This is a glorious age in which to live. For all those who don't think so, please think again. There are huge populations of both language and computer literate people looking for direction in life. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's a wrap. We can and will manifest our destiny, but before we start playing those mind games again we need to improve our mental health.
The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
It seems to me that at this stage I need to draw an invisible demarcation line (perceived separation) between what might be deemed the physical/objective evolution of the universe and the psychological/subjective evolution of the universe. As I have already indicated to find the truth it is essential to (a) scan the universal library (b) transcend the scientific viewpoint and (c) enter into the poetic/symbolic/Platonic domain – the realm of higher consciousness. To me there seems no valid reason for not accepting the existence of such a phase of higher consciousness when we readily accept the existence of the subconscious mind. Indeed while the subconscious mind might be the playing field of dreams, memories and reverie, the higher consciousness might function as the netscape or mindscape of intuition and collective telepathic communication.
One proposal has been that prior to the perceived separation we were in direct communication with God. According to A Course in Miracles this was a state in which we required nothing. That fulfillment was our natural condition. However, regardless of whether this is right or wrong, I suggest that the health of the individual, planet and the universe are directly related to our combined psychological/spiritual health. The very fact that we make choices, thereby influencing outcomes suggests strongly, at least to me, that our psychological/spiritual aspect is extremely important. Surely a material universe would be less susceptible to the fluctuations of free will. The (holy)ghost and the machine are apparently separate but dependent parts of the whole. To deny either is to deny the beauty in our eternal struggle for perfection, where perfection is another way of saying wholeness or completion or integration or unification of personality.
I wrote about perfection on the last page of my book about TE Lawrence –
Is the perfect soul one of pure humility or freedom's passion? And in the end which we do most admire or distrust? Or is it the accidental blunder of the two like water hot and water cold making just right? How am I to begin?
How the body and senses and so forth came into being I cannot say precisely, but I imagine that we could consult our scientific history books for answers taking us back through and prior to the material evolutionary phase of creation. Since those ideas are the ones that have influenced our thinking, then they are the ones we have accepted as real. The truth might be infinitely more or less complicated than we can possibly imagine. It might be that only through revelation can we competently and progressively fill in the gaps. You might try reading The Urantia Book.
It's the same with anything; we accept things as real because we believe they are real and keep discovering evidence to support and justify them. This includes history, science and the Bible. We can't get away from the fact that we are our own thoughts, and that we accept into our minds is true for us.
Even though all scientific theories, including the Big Bang, Quantum Theory and Darwin's Theory of Evolution, may appear quite plausible, they are still only ideas within the larger universal idea which the one acceptable to the mind. That is, ideas within ideas, or realities within realities. We crowd the NOW with more and more ideas with each thought we make, and every breath we take.
God breathes equals God thinks equals God inspires equals God creates equals God gives equals God loves.
And the winners are: Time, space, the ego, the body, the senses, fear, disease, death, art, science, philosophy, religion, history, war, and a whole host of others.
Just imagine filling a slinky with bean bag beans then crushing them to nothing; a regular black hole of a joke.
The universe is an eclectic confidence trick!
Life is the best story ever written and we're co-writing it.
So briefly, we all start out as extensions of the Cosmic Spirit/Mind, regard ourselves as separate entities accommodating a personal identity and relate to others in a variety of ways. Since each particular thought pattern projected from our inherited spirit/minds confers on us perception, including the perception of life, the universe and everything, then clearly we are responsible for what we perceive. And whilst particular thought patterns have produced apparently good manifestations, other particular thought patterns have produced apparently not so good or evil manifestations, where good and evil apparently exist only as relative conditions within the slow, often painful, but sure journey home, where home is a state of mind that is harmonious and spontaneous.
Meanwhile God sustains the lot of it out of the goodness of his heart. Life as we know it gradually becomes more and more complicated. Without some sort of communication devise all would be lost. In comes the Soup of the day, sorry, my mistake, the Saviour of the day, the HS, the Holy Spirit, the Higher Self sent by God to remind us constantly and help wake us up.
Oddly, I wrote this as part of a poem in 1975 also.
Go on slumbering oh thee, my mind,
For to wake is to know Reality.
However many of us don't want to be woken up. We like what we've made, or at the very least, we think we do, we've acclimatized. It doesn't even occur to us that there might be a better way, we're zombies, all of us. Just like in HG Well's Time Machine. Every time the bell rings we answer without even wondering whose ringing the God Damn bell. Or poor deceived Truman in the Truman Show. Life, the universe and everything, as we know it, has become a bad habit. We're addicted to it because we know nothing else. Happily or unhappily, we accept a second rate existence.
