Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension
Charles Eisenstein
“In a past life, you were a Midwestern farmer and I was an Indian woman. I had the ability to make seeds sprout and grow in my hand. I taught you ways of growing grain in harsh weather, which you shared with the other settlers in the area.”
A psychic intuitive told me this at a wellness day where I was a speaker. I was not initially inclined to pay her much attention. I'd overheard her running on about the impending transition of humanity from the third to the fifth dimension, and it sounded like a bunch of New Age hooey to me. (Not that I reject this idea – I think the New Agers are simply using their own conceptual vocabulary to describe the same civilizational shift so many of us sense.)
Still, one of the participants in my seminar said Patrice was great, so afterward I asked her to amaze me. Usually I'm not impressed with “intuitive readings,” because they could be true for anyone. Things like, “You are going through a period of transition.” Patrice's readings were not like this: they were clear, specific, and spoke directly and uncannily to my condition. I was impressed, moved, and grateful.
There was once a time when I would have been hungry for proof that her psychic information was “true.” Show me incontrovertible evidence that the paranormal even exists, I would demand, and that this is a real psychic and not a fake, and then maybe I'll believe it. In keeping with the ideology of science, I held belief hostage to evidence, not realizing that in many realms, evidence follows belief. Today I am no longer hungry for certainty. Instead of picking out every logical flaw, I strive to hear whatever truth lurks within. I keep what rings true, what speaks to me, and what gives me a certain feeling of, on the positive side, upliftment or electricity, or on the negative side, that feeling of “uh oh” when I encounter a bitter pill of truth that it is time to swallow. In other words, I rely on feeling and not reason in choosing what to believe.
I even do this when I choose scientific beliefs. I dabble in various controversial areas of science, where proponents of opposing views offer equally compelling explanations for the same dataset, and scornfully explain away their opponents' positions. Really, what logical basis have I to choose between them? Do I imagine myself smarter or more discerning than these scientists who have devoted their careers to that field? Nor do I have my own laboratory or research apparatus to investigate on my own whether crop circle photographs are genuine, whether pre-Clovis archeological sites are authentic, whether the spectroscopic signature of interstellar dust indeed shows evidence of organic polymers.
Last time I wrote about this, a commentator suggested that we not “believe” anything. I find this position disingenuous, akin to certain misunderstood Eastern teachings about non-attachment. We are born into the world of flesh and dust, and are not meant to be aloof from it. We are meant to experience the joys and sorrows of attachment. If you want to build a bridge, or a relationship, you have to believe something and act accordingly. You believe the steel will hold. You believe someone will do as she has said. Life in the world is built of beliefs. The world is built of stories. We enact them and live in the world that they create.
Most of our world-creating stories are unspoken and unconscious. For example, the very question, “Is it true or not?” or “Is it real or not?” smuggles in some very deep cultural and ideological prejudices. What do we mean when we ask, “Was the UFO that Ken saw last night really there?” We mean something like, “At point X, Y, Z (Ken's back yard) from time T1 to T2 (last night), a flying saucer was present.” Words like “actually” and “really” hark to an objective Cartesian coordinate system that is independent of any observer. We reject the idea that “It was there for Ken but not for me.” Surely there must be a fact of the matter independent of anyone's perceptions. Right?
Well, maybe not. In modern physics, the objective Cartesian coordinate system has become obsolete. It is simply not always true that an electron either was, or was not, at point X, Y, Z at time T. In the absence of an observer, it can be both there and not there. This idea is hard to articulate. To do so I used the word “be”, but even our concept of existence draws on the same Cartesian assumptions I am trying to question. The result is paradox.
The paradox is an artifact of an unconscious ideology that assigns an objective, absolute meaning to words like “is”, “be” and “exists”. It is not only through modern physics, postmodern deconstructionism, and political prevarication that the meanings of these words disintegrate. Shamanic cultures also had a more fluid understanding of reality that blurred the boundaries between objective truth, personal truth, mythic truth, and dramatic truth.
