Building a Bridge from the Horizontal to the Vertical
Consciousness reveals itself as the realization of your potential which said differently is achieving your destiny or fate. You become what you are...but not the you your mind thinks you are.
Now, remember the definition I use for fate: Fate is the truth of who you are working its way out through your ignorance, your unconsciousness, your stupidity. In fact, it is important to state, to invite you to consider, that your existence and your consciousness are identical. Existence is the physical truth of the metaphysical source from which it came. Your existence is proof of who you are. Of course, if you look at the world in which you live, that’s very hard to believe much less accept. If that’s true, you may ask, then why doesn’t my life resemble the truth of who I am? The invisible, one consciousness, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient is what every human being seeks in their own way, many times not even realizing that it is that which they seek.
The visible multiplicity, the billions of lives, lost, seeking but never finding, remaining stuck in the web of the mind. So, the phrase, as above, so below, is the same statement as what a person does is based on what a person thinks. But your thinking was not part of your existence...it was part of your experience...that’s where all your stuff, your baggage came from. That being said, it’s so hard to consider that any moment of instability you experience is not real, it’s just a by-product of your biology that came to be as a result of your experiences. The mind understands only through separation, division, analysis, duality and as a result, never really understands the essence of what it is experiencing. This is this, the mind says because it’s not that. You do this but you don’t do that. The mental being who becomes dominated by his constant mental struggle to find what can never be found remains a prisoner to itself, not knowing that it is itself who enslaves it. Consciousness is and must be identical with being fulfilled, joyful, perfect. Everything else is an illusion of the mind.
Now, if you follow this thinking for a while, and you’re willing to throw out nearly everything that arises in your mind, you might have a pretty interesting experience...which is...even for a brief moment, and I mean a glimmer, a whisper, a simple moment empties the mind and all its addictions and you find yourself just being. The old spiritual models would propel you further into the nothingness, further into the escape of life where in the new consciousness that is evolving, that sense, that experience of being above your mind, is going to lead you back into daily life and into the transformation of the physical world. Since the pandemic began, scientists all over the world have been able to show drastic reductions in nitrogen dioxide, PM2.5, Carbon monoxide, and Sulfur dioxide. It only took 4 months of change to create that.
The invisible, one consciousness, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient is what every human being seeks in their own way, many times not even realizing that it is that which they seek.
Imagine what you could do if you were intentional and purposeful for a period of 10 years. Keep in mind, the reductions in pollution...it was accidental. We didn’t even mean to do it. Imagine what would happen if we as a planet did decide to do it. So, you, the individual, must begin to associate your life, your mind, with the metaphysical, with consciousness, for that is precisely who you are, the metaphysical concealed in the physical, the divine concealed in the ignorance. Your mind and all of the difficulties you experience begins to shift the closer it gets to true knowledge...knowledge which is not an aspect of the mind but an aspect of consciousness. Do you understand that? If consciousness is one, is the creator of life, the many, then there can only be one world, one life, a life reflective of the perfection of its source which is consciousness. So, again, as above, so below. As you see, so do you hear. As you hear, so do you answer. As you answer, so is your life. Being aware of this allows me each night to realize I don’t know anything.
And that I, too, am but a beginner on the ladder of awakening but I am aware that it is what I seek, what I want. The Alpha and the Omega (the context and the content, the metaphysical and the physical, the vertical and the horizontal), are two different realities yet I am suggesting to you that there is only one reality and that the Omega is a tool of the Alpha to experience itself in physical form. Only one of them can exist, for there is only one consciousness, one reality. And I don’t know what your experience is but mine is that people don’t like having their realities, their illusions, messed with.
I know that some of these concepts can be hard to understand but until you do until you make the conscious, purposeful, ascent to knowledge, you will suffer and that’s reason enough to consider that there’s something else going on because if there wasn’t and this is all there is to life, then what’s the point? There is none. But, of course, there is a point. A good analogy is comparing your mind to the processor in a computer. Processors have continued to improve and update. We need and require highly functioning, fast processors. Why don’t we require the same from human beings, from politicians, from parents, from teachers, from ourselves...you get the point. Microsoft ends its technical support for Windows 7 which came in 2009. Our technologies have surpassed our abilities to keep up.
Your mind is not an instrument of knowledge but it thinks it is. Your mind is an instrument of analysis and division. Of suffering. The mind can only form a mental construct of the thing it is observing and is incapable of seeing the relationship of the part to the whole.
