A Radical Thought

When you read up on the experience of non duality there is a state of awareness that exists where you become aware of a vast endless ocean of a place, some have called the Tao.  This is known and commented about and the accounts are all pretty much the same. It is a formless kind of place, immersed in feeling and beyond all material existence.  This is a place of pure potential, a vast ocean of bliss.  In the works of the Savaists it is often referred to as an ocean of milk, so called because it resembles a field of orgasmic energy out of which all phenomenon flows.  This shows up in the iconography of the Hindu Shiva who has a small fountain coming out the top of his head which is in truth a seminal projection. This semen flows most often either onto the mountains where it flows like a river in small rivulets to the sea or is sometimes flowing over a small altar that depicts the masculine and feminine forms together as one.  This is so depicted because of how the energy of the cosmos feels. Because most people who experienced this were men, it has been quite natural for this depiction to have the associations that it does.  This is why also that there is this idea that seminal fluid is actually distilled into pure prana and allowed to rise up through the spine to the brain.  This is perhaps the most impossible of feats since medicine has established, without a doubt, that the nervous system and the vascular system do not cross.  It is described this way, though because of how it FEELS.  It FEELS like this fluid moving up in the body.  In fact, some practitioners (even today) teach the process of something called sublimation, which they believe is the transformation of seminal fluid into pure pranic energy which can then be used for healing and other work involving ascension.  While the specifics of this may be way off base, the essential sense of it is correct because while this is most certainly NOT seminal fluid (or cervical fluid for that matter) but simply an energy so potent that it FEELS like fluid moving in us that it gets described in this way. This should tell you how powerful and tangible these energies are, and when you feel it moving in your own body, you would swear that this is indeed the case.  Regardless of what you believe, even if you DO believe that you have seminal fluid running up your spine, you can work with this energy as it presents itself to you through visualizing it in just about ANY way that allows you to relate to it on a personal and visceral level, and since prana is itself intelligent, it will respond to your thoughts and feelings.  I am pointing this out because we create all kinds of images for a phenomenon that is entirely nonmaterial.  This, as you will see, is an important point to bear in mind as I move along.

This realm is one where there is no action.  The energy is like a highly distilled substance, a great inexhaustible ocean of energy from which we draw.  There are those who say there is nothing to do here other than to merge into the deity beyond the deity,  and that is that.

I am accustomed to digging into these things and feeling them out and asking new questions and seeking answers we may have missed.  I was once a heyhoka, a term used to describe someone who had had a dream or vision of the thunder beings.  What was so important about the heyhoka was how they struck to the center of things to ferret out their core essence.  Their hearts and souls were the lightening striking that cracks open reality and reveals in that sudden flash of knowing the center of how things are.  As an artist, I am always asking what is at the core of things?  Where does an idea emerge and how is it aligned in terms of its larger expression in the world?  We have the capacity to see in these ways, and for me it means reaching that place where things become startlingly simple and direct.  For me, some things really are very simple. Most of what we see in the world is a jumble of misunderstood things, covered in illusory matter or distortions.  How do we dig deep and find the gold lying deeper within? As an artist, this fits in very well with what I do, which is asking questions about tradition and why we choose to accept the forms and images and symbols that we do. Lying at the core of symbols is also consciousness. How we align to certain imagery also explains a lot about how we are aligned to the divine.

I seriously do feel that all of life is ordered on the yin and yang principle and as such, even the smallest particle is itself a twin of a larger form of consciousness which is itself twinned.  This twin is the yin and yang, the feminine and masculine currents that run straight through everything.  I say masculine and feminine, but these forces grow so broad that they could constitute forms that would not appear to us as being the feminine and masculine we are used to knowing here on the planet.  I would argue that this force is what gives rise to everything and so the deity itself is not some dude hanging out in the hills or clouds but is the very essence of the divine circuitry that requires a continuity with these two poles in order for it to work.  think of it like a magnet or a battery or an electrical circuit.  The energy cycles from one pole to the other.  At no point are these two forms really separate at all even though they give rise to phenomena that might seem distinguishable to our very dual perception and egos which are very good at the task of identifying, sifting, and drawing out one object from a vast field of objects. Conversely, this is why when the ego recedes, we are able to experience vast forms of consciousness and where we can touch the Tao or this ocean of vast potential.  So given this sense I have, I have something for you to consider and see where it takes you.