The late Joseph Epes Brown, a professor of religious studies who lived with Black Elk and, at his request, chronicled the rites and spiritual knowledge of his people, describes this blending of truth in the book Teaching Spirits. The ritual enactments of various mythic stories are not considered mere representations of these stories, and the actors were not merely playing roles. For the participants and observers, the stories were really happening. They were not depicting some bygone event. The question of their literal truth did not even arise, because the very premises of that question did not exist in their conceptual vocabulary. Furthermore, the ritual enactments were considered to be essential to maintaining the living truth of the story. Hence it was that storytelling and ritual were sacred functions. Actors became the mythic figures they portrayed. (The same might be said for modern actors and modern drama. Perhaps this explains, in part, our culture's fascination with movie stars. It reflects a hunger for the sacred world-creating power of drama.)
The degeneration of truth into fact took many millennia. When Ancient Greek sages recounted the Olympian myths to their audiences, no one thought to question whether, say, a Titan named Prometheus “actually” stole fire from Zeus to give to humanity. We have an image of credulous primitives swallowing fanciful explanations of human and natural phenomena, but perhaps it is we who are credulous and unsophisticated. It is not that the Greeks were incapable of reasoning out the absurdity of their explanations. It is that they understood that truth is much bigger than reason and evidence.
These intuitions still live inside of us today. Consider some of the following propositions, which appear in mythologies around the world:
1. The Earth rests upon the back of a turtle.
2. Somewhere there is a great tree, the World-Tree, and if it dies the world will end.
3. When the gifts were being passed out to the animals, human beings got left out, and received in compensation a gift and curse that makes us unique.
I don't know about you, but these statements ring true to me. They feel true, and they leave an indelible imprint on my mind. The Earth does rest upon the back of a turtle, and that belief both contradicts, and does not contradict, the belief that the Earth is an orb spinning in space. From the perspective of objective truth, which dominates our culture, it contradicts. From the perspective of mythic truth, it does not. Thus I can say, with complete honesty, that I believe all three of the above statements. And not just because I can offer a cogent symbolic exegesis. I really believe them. I can look you in the eye and say, in all truth, that the world rests on the back of a turtle.
When I receive a message like Patrice's, I listen from a perspective of shamanic or dramatic truth. It is not that I gloss over any empirical absurdities; I simply don't even go there. I suppose I could ask for details of farm life in the 19th century midwest and check if Patrice's vision contained anything surprising that neither of us is likely to have known through ordinary means, but in the shamanic mindset, empirical proof is not a priority. Besides, who is this “I” who was once a farmer? Divested of my present biography, am I still I? What remains of I when my name, my relationships, my memories, my languages are stripped from me? Perhaps only an awareness, an attention, but then what makes my attention “I” and yours “you”? In what sense is that farmer me and not someone else? Modern notions of reincarnation smuggle in the modern self, a discrete, separate identity surveying an objective universe, a world of other. Here as elsewhere, the quest for certainly leads to a quagmire of confusion.
Without believing that “I” actually “was” a 19th-century farmer, I believed Patrice's story. It felt true and it illuminated issues I face in my life today. On the metaphoric level, she and I were enacting a modern version of events she described. She lives in a realm of magic and miracles, a world with different rules of cause and effect. She calls it the fifth dimension. She did not sprout seeds in her palm, but she did some other things that are considered impossible or a ridiculously unlikely coincidence in our world. Now it is my job to convey something from her world to ours, to the other farmers. I cannot do the things Patrice can do, but perhaps I can translate what she has shown me into something useful for my fellow denizens of the third dimension.
Image: "World Tree, Laval Dieux" by Gyrus via flickr, under Creative Commons license, certain rights reserved.
