.

Day after day when the sun would be the greatest they would come out. On the second day of this, they were out in forces that reminded me of Hitchcock or Stephen King movies. Scores if not a hundred of them flew above and around us. I had flashbacks to scenes from “The Birds.” One particular image from “The Hunger Games” came to mind, where the tracker jackers attacked and covered one unlucky contestant, stinging her into a puffy ghastly death.

Nevertheless, I tried to remain calm, lying on my bed, wondering what the proper response should be. I mean, this was extraordinary. My cat, Muff, who had been curiously focusing on these creatures at times, at this point looked up at me from the floor with wide terrified eyes and let out a meow of terror and confusion. Also, being the guy I felt it my obligation to protect wife and cat at any and all costs, even if it meant throwing my body between wasps and family.

Still, I was keen to find a different way than all-out war. I know that is what we need to do if we are to survive on this planet (saying this even now as a wasp friend of mine just came in and circled around my right hand as it was typing before flying on over to the window again). So at this time of full infestation, I stopped and watched and remained calm, having faith that Hichcockian horrors only exist in fantasy, not God’s real world.

Meanwhile, my wife went into action. To my amazement, she got out a Mason jar and its lid and began enticing one after another of these beasty things into it then releasing them outside. She encouraged them to leave by keeping the door open as well. I knew this was futile because they could and would come back inside, most of them. Or they would retreat to that inaccessible nest that we could not get rid of despite the hours of freeway driving. Still, I was awestruck by her complete lack of fear in her task. She was as aware as I that we could not live calmly in a tiny twelve by seven trailer with hundreds of wasps buzzing about our heads and filling the air all around. Yet she methodically and without a trace of skittishness, let alone fear, went about collecting and removing our unwanted visitors.

Knowing we could not live like this and realizing that my wife’s choice, while admirable, was ultimately futile, I watched and pondered my course of action. What came to mind was Sathya Sai Baba’s words on this, which were that though you should never kill another living thing, you must of course kill insects inside your house.

So, being also aware that there is no death anyway just transformation of consciousness from one form to another, I must confess I went about helping these tiny beings along in their “transformations.” I was inspired by my wife’s example of fearlessness, too, and with respect for each and every one of them, and with love and appreciation for their existence, I went about ending said existences for them, one after the other.

They were amazingly stupid and inept. They apparently were literally born yesterday, as I began to consider what might be the short and brutal life spans of wasps. I could easily kill or disable them with the sole of my sandal. They were much less able to withstand blows than comparable insects such as flies or mosquitoes. They were unbelievably less nimble. And they, unlike said flies or mosquitoes, did not return or retaliate either. I swear, I’m not sure they could sting you except by accidentally backing up into you! They seemed to have enough trouble just dealing with their confusion of being in an enclosed space with patches of light they could follow but which did not lead to any open space and was blocked to the outside … with glass, you see, or similar obstruction. I watched them going crazy on every sunlit window. They moved in endless ritual processions of futility.

Between both of our efforts we reduced the numbers of the invaders to a livable number—less than ten visible at any one time. And we relaxed again into our routine. It was at this point that again I could return to my pacifist approach of peaceful co-existence.

I lie there on my bed watching these insect planetmates, wondering what it was like to be them. I held no animosity toward them … quite the opposite. They were rather cute. They careened about on newly formed wings, their many legs, arms, and stinger bottoms dangling below. Jerking left and right as they flew peripatetically about, I was reminded of cartoons of such insects—Disney-like and from commercials. Hardly offensive these depictions, they were charming and affable. All this overlaying my perception, these youngsters from a different kind of mother seemed like infants trying to walk. They were charming and delightful. It filled me with warmth and love to feel this connection to another life form, which in my way of thinking could easily be me, have been me, or is me right now being a part of me I’m not presently aware of. At any rate, I felt love for them, and from them for all creation extending out from them. There was a palpable love filling up all space around me and I bordered the euphoric as I welled up in the poignancy of it all. Tears came, in apprehending such beauty and love.

And it occurred to me that this encounter with the wasps was like our relations with all things. Oh yes, we know the parable of the frog and the scorpion: The frog and the scorpion have an arrangement for the frog to carry the scorpion on his back across the stream (a wasp just said hello to the underside of my left wrist just then, as I was typing, and continued on). In exchange for this service the scorpion says he will not sting the frog. But in the middle of the stream the scorpion stings the frog and they both drown. The frog before dying cries out, “Why did you sting me? You know we will both drown!” The scorpion answered. “You should know I can’t do otherwise. For it is my nature.”

Well, watching the wasps I thought of that parable and had a different way of seeing it. Of course beings will do what is in their nature. I might even get stung by a wasp. But I might also get hurt by another human. I might get slighted or slandered in a way that is a great deal more painful than any insect bite.

And aren’t they much the same? Do I refrain from relationships because they can hurt me at times? No. Do I seek to kill off all other humans on the chance that one of them might hurt my feelings at some point? Of course not! So why do we kill off insects that would even more infrequently harm us?