Yet how many of us so called mature adults, including TE Lawrence and myself, continually compete with ourselves, and with each other, in the hope of finding fulfillment? How many wives, husbands, lovers, jobs, vacations, trials and tribulations do we subject ourselves to during our search for the sacred is right on our doorstep? We weren't meant to be bound by the laws of nature, flesh and blood, or confined to the wheelchair of our conscience, but to soar, like Pegasus, with the angels. We are angels or at least closely related to them.
Just close your eyes for a moment and like the Psalmist,
Be still, and know that you are God.
Unfortunately we're in this mess because, like God Himself, we love what we've created. The universe as we currently know is a product of our own giant ego projection. Once a condition or an ego block is put between the relationship with oneself or another person a limit is set for that relationship resulting in an imaginary sense of scarcity and deprivation. This making of an ego block is essentially where all our internal chat comes from. Consciously or unconsciously we are literally at odds with ourselves from that time onwards. So the Karmic clock, the positive feedback system goes around and around, eventually making some of us so sick to our souls that we begin to search for the truth about ourselves again.
I rather like the analogy of the aboriginal Dreaming to assist in symbolizing the progress of universal evolution and the separation, in addition to some dreams I had.
Holy smoke! She can't be serious, I hear you mumble to yourself ever so politely. Well the thought has crossed my mind that I should keep quiet about all this, but something, and call it what you will; ambition, obsession, illusion or delusion, keeps driving me on; or perhaps it is love. And since I've come to the happy conclusion that the so-called Fall of Man or separation wasn't a mistake on our part, or on God's part, but possibly a part of the process of progressive universal realization and fulfillment, I feel obliged to tell it the way I see it.
Imagine for a moment that, as extensions of the Cosmic Mind we began dreaming. Something like we do in the REM phase of sleep. I call this the period of universal gestation. The dream became somewhat vivid and the dream characters thought they'd created themselves. The umbilical cord was cut! The aboriginal Dreaming stories resemble this, where Dreamtime creatures are recognized as the creative ancestors of the physical world. The Dreaming is surely as much a symbolic cosmology as Asiatic and European myths and legends. Shape and form evolving from the loose connective tissue of uninhibited, imaginative thought. Perhaps, because they are closer to their origins, Australian aborigines have much to offer us; the Dreamtime stories may conceivably have more relevance, if only slightly, than any modern scientific theory, and their current tribal memories holding the key to the Cosmic Pandora's Box.
So for the time being, could we set up a parallel between two seemingly opposed, yet complimentary theories, that is, mine and everybody else's. And let's just say that none of them are right and none of them are wrong. Like everything else in the perceived universe, they merely represent, or symbolize the truth. Now consider Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which is based on selectivity, and my Theory of Universal Fulfillment, or as I sometimes like to call it, The Quantum (shared thought) Theory of Evolution, which is also based on selectivity. The only difference between the two theories, is this. Darwin considered the basis for selection was the success or failure of patterns of genetic inheritance and therefore matter based. My theory, if I could call it that, (although it largely resembles countless others through the ages), proposes that the evolution of intelligent life now depends on the manifestation of thought, therefore mind, our minds, or more correctly a combination of our spirit/mind patterns together with the Cosmic Mind. Neither do I have a problem with the perceived expansion of the universe. I don't imagine that the Cosmic Mind has any trouble what so ever squeezing any number of ideas into itself. It has literally infinite capacity.
Adorned with stars is the universe,
their radiating bodies
glistening against the darkness,
in the limitless immensity of all Creation.
Let's take this argument a step further. Imagine that it' s not space which is the entity that is expanding, but consciousness. Not that the Cosmic Mind is getting bigger, it is just sustaining more thoughts, including those about physical and psychological reality. After all, our own minds don't explode, or start rejecting stuff when their full, they just store it away some place, save it, and call it memory. Jung called it the collective sub-conscious. I call it the Universal Library. Yet another bright idea!
Now while the Cosmic Mind is dreaming no harm is being done. It knows its dreaming and doesn't mind a bit. After all, that's how it creates for Goodness sake. Just like me writing a novel. Or an artist painting a picture. Or my mother-in-law knitting a jumper. However, as the dream continues there comes a period where the super consciousness, that is, consciousness of consciousness, becomes an issue. Endowed with the ability to create like the Father, the Cosmic Mind's characters make up a new and dangerous way of thinking - the ego. Whilst the ego is part of our entitlement to free will, it can also be our jailer. TE instinctively knew this too and I quote:
...because my wish was to be as superficial, as perfected; and my jailer held me back.
But like dreams, the ego too is unreal, with its main purpose being the protection of a body that is, in a sense, unreal. In fact I believe the body to be but a temporary tabernacle, a scaffold, a cocoon, a spirit/mind energy system designed to train and nurture a perfect and eternal spiritual being. In other words an immortal soul.
The exterior world is simply a reflection of the inner world.
Plato was right. We are shadows (symbols) of perfection.