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Deep Wonderful Insights
I really enjoyed reading Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension. It is like poetry for me. To be savoured. It speaks to the visceral as well as the intellect. It reminds me of a book I am presently reading called the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, that is SO deeply real, that I cannot read it for too long because it has such an impact with me.
It inspires the very wanting to breathe in the reality outside the print before my eyes, rather than escape into the text from the world outside. Hence I haven't got to a quarter of the book yet!
If ONLY we can understand science is a powerful tool but is not THE truth!
I understand it. But many don't and are destroying everything. So this is serious.
Once even at a forum dedicated to psychedelic exploration, the Lycaeum, I poeticized about water, and another said, 'what! water is H20!!'
Another time I spoke about the heart being centre of feeling and was told it was merely a pump. I kid you not.
The saddest is when peropls have HAD psychedelic experience and still don't get it. THAT is the danger of scientific 'education'! In fact so-called edcuation in general. It is designed to suppress the imagination! (John Taylor Gatto)
So, for example, how to understand water in a deep way that includes 'H20' but also can feel its interelated presence and meaning within the spiral of feeling. THAT is the challenge now. For those who are scientifically heavy that is. For if psychedelic experience cannot shake you up, then there needs to be MORE work to dispell the mindcontrol.
And I am not suggesting I am some great enlightened being either. I am just learning all the time.
H20
Hi Zazt, as I read this comment one thing that came to mind is that H20 is actually not "just" H20. Here is what I wrote about that in Ascent:
... In science our pretense of mastery manifests most fundamentally in the supposition that water is a structureless jumble of identical molecules, a generic medium, any two drops the same. To a standard substance we can apply universal equations. That each part of the universe is unique is profoundly troubling to any science based on the general application of standard techniques. The same is true of technology. Only a universe constructed of generic building blocks is amenable to control. Just as the architectural engineer assumes that two steel beams of identical composition will have identical properties, so does the chemist believe the same of two samples of pure H2O.
That any two samples of H2O, or graphite, or ethanol, or any other pure chemical are identical is a dogma with enormous ramifications. It implies that the complexity and uniqueness of objects of our senses is an illusion, that they are mere permutations of the same standard building blocks. Such a view naturally corresponds to the objectification of the world, which makes of it a collection of things, masses.
The opposite view sees every piece of the universe as unique. No two drops of water, no two rocks, no two electrons are identical, but each has a unique individuality. This is essentially the view of animism, which assigned to each animate and inanimate object a spirit. To a Stone Age person, the idea that water from any source had a unique character or spirit would have seemed obvious. Modern chemistry denies it and says any apparent differences are merely due to impurities -- the underlying water is the same. Animism says no -- to have a spirit is to be unique, irreducibly and intrinsically unique. To have a spirit is to be special.
***
There is more on www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter7-4.php. Somewhere else I talk about how modern science actually supports the irreducible uniqueness of each drop of water, even of each molecule and each electron. I think that is in Chapter 6.
P.S. I share your admiration of Abram and Gatto.
Charles Eisenstein
www.ascentofhumanity.com
Uniqueness
What you remind me of, regarding water, and control, is beautiful, and powerful.
You see, it is easy for people who are not familiar with the stiff terms, symbols, math, abstractions of science to be intimidated. That is its power isn't it ? It is called 'blinding you with science'!
And as it was in the past for people who weren't allowed to read the Bible, and couldn't understand its Latin verse, etc., the 'priests' of both religion and science can, willy nilly, pull the wool over our eyes. And this is political control.
