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.