This vast realm of potential energy is much like the masculine in a way.....it is this pulse of pure energy that seeks some resolution or manifestation.  It is seeking the other side of itself, which is the feminine pole of itself.  In many stories, we often tend to think of a male deity form as existing in this place, somehow separate, off in the mountains or in the clouds.  This notion is not entirely out of place, even if it is itself something of a distortion of the facts.  But for the sake of understanding or relating to this vastness, consider that this sea of milk is indeed the bliss of the masculine.  There is nothing to be done here, certainly if you believe in the way that many have offered thus far. There is nothing that happens here, though, for the endless energy is in a sense incomplete, not yet reaching its fullest potential.....it is just endless bliss and that is good in its own way, but there is more to the story and this is where a very radical thought enters in.

Consider that the essence of all creation is to experience fulfillment by learning to create.  The act of creation is something that marks humans as special, as beings that have evolved to realize this capacity in their natures. But even on the individual level, if you understand the creative impulse, you will know that even in your own self, in your own body, you are bursting at the seams with the yin and yang energy entirely involved in the engine that is the very source of all creation.  Ying and yang energy in you, and in me; in all of us?  Yes.  Even in your brain, which is part of the massive system that helps to store, retrieve and then generate new ideas, you must first have BOTH the left and right hemispheres in your brain working in unison.  The left is very different from the right, and yet without them both we are not as effective creators. 

We know that when people are being creative they activate centers ALL OVER the two-lobed brain.  And these two lobes are VERY much mirrors of the masculine and feminine.  In fact, we tend to refer to them as the masculine left and the feminine right lobes.  If you know how the divine feminine works, there is nothing that could not be a better mirror for HER than the right brain.  And yet, without her partner, the left brain, who can take things apart and put them back together, who can see the tree instead of the forest, this VERY masculine left lobe is able to take the vastness that is the feminine and help to make some sense of it in a form-based way.  It is kind of interesting, too, that the feminine takes what the masculine provides or contributes, breaks it down in the same way that the ovum breaks down the sperm in the woman's body in order to utilize HIS contribution in the creation of new life. A very similar thing happens even in spiritual work, and as you dig into this you can feel the essence of it like a cord holding all of these very beautiful beads on a necklace.  You might be dealing with physical life which appears very different from creating an idea, but the principles are very much the same in ESSENCE. 

BOTH masculine and feminine are in on this act of creation in this magnificent engine that IS creativity.  It happens in our bodies when we make new life and it happens in our bodies when we are creating some new idea.  The effect is the same, or at least VERY similar.  What I am getting around to telling you is that the very radical thought here is that while we all can experience the Tao of endless potential, it is like admiring the feminine or masculine all by themselves.  You are gazing or marinating in only ONE side of a very vast and powerful cosmic coin.  I argue that in order to know divinity both within and "without" we have to go from potential to manifestation.  I say that when we do this we have made the full cycle from one end of the divine consciousness to the other.  Potential without manifestation is "useless" in a way.  Feel inside yourself.....it is a calm quiet place. 

I know; some want to say that this is merely ego wanting to get in on the act by creating something, but first I would say no it isn't and yes it is.  Ego is ALWAYS there, even those who believe they have squashed it like a bug. This is the error.  But beyond ego is also something more.....and it is here that we can know our creative potential in a much broader and much more empowered way.  It is also very beautiful if you can go at it like a child.  Don't worry if ego is in on it.  Ego is always there.  It always will be.  It is just one tool in your vast toolbox of parts.  It is not any more important than any other aspect of yourself and as long as you know how to use the tool without worshiping your tools like the end-all of who you are, you are in a very good place to go into this next "field" of being in a more mature and wise way.   I am going to suggest as an aside that this potential must then exits in all life, even non sentient  since it too is part of a divinity that is at its root creative.  What I am going to suggest to you is that up until you feel into this vast field of bliss, all you are feeling IS potential.  You are not feeling what the deity or Creator felt when it brought this vast field into actualization (or some part of it) You are only experiencing it in its state of rest prior to manifesting (or creating).  Because we are "it" in miniature form,  as individuals carved from the larger block of the divine, our task is also to draw off this energy in order to create. When potential energy meets intent, manifestation begins its FIRST leg of manifestation.  To reach full manifestation or creation, itmust also move through the feminine.  The feminine must be brought into this, and the feminine is so often seen as that force that births the world of things into being.  She is alone able to bear the spark of the masculine into its fullest potential.  Without her, "he" is merely up in those clouds very frustrated, very full of potential, and certainly probably more than just a little frustrated!   I say this in a joking way, but also in a very serious way because when creation is short circuited, frustration emerges as a very natural result.  When you look at epochs where one sexual characteristic predominated you also see a drift into distortion and even madness.  We NEED both sides of the coin in order to realize the fullness of divinity.  We NEED to create.  Creating is NOT just an egoic activity but can become what it was meant to be; a fulfillment of the divine presence.  How it happens depends on what is being created.  In some cases you may be creating on object, a book, a poem, art work, a business, a family, an idea, or a new way to assemble a motor or a theory on how something in the world works. All of this is creative....just as all of life is creative.  But we do not know the full scope of creation until we ourselves take this bliss field and make it into something.  We do this all the time to form events and to bring all of our existences into some new day or level of fulfillment.  Divinity, I say, is not complete until this is done.