What you say about water, about how every particle, atom, molecule is unique, and the reason that - what I call official science - wants us to believe that the reality is more mono-mechanical is for reasons of control. This reminds me of another thing I recently heard. Actually it was Johh Taylor Gatto being interviewd by Alex Ansary http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=848841001438931860 . Where he says how every child is unique. But so-called 'education' does not recognize the uniqueness of a child, and that is for reasons of controlling them. So this mindset for control goes from the micro to the macro to children!
i write therefore i am
one who writes the words that speak from the roots of where the source of words are coming from.Does modern scientific method study its own self imposed limitation on just how phenomenon and proof of the smallest particle reflect the actual current prevalent mass preoccupation with what they are programed with by certain secret behind closed doors meetings of gray faced men?What is the root of our consciousness, does it share some fabric of reality with what was once called truth?Does the word evil really ever go with the word root? Does the word root in all its long grip of the earth with deep fingers of the tree of life ever even reach to something that is so designated as to be everything that is abhorent and bad and could be connected to the worst we can imagine?
How deep does the source of the root go? When did the imagination that is the point of departure of the stories that grow like leaves on the world tree , when did it become the root of our discontent? When did the stories fall from the branches in the Autumn of our dissatisfaction? How did the children of winter find the fallen bits of universes, and when did they hide them in dark cloaks of dire definitions torn from the roots of suspicion that are ript from the ground of being and declared useless ugly dirty things that look like whithered limbs.Did reason grow tired like old roots in a jar?
Was this when religion was invented? does the meaning of the word reflect its practice? Does it lose its coherent extention to everything that "God" created? Does the word God become obsolete because truth has been severed at the roots of our disbelief? Of our disease, our distance that we see the stars from? When did we fail to believe in the magic of the heavens and the earth? When did male and female meanings of the roots of things become blind alleys of terrible masks of hallucinatory phantom people with orifaces that ressemble disembodied stunted manufactured thought?
Do the stories now hide in dark cellars like the high john conqueror root? waiting for the next underground railroad to infinity? to the Tree of resurrected belief in the leaf, bud flower and fruit of wonder does the trunk of TRUTH have a innocent heart carved on it? But where is the absolute proof? Of their undying love?
So true
21st Century Truth
This is a mindset I've been growing into over the past couple of years as well -- freeing myself from the rigors of fact and allowing the infinitely more complex and nuanced "truth" to guide me. As denizens of a post-Enlightenment world, secularized and bred in empiricism, it is difficult to re-situate our thinking into a perspective that does not depend on the dogma of Reason to explain reality.
How much of our "critical thinking skills" need be abandoned to intuitive, mythological, storyteller's Truth? As close as I come to understanding you, Charles, when you say "I really believe that the world rests on the back of a turtle", there's another part of me that recoils in confusion from it. How indeed are we to integrate this paradox of thinking and knowing, our advanced science with our abandoned magic? I think this is a very important step for us to futher evolve (or regress?)...
I also enjoyed the phrasing of "degeneration of truth into fact" -- this intrigues me, but I wonder if it is meant to say that what our present society understands to be scientifically factual is a less authentic, or somehow compromised, view on the universe than that of ages past? Where does the degeneration come about, and how might it be reconciled back to fullness?
I've hashed out the troubling consequences of misrepresenting "fact" and "truth" in a couple of my articles for this website, and the discussions that have followed have been enlightening – broadening my perspective to see how these "absolutes" can be flexible, contradictory, or completely subjective. And although I resonate with what you write in this piece, it still gets quite confusing for me to submit to applying the "truth" label to simply any interpretation of the universe.
Perhaps it is just a process of growing that I am still too freshly engaged with – or perhaps, one that is too ineffable to be discussed philosophically.
Thanks for the compelling read!
-st
truth and facts
These are deep questions and there is no short answer. One problem is that the words I must use to "explain" it themselves contain the very assumptions that I am trying to deconstruct. For example, when I write, "I really believe the earth rests on the back of a turtle," what is this word "really"? And in that last sentence, what is the word "is"? As the saying goes, The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
I don't believe our critical thinking skills need to be abandoned. They only need be returned to their proper place. We arrantly overapply them to areas where they are totally inappropriate. I know, because I did this most of my life, imagining, for example, that I could make sound choices based on reasons. The result was an agony of indecision, a disconnection from my true desires, and a lack of commitment to choices already made.