More importantly, I realized that just as we could accept a sting from an insect, knowing it was only doing what is in its nature and not taking it personally, we could also see the people in our relationships that way: They only do what is in their nature, we do not need to take it personally. And as long as there are not too many of them—these hurts or such people—we can live in peaceful co-existence with potentially hurtful humans, knowing that the stings of relationship are almost always unintentional.

Indeed, it occurred to me that all things can live in peaceful harmony and co-existence if we but notice the love and attraction all beings have for each other—which truly is our divinity…that tendency to want to be One again. If we can remember that all beings are more likely frantically focused on getting to a light that is mysteriously blocked off and hardly intent on hurting us …. if we can recall that like wasps the stings from others are unintentional byproducts of the ritualistic machinations of their struggles to be free … then perhaps we can let go of those horror picture fears that the world, and its people, would swarm over and hurt us, if given the chance. Of course we occasionally get stung, but, unlike the frog, we hardly drown from it. No. To know the truth does not make one paranoic. It makes one pronoic—that is, inclined to believe that the rest of the world, given the chance, is out to love us.

Continue with The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

Return to Matter As Metaphor, Part Two: Taught by Nature, by That Which Is — The Heights of Learning and Transformation Possible in Wide-Angled Contemplation of the World

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Looking Deeply Into the Message of the World … and Siddhartha: Have You Also Learned the Secret of the River That There is No Time? Everything Has Reality and Presence.

Matter As Metaphor, Part Two: Taught by Nature, by That Which Is — The Heights of Learning and Transformation Possible in Wide-Angled Contemplation of the World

The physical world is our indirect perception (for direct perception, look within) of spiritual and psychic realities. Hence, the physical world can not help but express the spiritual and psychic. What I am saying is: Look around yourself; the world is rife with messages, both personal and universal, relating to your place in the Universe, the meaning of our existence, the meaning of existence itself, and, most importantly, of guidance for getting us back hOMe. If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found. And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Hermann Hesse (1951) gives us a charming story of just such teaching by Nature, by That Which Is. In Siddhartha he relates how the main character left the sensory world of business and marriage and became a river ferryman. Siddhartha’s inner voice draws him to such a life and guides him to listen to the river:

In his heart he heard the newly awakened voice speak, and it said to him: “Love this river, stay by it, learn from it.”  Yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it.  It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and its secrets, would understand much more, many secrets, all secrets.

But today he only saw one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.  Who could understand, conceive this?  (p. 104)

Further guidance about the river is provided by Siddhartha’s friend, the elder ferryman, Vasudeva. Concerning his remarkable ability to listen, Vasudeva tells his protégé:

“You will learn it,” said Vasudeva, “but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths. The rich and distinguished Siddhartha will become a rower; Siddhartha the learned Brahmin will become a ferryman. You have also learned this from the river.  You will learn the other thing, too.  (pp. 107-108)

Later, Siddhartha’s education progresses:

He once asked him, “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?”

A bright smile spread over Vasudeva’s face.

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?”

“That is it,” said Siddhartha, “and when I learned that, I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadow, not through reality. Siddhartha’s previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.”  (pp. 109-110)

And further on:

Often they sat together in the evening on the tree trunk by the river. They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming. And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travelers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question.  (p. 111)

Such teaching, in contemplation of the river, continued for a long time. Until one day, Siddhartha was to learn a teaching surpassing all others. Once again, it is his mentor Vasudeva who directs him to look more deeply and listen more intently to the message of the World:

“You have heard it laugh,” he said, “but you have not heard everything. Let us listen; you will hear more.”

They listened. The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. He saw his father, lonely, mourning for his son; he saw himself, lonely, also with the bonds of longing for his faraway son; he saw his son, also lonely, the boy eagerly advancing along the burning path of life’s desires, each one concentrating on his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering. The river’s voice was sorrowful.  It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s mute glance. Siddhartha nodded.

“Listen better!” whispered Vasudeva.

Siddhartha tried to listen better. The picture of his father, his own picture, and the picture of his son all flowed into each other. Kamala’s picture also appeared and flowed on, and the picture of Govinda and others emerged and passed on. They all became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river’s voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards its goal. Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he has ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew. But the yearning voice had altered. It still echoed sorrowfully, searchingly, but other voices accompanied it, voices of pleasure and sorrow, good and evil voices, laughing and lamenting voices, hundreds of voices, thousands of voices.

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices — the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s glance once again.

Vasudeva’s smile was radiant; it hovered brightly in all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. His smile was radiant as he looked at his friend, and now the same smile appeared on Siddhartha’s face.  His wound was healing, his pain was dispersing; his Self had merged into unity.

From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.  (pp. 136-139)

This is, of course, an elaborate illustration and expresses the heights of learning and transformation that are possible in such wide-angled contemplation of the World.