When we create we bring intent into the great mystery of the feminine.  It is in her energy that we can imagine vast realms or possibilities.  Her body is the world of phenomenon, she is the Mother of the world.  So as we bring this abstract form of bliss into the world, we are entraining the masculine into the feminine currents and the result is an explosion of ideas and inspiration.  In the same way that your own inner inspiration follows the balancing of the left and right hemispheres of your brain as we have learned that the brain has to do in order to invent and to become inspired, and just as the two hemispheres of the brain mirror the masculine and feminine aspects of our dual natures and the seemingly dual nature of the cosmos, we are effectively dealing with powerful energies that can help us to bring new forms into being.  This same cycle of manifestation can be seen in how babies are made in the physical, but it is also rooted in our bodies, our brains, in how the positive energy moves to the negative, how the hot moves to the cold in thermal dynamics, and how events are created through the circular energy that moves from the inception to manifestation.

Our understanding of divinity is incomplete until we learn the full circuit that this energy flows or follows.  As the two dance and move one through the other in what seems a dual movement, the truth is that the entire world is supported by endless cycles of this dance happening at very small scales and very large ones.  I am of the mind that you can see the result of their presence in all things.  It is a center point of the creator that is buried in everything.  It is a point with no point but many points, a giant dizzying hologram where one piece cleaved from the whole contains the entirety of the whole in its smallest most seemingly insignificant drop or sliver.

Here is where this act can be your teacher, so follow carefully......

What you create is not necessarily ascended master material. In fact, there is a lot that we have done in creating that has brought terrible nightmares.  We have certainly created this, but you see, it is a gift that we have that we can do this.  This is just how important freewill is, and you can learn from what you create by stepping back and looking at the ramifications or results that your own creations have had.  It is true that what you create will be a snap shot of all that you are in this moment, of what you are capable of conceiving and as a result, the material that you have not yet refined in yourself will affect HOW you create.  THis is the tricky part, because in the same way that a clod of dirt in a hose will color the water coming out of it, so too does your own unexamined and more subconscious material color what you create.  Until you bring awareness of these things, you are caught in a cycle of creating with what that dirt clod offers and attracts.  You create, and that creation itself has a magnetic quality attracting all manner of things.  If an artist, what you create will naturally attract a certain type of viewer or person to it.  The life you create does the same thing. If you do not like what you see in your life, look deep within because there is something there that is effecting what you create, even if it is not intentional.  Philip in his gospel (found in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi scroll cache) said that these things in us make us do what we do not want to do and keeps us from doing what we want to do.  So true.  And thus, what you create will be a mirror of all that you are right now, examined or not.  The trick here is to develop awareness of ourselves, to see beyond the dross to what could be or at the very least that there could be something different.  When you reach this place, you are in a perfect position to begin the work that will enable your own consciousness to glimpse broader realms of your own being and of the divine cosmic order.  As we do this, it is as though we realize that it is we who are spinning the web of our lives and can better be able to heal and make the change which will bring us closer to creator which also has the benefit of highlighting the creator within us all.  So no matter where you are in all of this, you are creating the web as you go.  If you can step back and learn from your life and what you create, you can learn to create anew.  You can utilize the world and your place in it for great learning opportunities.  to do this means you have to be very honest and also humble.  If you are headstrong and feel you KNOW how things are, you will be less open to what may have ben eluding you, the blindness that sets in around each of us at each and every moment so long as the blinders stay on.

The thing for me is to realize that this circuitry is right here and right now.  It gives me pause.  WHat did I create today?  Did I help others to help themselves or did I use misplaced compassion to get them to a place I thought they needed to be based on my own set of rules or operative directives?  Did I do what each great teacher does, which is to remind others what was already within them to know and then be a source of inspiration, or did I just parrot a bunch of techniques or traditions just because someone else says that is the way things are?  No matter WHAT I do, I will always be making decisions based on who and what I am.  In this, I can be or do no other.  I am also a being both limited and limitless.  What do I choose to create?  I have a certain span of time here on the planet.  What does my own ego find important? What does my higher self say is important?  How does all this mesh?  How do I strike a healthy balance between all these parts so all of me comes along with no part discarded but healed and brought into its higher realization?