Interestingly enough, the word "fact" comes from the Latin "factus", which means a making or a doing. It seems the ancients understood that facts are not separate, objective entities but rather our own creation, like things manufactured in factories.
Charles Eisenstein
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com
truth like time
There are no secrets...
Oddly enough, I think it all began when a friend of mine threw his candy wrapper out the window of my car. Having always been sensitive to the esthetics of our beautiful planet—not worrying so much if the ground underneath the candy wrapper was toxic—I always looked frowningly upon someone deliberately effacing her beauty.
“Hey, why the hell did you do that?”
“I’m providing for the family of the guy, hired by the parkway authority, who regularly comes to clean it all up!” he stated with authority. “Not to mention the practical motivation that drives our correctional institutions to provide my brothers and sisters with a few hours of fresh air and exercise. And don’t forget about those who get their jollies by volunteering their free time for local litter patrols. Oh, and the businesses that advertise on the roadside that they’ve 'adopted' this particular stretch of road. I’m contributing to an entire industry, man!”
While my friend is clearly a free thinker, I’d never known him to seem so, I dunno… confusing! He’s not a shit head, you know. And, “brothers and sisters”? He’s never even spent a night in jail!
His action, and his reaction, literally threw me into a tailspin. How could something be clearly wrong, AND clearly right?
Or, true… and, not true?
Easy. (It’s a wonderful thing how a lifetime of practice makes something easy, isn’t it?)
Today, I have come to believe (thanks to that awakening) that we live in a unified cosmos of all possibilities. Everything has an equal opportunity to be true. In fact, everything is already true. Yup! Thanks to my friend, a litter bug!
In our current state of awareness, humans overly discriminate. Our view is of a world that is “either”, and “or”. Polarities, and dualities rule!
The good news is that, as this exercise in discrimination reaches its greatest expression, the threshold will be reached through which will come the quantum world of pure potential; the world of all possibility. (See # 5 & 6 below)
What is your worldview?
1) World as a Battlefield: Where good and evil are pitted against each other; where I am a soldier, and where ultimately, I believe I will win or lose the battle.
2) World as a Classroom: Where, if I study hard I will graduate to higher states of awareness. If I don’t pay attention “in class” I will fail to move on to the next level.
3) World as a Trap: Where I try to disentangle myself from whatever trap I perceive entangles me. I’m always trying to extricate myself from the trap I believe has fooled and ensnared me, and by extension, the rest of humanity. I’m trapped in this nowhere job; this toxic marriage; this backwater town, this third-world mentality, etc. (Ayn Rand, for instance, thought that she and the world were trapped by Altruism, and brilliantly extricated herself by erecting a philosophy of Egoism in its place. See the book: For The New Intellectual by Ayn Rand)
4) World as Duality: Whether I prefer a predictable, objective, mechanistic worldview or a chaotic, subjective, intuitive one, I recognize the polarities of the opposing worldview, and struggle to accept one or the other. The Universe is made up of me – not me. Everything is “either-or” depending on my personal belief.
(Whether “winning or losing”, “graduating or failing”, “extricating ourselves”, or “preferring A over B”, the above four worldviews suggest competition, rather than cooperation, separation rather than unity, with the different aspects of our world.)
5) World as Lover: Where I behold the world as a most intimate and gratifying partner, and I feel myself in an intimate erotic embrace with the world; penetrating, and being penetrated by the primal energies of the realm of our human existence. (Though a “World as Lover” type of person ceases to compete and begins to cooperate, it still recognizes a distinction between itself and its “other”. Importantly, this person has transcended “either-or”, and now exists in a world of “and”: (My Lover ‘and’ I). A World as Lover type of person senses all of the above levels in their own self, and realizes that all worldviews exist simultaneously in each individual in one form or another.)