It can’t see the essence of the thing. Oneness, perfection, boundless love, and safety, these are nothing but mental constructs to the mind...sounds pretty interesting to the mind but it’s not real. The whole is just a vague perception of the mind.
So, the objective, as the ascent to greater knowledge is made, is to train your mind to be a servant of that truth, of that path. The objective is to train your mind to create a bridge from the horizontal to the vertical. This movement from daily life to spiritual life has immediate and positive consequences. But your mind knows only its own analysis of the object. Your greater mission is to train yourself out of your own illusions, out of your obscure identity that is founded upon meaninglessness, from the mental prison you made to the world of freedom, of enlightenment, of awakening. You are asked to do the impossible which is to unify all of your experiences, good and bad, and see the essence of your path which is that all of your experiences, even the ones in which you were harmed, were of your own design, to guide you, at times to force you to see what your eyes cannot see...your perfection, harmony, and peace in the middle of everything collapsing around you, replacing chaos with the internal cosmos that is eternal, omniscient, certain, and unthreatenable. The reason you can do this is that this is who you are.
Nothing divided, nothing separate. Nothing you can’t handle. Nothing you can’t face. Because you are truth.
You are a micro example of the macro universe, of consciousness. You can choose to have life governed by your experiences or you can have your life governed by something greater that is not outside of you but is inside of you. This path is not about looking for a savior or a belief system. You can choose to have your life governed by the endowed power that is contained in your existence itself. Your birth signifies and establishes who you are and perhaps it’s time for you to act like it. I’m not saying it’s easy. It takes so much courage to face each day, knowing that there will be setbacks, failures. But you also know that those same setbacks and failures are the tools of your growth and evolution that you chose and it is this knowing, this knowledge, that allows you to rise above your mind and become the person you were meant to be.
You can see that in your past you saw struggle and defeat and meaninglessness where now you can see a structured, ordered, a succession of events whose intention is to shape you, guide you, wake you up. Why were you asleep in the first place? Because that is the process...it is consciousness, God, the Absolute, going about the business of evolution, of realizing itself in physical form but first creating itself in the ignorance, in the abyss, and then rising, little by little, lifetime after lifetime, century after century, creating time and space as mechanisms to achieve this awakening. As I said, you are governed by your level of consciousness, by the presence or absence of the inner knowing. But that presence or absence, you have chosen as part of your process, and when you’re ready, and I hope you are, you can stop suffering and start living, and when that happens, why would you want to be anywhere else but here in a physical body even though it is declining, in a world of chaos and pain, an awakened being in a world that is asleep. The knowledge you need is the existence you are. Do you get this?
Consciousness is and must be identical with being fulfilled, joyful, perfect. Everything else is an illusion of the mind.
It is contained in the birth, in the seed, of the being. But the struggle, the veil, the ignorance of not knowing this is is part of the process and you must come to understand this before you can expect to make progress. Your stupidity is the greatest thing you ever created! Isn’t that weird? There’s nothing wrong with you until you made up something different, something that would allow you to engage in the process, in the process of awakening.
So, if you want out of the process, wake up! Stop making stuff up. Stop dramatizing everything and shut up.
Evolution isn’t thinking things out because there’s nothing to think about. It’s guiding thingsalong. You are the knower, the knowledge, all the things to be known all at the same time, pretending that you don’t know that. It is nothing more than a really good actress who, having already read the script and knowing the ending, pretends to be surprised and shocked when things take an unsuspected turn in the movie. The actress can really appear to not know...but of course, she does know! She read the script! But your mind wouldn’t know what to do if it couldn’t separate itself from others, blame, divide, analyze if it couldn’t suffer. If the destiny of this realization, of the realization that you are God, that you are a physical image of the metaphysical force and all-pervading reality, if this destiny has not already been established and that life, evolution is going through these stages hoping that everything is going to work out but not knowing if it’s going to, keeping its fingers crossed, then you certainly don’t need to be listening to me.
And you don’t need to be trying to improve your life. I have a grandson who was having a bad day when he was 6 years old. He had flown his drone into his twin sister’s hair and that didn’t go very well. The drone was stuck in her hair. With his twin sister in a melt-down and sobbing, his understanding father was trying to help him through the situation. Afterward, his day having turned into an inescapable nightmare, he thought he could find solace in hanging out with a friend. Without permission, he left the house, went across and up the street, and rang the doorbell of his friend’s house. The mother came to the door and explained that his friend, the mother’s son, would not be able to come out and play because he, the son, had been put in time out. Having tolerated more than he was capable of tolerating as a 6-year-old, experiencing rejection at all levels, with nowhere to turn, he looked at the mother and said, “Fuck it.” And walked away. He was 6 years old. His mother was waiting at the front door when he returned home. It was a bad day. Multiply that by 100 and you start to understand the adult’s version of “Fuck it. I quit.”