Thales the Presocratic philosopher said that all things are full of gods.  I very much feel that he was expressing a deep truth to the workings of consciousness and the world which is that even in the tiniest thing, there is a larger expression throughout many boundless realms and realities.  If it is true that time is largely illusory, and if what I feel is true, then time spreads out like a vast blanket and we can only touch one point in the physical at one time (at this time).....and yet by looking left or right I can see what other portions of this blanket offers. Perhaps an atom has endless manifestations just as do we, that EVERYTHING that IS is bound up in this fulfillment cycle that is the very basis of creation.  I know that might be a bit much to take in especially if you are used to thinking about humans being the only ones with self determination, a soul, or the ability to reincarnate.  But what I see in the universe is that everything is of a piece.  It is all connected and it is the essence of this connection, of what lies within it that serves to connect it to everything else that is a consistency within all of creation.  THere are no exceptions.  Of course this is what I perceive, what I sense in the Tao and beyond. For as crazy as it may seem, I cannot discount it, and I rather think Thales was right and that he was not taken to idle speculation when he had so few things to say, which makes what he did say all the more important to at least consider.  And once you open your mind to this vast realm of possibility you are standing at the headwaters of a very powerful river which itself leads to an even more vast sea which in turn opens into an ocean which is touched upon by the boundless realm of space.  So as I create, those creations must then have their larger expression through the conical nature of consciousness.....creation which expands outward, or spirals outward and upward.

Buddha was fond of stating how what we do in life matters, what we create in each day is important.  I think he is right.  I think that the act of joining the field of potential to meaningful and conscious creation is the very model for knowing the divine.  For as much as we might want to discount one aspect in favor of another, they are all connected and move evenly together. When we do this, when we bring awareness to what it is we are doing here, we also shed some light on our own actions and thinking that go to make up the divine circuit that moves from intent or potential to manifestation or realization.  I don't think they are complete without each other and just as the particle and wave in physics expresses an aspect of the same thing, so too does potential and realization suggest the completion of the universe in one seemingly insignificant drop.  So the world unfolds like this wonderful canvas and we get to create upon it!  What do I get to create? What juiciness awaits?

All Things Are Full Of Gods

Thales, a Presocratic philosopher once said this.  He was a teacher to Pythagoras.  Pythagoras is most often cited as a great mathematician, but what some do not know is that he was given entry to an Egyptian Mystery School, an event that was a long time coming for him.  Clearly, Pythagoras had an awakening after being told how to awaken the sleeper within.  He came to the school a changed man.  He went on to be involved in a school that was about as egalitarian as the times could allow, including both men and women in its ranks and which also included some interesting discoveries about how to heal using sound and a sense that there was an underlying principle in all of life, which Pythagoras tended to see reflected in math.  What is so interesting is that his teacher, Thales, made a point that I don’t think was possible to make without seeing into the quantum field.  I will be so bold to say I now know what he meant when he said that

“All things are full of gods.”

At a certain point in my awakening I was taken into what I understood was the interior of life as expressed through what I call the quantum field of experience.  Further, it carried a passion and a desire that I knew was the impetus for all creativity, be they a painting,  a book, an invention, an idea, a child, a Movement, or a universe…..it was the mover of life, the world, and through freewill we were choosing how to utilize this energy for good or ill.  Within it lay something very simple, a holographic principle that threaded every particle, every single thing in existence, to everything else.  This was an energetic dynamic that was entirely unifying, connecting, weaving all of life into itself.  I would later see this same idea reflected in numerous other thinkers and writers who were pointing all to the same thing. Some were in physics, some in the esoteric arts.  All were just like you and me.  Beautiful people all waking up a bit from our mass dream.  Within this was the notion that everything that is exists at multiple dimensions.  Everything has a higher life, a broader existence, which is more than just what is expressed in the material.  Its not that life in its broader dimensions is more desirable, not something to take us out of our here and now, but rather as something to augment what it is we are already experiencing and feeling NOW.  Within us, and within all things, resides higher forms, broader expressions of what we are, and what everything is.  In that moment, the words of Thales came back after years of pondering just what he meant.  I suspect he saw the same thing as I did, and that many others do when you have an encounter with this field of intelligent energy that expresses itself both as particle and wave.  Within us are our higher selves, what some might want to call gods.  While we have been trained not to consider that we ourselves could be gods ourselves, this thinking has only been put forth as a way to limit our experience through artificial beliefs that do not align with the deeper inner truth residing in all of nature.  While we only seem to see what is in front of us through our five senses, we do have more senses, and these belong to this resonant field, this quantum field or waveform awareness as I have described it.