6) World as self: Where I become one with my World-as-Lover, where the subject and object are no longer separate. I see the world in all its parts as an interconnected whole. In this worldview, cooperation is just another way of viewing competition. Duality ceases to exist, polarity is an artifact, hierarchy becomes holoarchy and holistic unity occurs.
(Ideas for this list were lifted from the What The Bleep web site)
“There are no secrets. Only time for them to unfold” -David Crosby
"If only I could remember the future"
World As Lover
In the Goddess mythology there is the association of the Serpent with the union of eternity and time. As the serpent was metaphorically periodically sloughing off old skin so as to be renewed in this world.
Serpent wasn't damned, and had other associations, and a most important one indeed was representing the sacred mushrooms, as well as the Guardian of the Tree in the Garden. As the Goddess, and her Lover and Son...................As Her *Lover*.
Who is she?
She is Nature.
What is Nature?
It is Earth, and all species, and the universe, before it was 'split' into 'heaven' and earth' by the patriarchal mythologies.
So her Lover is the sacred mushroom? More so it is the union of eater and mushoom and dancing and Nature. The Duende. When love is So deep that it is unspeakable ecstasy.
~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~
Now ac herrrm. Facts!
fact 1)) The ancients didn't know about mushroom spores,
because fact2)) they didn't have access to microscopic technology. So myths would be that shrooms happened magically after thunder and rains and lightning.
fact 3))But WE know that that is not so. That they progenate by means of spores.
So does this mean that we can throw away the MEANING of how we relate to them, and the meaning they have for us and our relationship with Nature?
Well I don't know how YOU answer this, but I do by looking directly at offical science! And what I see is myths.
Yes.
Just the same. And many just accept them. One very important and crucial myth they join hands politically with is the *myth of mental illess*. And the myth--implied--that they know what consciousness is. They do not. And they know what MATTER is. They do not.
feel me?
myths ARE facts
Shrooms happen magically after thunder and rains and lightning. Their tiny spirit babies float in a sea of wind. Called by their mother to a moist warm bed where they become like many tiny serpents, they join to yearn in their heart to see the sun once again. In time, the young brave stalk, erect and penetrating, makes love to the sun, and to the moon, and stars. In its ecstasy, it squirts new spirit babies at the sun to float again in the breezes of the sea of wind.
"If only I could remember the future"
spirit babies
So true, so true... thank you Don for this poetry. And I really mean it when I say "true"!
Charles Eisenstein
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com
spores
I do feel you and hear the voice behind the words.
Knowing about spores doesn't invalidate the magical explanation. You could say the spores are merely the vehicle by which the fungal spirit manifests. Each view could explain away the other, reduce and encompass it within its own vocabulary.
As for the myth of mental illness, don't get me started! Maybe soon I'll write about that. Depression: the soul's withdrawal from a kind of life you were not meant to live. Anxiety "disorder": the persistent feeling "There's something wrong around here and I don't know what." ADHD too, another sort of heroic refusal. Ha ha, a recent correspondent of mine, a "mental health professional" wryly observed that one of her clinical manuals lists "A belief that his life has a purpose" as a symptom of a mental disease.
Charles Eisenstein
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com
yay
Charles,
I cannot wait for you to write that so I can debate it with you. :)
excellent
seeing faries
I wonder if those of us who do not have those experiences (me, for example) are just envious, and so in order not to feel the envy we say that you are making it up, hallucinating, etc. But even if we believe you, that belief usually does not penetrate very deeply because it runs contrary to the evidence of our senses. We can believe maybe, but we cannot KNOW.
Charles Eisenstein
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com
psychic development
channeling
Actually, I often experience that my material comes from a source beyond myself. Traditionally, all art was thought of this way. The artist was just the channel, the "reed flute" as the Sufis put it. We just need to allow the Gift to flow through us. Well, then my smaller ego self wants to take credit for it! The result is that the channel narrows and plugs up and I can no longer offer art, but only an imitation of it.