Eventually we all have to make a choice between false freedom and real freedom, that is, freedom to fulfill our destiny by cooperating with the Creator.
Important Announcement: The prodigal son returns home.
This is possible because the universe is a manifestation of the Cosmic Mind. There is no restriction on the number or type of ideas in the universe, because, ideas incorporated is what the universe is.
And Lawrence once called himself an incorrigible phraser!
Universal Fulfillment or the Atonement or non-duality or liberation or loving your brother as yourself is simply a state where God's Will and our own are not in conflict. We love. We merge. We become One.
We are One
Now the subtlety of this argument is profound, which is really only a smart-aleck way of admitting I'm in hot water. (Notice how we automatically do or say things simply to justify ourselves! Lawrence charmingly called this socially acceptable form of ego self defense; self depreciation.) Anyway, as the consciousness of the Cosmic Mind expands there is no limit to what it is capable of. Any idea or set of ideas can arise and manifest in some form or other. So as the dream characters became more evolved, there must have come a time when they thought they were real, that is, of themselves. In other words, separate.
This does not mean to say this separation happened all at once. On the contrary, I rather doubt that it did. A Course in Miracles says it happened over millions of years, or at least, what we perceive to be millions of years. I actually think we attempt to -
Read our past forwards.
Or alternately,
Write our past as we go along.
The result includes fairy tales, mythology, theology, history, autobiography and scientific theory.
Whilst we currently believe that evolution entailed the development of chemical to microbe, through to plants and animals and eventually to man, what actually took place and, quite possibly, is still taking place, is a progressive differentiation then unification of our material/mental and spiritual aspects.
Although one can give credit to higher animals for thinking and basic reasoning, one cannot give them credit for being conscious of being conscious. This attribute is definitely man's sole/soul domain. Once the separation or perceptual independence was complete, then interaction between separate personalities dominated the manifested planetary scene, giving rise to the on going tragic family saga of Cain and Able, the soap opera to end all soap operas.
The Old Testament bears witness to the chaos of the separated world.
You may ask if the world has any non- separated personalities, and this would be an insightful question. I'm not sure how many people have knowingly re-established communication with God, but I imagine there's been a saintly number down the line. And we've even managed to imprison, torture, burn, shoot, hang and crucify a few. Phenomena such as intellectual visions, mental pressings and intuitions are not unnatural to such people, and their work, like that of the late Mother Teresa, is their trademark.
You shall know them by their fruit.
Nowadays these people are referred to as conscious. In other words they know where they came from and who they are. They have gained and maintain communication with the source. Sometimes they are called channels. I like to think of them as Homo Sapien sponges or fleshy floppy discs.
May the Force be with you! Thanks to Joseph Campbell.
Although I ruminated for some time before becoming comfortable with these ideas, I had not realized their full import until I dreamt the following. In my dream I was standing beside a projectionist in the projectionist booth with the projectionist Himself. Both of us were enjoying watching the film as well as getting a kick out of observing the audience. The next thing I knew I was a member of the audience and oblivious of the projectionist. In the next moment I was a character in the film and then, much to my horror, and I forgot to tell you I was watching a Goosebumps movie at the time, my human body became completely stiff, I was utterly terrified, then I changed into a cat. After that, me, the cat, strutted off into oblivion.
A cat is a cat,
and that is that.
But a man's not a man,
while he's still a cat.
After this I realized two important things. Firstly how easy it is to think we're separated. And secondly, how God did intend enjoying creation with us. How it hurts me to think how we've all hurt Him. The mind is so powerful it can, and does, convince of us anything and everything. It is quite likely that our perceived reality (r), bears little or no resemblance to Reality (R). Is it any wonder that St Thomas Aquinas went mute after his last revelation? So I now know,
I'm everyone,
all at once,
all the time.
We exist in a spiritual cyberspace where changing thought patterns affect perception even as we speak. One moment we might be searching for a shopping trolley and the next minute one turns up unexpectedly. Or a friend you've been thinking about phones up out of the blue. Or perhaps a complete stranger turns up to help you out of a tight spot. You're amazed by a particular outcome or dismayed by your inability to control your life. And don't things go terribly wrong when you're in a hurry or in a bad mood? What is perceived as a logical step by step and time dependent phenomenon is really a complete and karmically appropriate overwrite, manifestation, of reality complements of you know who! Every new reality is the only one that apparently exists. And it follows then that the only time that has any meaning at all is also NOW.
NOW = ETERNITY
And surely this forgetting or unknowing resembles Plato's Forgetful River, or The Cloud of Unknowing? However, with the occurrence of a frame of mind bent, distorted, on maintaining a perception of separation we move blindly on, not realizing that we all have the power and the glory for ever and ever, Amen.