When you learn to tap this field wherein gods reside, where higher forms of consciousness exist, you literally align with still larger parts of yourself you may not have observed through your more particalized portions of your awareness.  By going beyond your physical senses, you can literally begin to sense into this vast field that is all around you…..that unifies and which shows or reveals through your awareness that you are indeed part of everything.  This is expressed through an energetic awareness, a vehicle of sensing that is your own expanding sense of being.  In a very real way, the universe will bloom before your eyes, will expand outward as your awareness expands.  The world can change as you change….the world can resolve into something truly remarkable as your capacity to perceive it opens up.

If you consider that the “gods” do not exist as a force that is outside of you, but that make up an infinite field or web of awareness that includes both individual beings as well as mass connectivity between all of these “cells” of being, you can begin to realize how everything is both connected as well as individual.  We are here on this dual plane to experience ourselves not just as seemingly individual, but also as one.  Related.  Its not one or the other, but both.  By doing this, you can, I feel, begin to glimpse what is ours to know in this world, this life, this reality.  As we all grow in awareness, so too does our awareness of our being as more than just what our own fleshy envelopes seem to offer us in experience.  We are certainly this, but we are also certainly more than just this.  When this kind of awareness begins to bloom not as a concept, but as a tangible experience, the world begins to open up in a dizzying array of possibility.  You can FEEL how the universe is teeming just by feeling its currents all around you.  By losing yourself in its current, you can feel within you what you once thought was somehow outside of you…..but never was.  Its right where you are.  The universe is broadcasting itself from you, around you, and through you.  You are at once it and also looking at it from your own vantage point.  Its a rather remarkable set up we have created for ourselves here.
This is what some have come to call the illusion of our existence here.  This is what some call Maya.  When the ego gets in on it, then yes, there can be some distortions, but its not ALL distortion and hurt and pain….all very tied up in karma.  Its meant to actually be a vehicle for divine awareness….but we haven’t gotten to that point yet, which is why so many masters of the universe have sought to call our experience an illusion.  It isn’t.  Its a CREATION. This is an important distinction, because once we go beyond karma, what we have is not illusion, but the truth shining back at us as a reflection.  And this reflection is what we have chosen to create.  When we begin to create beyond illusion and beyond karma, what do we have before us do you think?  What we have is that mythical garden of Eden…..that original state wherein we know our divinity, a place where we have cast off shame, removed it and learned to move onward.  It is here that we feel the lips of the gods speak within…..and we can feel in each particle not the lower vibration of karma but the higher vibration of the divine….and its in every single thing!  Its not in some elect few!  Its in EVERYTHING!  And once you get that, once you begin seeing that, feeling that, you feel it in yourself, you feel it in others, and the whole world becomes like this luscious sparkling realm that is truly like some undiscovered world.  Until then, life will SEEM like the illusion that it is.  In a way, it IS illusion.  But it can be more.  And if you are brave enough to consider that this view is correct, you can move into uncharted territory and do what even the great sages may not have been able to do, or see within themselves.  We have been glimpsing it all along, yes, but some of what it is has been obscured by our own mass illusions that we share as a species.  I am here to tell you that there is more.  Its not mere illusion.  This is something that is inside of you, and its knowing will wake up within you in such a wonderfully innocent and obvious way that it will change how you feel. It has the power to make you so hungry for this seeming dream world that you will seek to find a way to bring that dream into reality.

The path to this is through love.  This love, though, is no ordinary love.  When you feel it, you realize its as real a force as the wind or fire.  It exists as a real sentient being in all of life.  When you let it move you, it has the power to bring real change.  When you awaken, you essentially surrender to its rip tide of energy. It takes you like a lover.  You are then reduced to simpler parts as all of the dross of the ages is gradually moved from your central awareness.  A little of this glistening world begins to reveal itself.  This is a creation.  No one need tell you what it will look like.  Its all yours.

So yes, I read what Thales said so long ago, but it wasn’t until I awoke to this life that I began to feel into what it was he was most likely saying.  I know it sound presumptuous of me to say…..but you see….this isn’t really about knowing in the normal way.  You just FEEL it.  The truth resonates in you in this undeniable way.  How do I know?  I just do….but you see, I am not here telling you that you will only know the truth if you follow what i say.  Do whatever you wish….if you can see into this bloom I am offering up, great.  If not, its great too.  We will all come into this larger life when we are ready, and it will always carry your own brand of focus and awareness.  In this way, it will be perfect.