Charles Eisenstein
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com
Bravo
I like the way you think, or is it perceive? I told Daniel to cut you back, though, since your posts make so many of the others look bad. :-)
www.farrfeed.com
its because i read some of your writing
that i thought of an ugly jesus in a cheap carnival, but maybe that's my mess-sigh-ya complex comin out.
buffalo lights! wheeeeeeere's the buffalo lights?
It is humbling
It is humbling when I recognize how much my beliefs act as filters to my experience. Since beliefs are, in many ways, organic and lively, it is difficult to bring them into full conscious awareness. They are rooted deep and like weeds have a way of reappearing. Perception is not some objective event that is the same for everyone at any given time. Instead, while there are commonalities, the senses and their "input" are continuously being interpreted.
I agree with you that beliefs are most easily revealed as stories. If we can allow ourselves the freedom to tell a new or different story and really inhabit that story to the limits of our imaginations, then our perceptions change. This can be deeply frightening. The temptation is to return to the familiar in a search for certainty and comfort. Of course, what we know as being "familiar" is often entangled with how we were raised in our families of origin. Most of our beliefs are inherited. Depth psychology can be useful in revealing some of those family (familiar) stories that get embedded in our psyches. I've found breathwork to be the most powerful modality for unearthing unconscious beliefs.
After reading your first post on RS I bought your book and plowed through it in 2 days (winter in Maine). I have followed a similar path of struggle between the desire for proof and the appeal of simple belief. I loved how you went through the laundry list of despair inducing crisis' and facts _ then spoke directly of optimism. Finding hope without being in denial is something of an art form.
Finally, you speak of the power of words and how many assumptions and beliefs are contained in simple language. Yes, and also there are some words that we ask to carry so many different meanings and potentials that they sag and stretch under the burden. Such a word is "feeling" which is asked to cover an entire spectrum of both cognition and direct experience. I don't know what to replace it with either. But in the future, like the Inuits 53 words for snow, we will have a vocabulary of feelings that can accurately hold their associated stories and beliefs. Thanks so much for your work.
coyote
This freakin ruled.
Give me the food, farmer, and I'll eat it! I thought your portrayal of truth was amazing. I too am not of an eastern philosophical background, but I find what you describe resonates with much of Heidegger's teaching on the nature of truth. For him it was an opening up--truth was not a fact or a state of affairs, but the act of revealing that which was hidden. Truth is anything--it's the realization that the world is filled with possibility. We often live in the "untruth" of carrying out our existence as though we're trapped, or limited by what we can do.
The one and only thing that we HAVE to do in this world is die. All else remains open. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Anyways...thx for this.
rawk.
-jp
the tree in the desert
we are at the great white tree in the desert of our great going down to the mirror water hole we are in the spider lightning web of nights showing flash after flash of DNA memory down the time thread sowed right through the land of the dead the silver vortex tree turns slowly around its snaking hieroglyphs that spiral up its infinite corridor branches, twisting ever up toward the crown of voice leaves, glinting in the coat of rainbow rain we are entering the vast network of earth stories written in ocher and mauve traced on barks and roots with elfin aetheric language wrapped around runic glittering transparencies that have vanished down the fairy lanes that waver in lingering lines that lay on the ground around openings that appear in fingers of carved stone whose dimension moves back and forth through the forest of names that dance with tiny lanterns in forevermore circles disappearing again and again through thickets of written spells and fare the wells
we behold the ancient modern gold illuminations in the great gnarly arms that hold up the universe of green saucer shaped energy maps we have been here before in the grand halls of shed bold rays down the gargantuan galleries of cathedral skies...