So like the aboriginal dreaming, the ancient myths may also have their origins during the period before the apparent separation, that is, body identification, and then re-told in symbolic stories drawn on walls of caves, stone tablets, papyrus scrolls and in ancient tombs. The Rainbow Serpent and Pegasus could be said to be old family favourites, and the oral, pictorial and written record, the precious family album.
Myths are models.
This brings me back to the origin of fear, which fascinated me so much earlier on. Perhaps it stems from those earliest times when, conditioned by animal instincts, we failed to recognize we were reflections, images of the Cosmic Mind. No longer were we a part of a big happy family, but out there on our own, ruggedly independent and homeless. Since then our pride has all but obliterated our brotherly regard for each other.
I wrote this in my book. I'll leave its interpretation open to you.
As I chartered new moist mountains, my harassed and weary footsteps, so well earned, made patterns like lanterns in the mud. I thought to explore recklessly, but then, like the frozen branch in winter which licks the cold air with it stiff tongue, could not but wish for the return of the sunny season and the charms of fancy and freedom.
The evolving landscape paid me a visit, seducing me to care for it like an expectant mother whose delight is in the forbearance of change but not in the change itself. I ventured along the forever road a bit, hardly aware of my whereabouts or purpose, except I now understood that I, Rachel Balfour, was completely alone and at the mercy of the elements both physical and otherwise. Medieval stone fences seemed to quiver as I navigated them, threatening to hurtle ancient parts of themselves at me like the remote Law. But I teased them with a guilty smile, a sad reminder of my happier self.
As I walked the weather roughened pathways I thought to hide like a hare or a snake or a slug, only to find comfort there, an undeserving treat for a she-devil. Lonely travel had always been my dream, never an option. Now that it was, I found myself, after all, dependent on my kind.
Which way to go was my plight, and having never been further south than York and not more east or west than Scarborough and Harrogate respectfully, the notion of insidious progress anywhere tore a gaping hole in my self-imposed determination. It was then I thought of Ned.
What would he do, I wondered? Learn to tolerate, if not enjoy the situation I suspected. Rather as does a foetus in the womb or a tortoise in the twilight of his chamber, but with less urgency and consciousness of effort. Within myself I endeavored to meld those feelings of dread and nerve, being very similar to begin with, into a massive distinction of pride in my freedom and control over myself. Such is the genesis of confidence in the face of necessity.
Suddenly there seemed to be a bridge ahead, not of iron or stone or wood, but of hope, which is the guiding star of mankind, whose name is sometimes God and sometimes luck, rarely if ever, his meritable own. I raised my head to pay attention, and in doing so, stumbled upon my salvation.
Luckily for us, having been provided with a communication device, the Holy Spirit, (vis; the Internet) we possess a in-built character barometer, a standard, a shepherd, if you like, to protect the flock. Fear and trepidation arise when we stray too far. Our Higher Self or Christ Nature, clocks on. The HS is the link, or the bridge between our souls and our egos, between the seen and the unseen, visible and the invisible. Like Jesus Himself, it spans the formidable chasm and saves us from the pit, the eternal void. But we have to learn, or perhaps re-learn, to trust it. Trust is part of our own and Plato's necessity. In his novel called Astonishing the Gods, Ben Okri handles the trust involved in the crossing of the bridge beautifully. There was of course a bridge, the lesson of trust, in the recent popular movie called the Truman Show as well.
Dear TE Lawrence said somewhere or other that he failed to meet the standard or something to that effect. His tragedy was that he knew there was one but he couldn't find it. Many of us are like that; desperate to find that elusive something we're looking for. It's not until we realize that it is the total unconditional giving/sharing of ourselves that counts. Like Lawrence's valiant search for an authentically personal way to serve, this is really what life is all about. Poor thing, I guess he tried desperately to modify his behaviour by joining the RAF but failed to modify his mind. Filled with disappointment and guilt about the role he played in the Arab Revolt, as well as his lot in life in general, he was unable to forgive himself. Trapped inside his own self- concept of unworthiness he didn't really have a humble bone in his body, so his particular thought pattern was more negative, more inconsistent, more ego serving, more anti-Christ serving, than it should have been. Consequently he lived in a hell (realm) of his own making. Perhaps this explanation is an over simplification, and if it is, I apologize, but from the first it seemed to me that the Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a glorified confession. Lawrence was compelled to tell his story in the way he did, and his internal teacher, his Higher Self, was his guide. He had to tell it from the inside out, not the outside in. Understanding this only makes his work all the more illuminating and precious. Those who have criticized the work and doubted its veracity may indeed have cause for complaint. His dreams may well have outshone his actions. But to doubt his heart felt intentions and underestimate his contribution to the evolution of personal, planetary and universal freedom shows a complete lack of insight and compassion. What the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Mint and his exquisite letters give us is a generous and poetic record of his epic journey, his Odyssey, through Samsara.
His tragedy is our teacher.
Well now I've got that off my chest, what's next?
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