People quit every day and it’s understandable. You’ve quit before. I’ve quit before. But you got back up and headed back into the game but the problem was your level of knowledge didn’t change. You stayed the same hoping to create a different outcome.
I had an impressive professor at Winthrop College, Jack Boger, who, when a graduate student went about the business of solving a current problem in education with an ancient solution, would raise his right arm with his elbow resting on his desk, and start circling his index finger, indicating to everyone, “same old, same old.” I remember sitting there saying to myself that I would rather say nothing than to get the finger. To me, it was the kiss of death. How many times in my life I have said, “I just didn’t know.” “I just didn’t know.” And as my first teacher, Tony Speed, said to me one time, “Your problem is now you do.” And he was right. If you thought you had problems being crazy, you ain’t seen nothing yet, but now, they will be good problems that feed your soul, inspire your body, infuse your emotions with relief, peace and certainty...and power.
Sri Aurobindo, in his book, A Life Divine says...” consciousness is Myself, operating; the known is also myself, a form or movement of the same consciousness.” Your death doesn’t explain your birth and your birth doesn’t explain your death. But consciousness explains both. And that is who you are, using the birth and death process as a mechanism of your unfolding as the path of mankind moves closer and closer to its intended destiny.
The knowledge that I talk about, the knowledge that I invite you to consider, and the will, the will of the divine, of God are one and the same. The word of God, so to speak, is the power of God, but it’s just words until you decide to live them. The problem with God here is that using the word conjures up your past experiences about God and we’re trying to eliminate those experiences as a basis of knowing. I assure you that you do not know...and neither do I. But just imagine...here there are boundaries, countries, states, cities, places you can go, places you can’t go, things you can do, things you can’t do...but now imagine...no boundaries. There is no containment, no circumference, no rules, only being, timeless and spaceless, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, vast...that nothing in the physical world can lessen or destroy. Are you ready? That is who you are.
You are the Joy, the Enjoyment, the thing you are Enjoying, the entire process itself. You are it. None of the other stuff you made up about yourself means anything....and the reason why is because it’s not real. Not only is it not real...It’s not true. But as long as you believe that it is, then you stay in the circling tracks of your mind, imprisoned in your own thinking. I think, therefore I am was relevant at the time that Descartes in 1637 created a rationale for being in his Discourse on Method. The original phrase being, “Je pense,donc je suis,” The French are still doing that after all these years.
In today’s world in 2020, our very best thinking cannot solve the problems we face. Racism, hunger, inequality, injustice, all on a massive, global scale. Science has had its shot. Religion has had its shot. They haven’t worked. It would be better to say today, expunging the ego through eliminating the “I,” and the thinking, “Thou Art That.” In the old Sanscrit, “Tat Tvam Asi.”
It would be the conscious, evolved You looking at the unconsciousness, mental You and saying, “Thou Art That,” reminding you of who you are, moment after moment, day after day, until you began to gravitate to that new identity. Thou Art That.
Durckheim, in The Way of Transformation, says “On the contrary, we are invaded, as it were, from morning to night, both by our inner being as well as by the threatening exterior world for which we are responsible. The field of our ceaseless effort to reconcile both sides is none other than our ordinary life. If consciously or unconsciously, we concern ourselves solely with our work in the world and exercise and establish our world-ego alone, we are bound in the end to fall prey to specifically human unhappiness. The inexplicable suffering is brought about by our estrangement from our inner essence.
The time has come for us to free ourselves from the idea that only those things which can be rationally grasped and objectively verified are real and binding. The state of mind and body that blocks any awareness of the presence of a greater being inevitably produces a special kind of suffering. It is the experiencing of this anguish that forces us to take stock of our life attitudes. We must train our faculty of sensory perception to feel and appreciate qualities that are beyond the limits of our ordinary consciousness.
If we measure ourselves solely by our relation to the daily world that continually oppresses and threatens us with its endless requirements, then our body has no meaning except to make our performance and survival in that world physically possible. The true significance of bodily training lies in the need to reach a state that makes such manifestation possible.
That is your work, to begin to train yourself, to discipline yourself, to study, to become intentional about your becoming process in such a way that the manifestation of who you really are becomes a reality.
This is how you will build a bridge from the horizontal of daily life to the vertical of spiritual life.
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