have seen the diamond fire window of holy chaos fruit of good and evil taint tint veined arcane symphony of vast winged voids shimmering and shattering with chimes of bliss beams reaching with silent hands through the spark zero core belief bifurcation of unity and totality, awaken its gaian paradise revelations of purple and phosphor wonder dripping
through singing waters crystal enchantments embracing arcoss wild whispered flow that glow that shows enought to decipher what is scralled in the forgotten wood of nothingness those signatures of nature calling the stained heaven from its pearly early from child-eyes that have seen everything down in the earthen vaults through the shadowy gates of stars
what comes out of the wilds of seeing beyond, mutated, reasoned, rotations, was a long way around for the veil of mountains as the curtain of fallen dark tongues speaking in tongues of rivers winding around thrust branch of cosmic torrents.
faerie seeds
magic and faery magic
i wonder what the buddhist version of faerie magic is?
a good buddha belly laugh at least.
we need more seeds planted in our gypsy boots.
heck i did not make it to Woodstock, to roll arond in the psychedelic mud with Jimi Hendrix and co.
but i did see Jimi a couple times.
i love yer name it has a magical ring to it, Eugenia Macer-Story
ha...
i bet we will never see
yay!
great article and comments. very inspiring everyone! eye-on-the-quest, set compasses sourcewards. folks using their Gifts to understand the mother, that they may travel the threads home to now.
spring's a' comin'
www.organelle.org
www.truetao.org
clarification on Eugenia Macer-Story
oh well
twins and the group mind
Hi,
great article and posts. Faerie seeds and mushroom spores travelling like the water sprites with the cosmic torrent.
I'm an identical twin. Though my sister and I have become apart now, we were once very much together. For some people the identical twin thing gives them an uncomfortable Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned unease that a sinister group mind is at work. It amuses me( she says, eyes emitting bright beams of light.) We would always be asked 'are you telepathic?'
Understanding the self was difficult from this perspective. I have an experience of being both unique and the same, in a literal in your face way. My spirit is my own, but it is also absolutely connected. On the surface my sister and I appeared with identical DNA, and we were hyper related. Into adulthood the less obvious differences have altered our physical appearances even, changing us in unique ways.
Our connection wasn't just to each other, it extended itself out, but I can appreciate why some identical twins get caught in their relationship, and either can't or won't step out of it. I sometimes regret what I've lost. I no longer feel that same extended consciousness.
Most of my psychic activity seems to be retained in the dream world, where the group mind still functions. I get messages, skills and gifts, but I admit that I have no idea how to use them. I stuff it all into a psychic cupboard. I open the door I close the door.
I'm happier for the twin mind to be seen in relationship to the group mind. I guess we were lucky not to have been separated at birth, so some social scientists could complete an unworthy study into nature versus nurture. Yawn.
the twins
twin tree dna
I love your post cjmoore.
Evolution is kinship, myth is reflection and twin tree dna is immortal. I should think less identical and more complementary. We know resistance is futile, one day we will all be assimilated -back into the tree root.
the roots the roots
Believing
Eisentein wrote...
Last time I wrote about this, a commentator suggested that we not “believe” anything.
The point isn't believing vs not-believing. It's whether or not you recognize belief for what it is. When you embrace a belief, do you recognize it as your own creation? As a choice that you can examine and question? Or do you assume that your chosen beliefs represent substantial truth (as "religious" people do)?
We are born into the world of flesh and dust, and are not meant to be aloof from it. We are meant to experience the joys and sorrows of attachment.
The use of the passive-voice "meant to be" belies our own power to examine and question beliefs. Who or what is it that "means" for us to do this or that? Are we assuming there's some God or Force that decides that we're "meant to" feel this or that? Or do we take responsibility for how we choose and create our own meaning?
You could say, e.g., "I choose to see myself as living in a world of flesh and dust, and I want to be attached to the joys and sorrows of this world." Wouldn't that be clearer than speculating about what's "meant to be"?
To question your chosen beliefs is hardly being "aloof" from the world. Indeed, taking refuge in a belief-system is a common strategy to avoid engaging with the living experience of each moment. When these joys and sorrows appear... how much are you present for the experience itself? How much are these experiences filtered through a belief-system?
Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/