Continued with The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

Return to Matter As Metaphor, Part Two: Taught by Nature, by That Which Is — The Heights of Learning and Transformation Possible in Wide-Angled Contemplation of the World

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The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe

Matter As Metaphor, Part One: Physical Realities as Metaphors for Inner Realities … The Physical World Is Our Indirect Perception of Psychic and Spiritual Realities

If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found. And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Physical Realities As Metaphors for Inner Realities

The modern day holy man from India, Sathya Sai Baba, explained, “He who seeks the Guru can find him in every word spoken within his hearing, in every incident that happens around him” (1991, p. 16).

There is every reason to believe that he meant this literally. And, considering that in this context “guru” had the meaning of God and the cosmic divinity, the statement bespeaks much more than that as well.

Lawlor (1989b) tells us how the Australian Aborigines’ idea that the world is a metaphor or imprint for a truer inner reality is the essential element in their world view. As he put it:

All of existence is the projection outward of internal, subjective states into objective ideas, forms, and substances; the Sky is the “dreaming” of the Earth. All life and all energies emerge from the Earth, even those we consider subtle and celestial. There is a constant exchange between the Earth and its dreaming. The stars in the sky are the spirit energy of beings who were born from, and who have lived on, Earth, just as all men emerge into the world from the female womb. These ancestral beings return from the dreaming (the starry firmament) as radiated light and heat, which generate new life on Earth.  The male sperm is analogous to this radiation as it fertilizes the female but, itself, was born from the female.  Our minds and imaginations are always attempting to listen to the voice returning from the starry ancestors and we then reimage them.  (p. 43, emphases mine)

In another place Lawlor (1992) phrases it: “The dreamtime creation myths of the Aborigines guided them to see the physical world as a language, as a metamorphosis of invisible spirit’s psychological and ethical realms” (p. 22).

Similarly, Laing (1988) tells us, “The whole world was once part of man’s psyche, but no longer” (p. 62).

This idea of the physical universe as reflecting and expressing our basic spiritual and psychological realities is a common perception and viewpoint of mystics of all traditions.  In the West, the twelfth century mystic, Hildegard, wrote about this vision of reality.  Of her, it’s been said, “Hildegard plainly uses physical laws as illustrations of spiritual truths” (Uhlein, 1991, p. 54).  And further on: “Physical images are most useful to Hildegard in comprehending the things of the soul” (p. 54).  This relates to the idea of physical reality as metaphor.

Another quote:

Like the Platonists, she understands the world to consist of four elements: fire and water, earth and wind.  She employs these pairs archetypically, to describe psychological traits and to create complex analogies for spiritual development.  (p. 54)

The point is that this is the same way in which we are talking about physical reality as metaphor: that in fact the world as we perceive it gives us lessons in underlying realities which are, in the absolute sense, more true; that, in actual fact, the psychological traits of which she speaks are simply reflected in nature in the form of earth, wind, fire, and water, and so on.

This perspective is expressed poetically this way:

Proving What?

How in autumn, even before the leaves fall,
When they’re all at their height of color,
Next year’s leaves are already there, tiny,
on either side of the stem of each leaf
where it meets the branch,
Already there, waiting,
Before the leaf that is still there
is dead and falls,
Tiny folded leafbudsheath
Resembling two hands in prayer
Palm to palm with fingers extended.

Proving what?
Life after death exists
even before you’re dead.

Or how when a redwood tree is cut down or blown over
It doesn’t die because the roots
Curl up out of the earth and become
new trees,
Each of which can grow to be
Just as tall just as old
as the tree which was there before.
It’d be as if you were cut off at the ankles
And your top taken away to make The Milwaukee Journal
And your toes curled into the ground and came up
as ten new “you’s — looking exactly like you
and being exactly like you.
And so a redwood you see now that’s 2000 years old
may’ve come from the root of a redwood that was
2000 years old
that may’ve come from the root of a redwood that was
2000 years old
so far back that it’s literally one million years old!
And that’s why they’re called Sequoia sempervirens,
ever-living.

Proving . . . what?
Even before you’re dead
life after death exists.  (Antler, 1991, p. 61)

At this point, I feel it is important to stress that I am proposing much more than that the physical world is a source of metaphors or analogies for expressing psychic and spiritual truths.  If this were all there were to it, I would be saying nothing more than that our perceptions of reality are a good poetic source, which is rather close to asserting nothing at all.

One’s Experience of Reality Is the Wisest and Most Beneficent of Teachers.

From the preceding chapters, it should be clear that what I am saying is that the physical world is our indirect perception (for direct perception, look within) of spiritual and psychic realities.  Hence, the physical world can not help but express the spiritual and psychic.  What I am saying is:  Look around yourself; the world is rife with messages, both personal and universal, relating to your place in the Universe, the meaning of our existence, the meaning of existence itself, and, most importantly, of guidance for getting us back hOMe.  If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found.  And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Continue with Looking Deeply Into the Message of the World … and Siddhartha: Have You Also Learned the Secret of the River That There is No Time? Everything Has Reality and Presence.

Return to Humans Have Developed Language Because of Their Inability to Truly Communicate … We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity: Ritual as Shadow, Part Eleven

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