The hour is striking so close above me,

So clear and sharp,

That all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: There's a power in me

To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish

And paint in gold, as if it were an icon

That could bless us,

Though I'll not know who else among us

Will feel this blessing.

Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours was written around 1903. He was twenty-three when he started it and had already published three volumes of poetry. Book of Hours was published in 1905. The inspiration for the book came from what Rilke called "inner dictation." Words came to him in the mornings and evenings and struck him with the force of a persistent awareness, which is actually the inner senses manifesting thought in physical form. The inner senses using innate electrical intensities shape the reality I experience and that beholding can be as extensive as I want it to be. There are no restrictions that limit my creativity once I cross the threshold of wisdom and express the innate power within me.

 Rilke's thoughts are energy and as energy manifests physically in my reality, it acts as a catalyst. I imagine my self functioning in the world within me. When that happens my inner senses ring a bell of awareness; a new world takes shape and in every second of it, nothing is too small to cherish. The act of beholding this world ripens my own beliefs. Creative enzymes flow through me in an intensified dance of consciousness. My energy is painted with the gold of awareness. The blessing of abundance fertilizes my blue veins and spouts the red blood of physical metamorphic resonance in the endless action of creation.

 All realties wait for me to discover them. Each inner experience is real when I become aware of it. Each dripping thought frolics within a dewdrop of awakened energy that restlessly expands into a catechism of wisdom without beliefs. No longer hampered by conventional gravitational realism, I can wander from cloud to sky, as I pick molecules of radiance from the consciousness of the sun, which fuels the universe within me.

Success has no footprints in a world where judgment floats on a carpet of tolerance. Fear has no motive in a universe that flowers in multi-colored vibrations of acceptance. Love has only equals when a mirror of truthfulness reflects the genesis of consciousness.

Experiencing essential aspects of awareness, I see a self and behold the beauty between time and space. Each moment of beholding strikes the wires of my own electrical intensities and another quality of consciousness becomes me.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

 The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I'm doing now. I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.

Alan Watts the British philosopher wrote that interesting statement in his book The Way of Zen, published in 1957. If I ask my self who I am, I do start putting a mental image together of what I've done and where I've been. I am a composite of yesterday waiting for tomorrow and never seem to get yesterday out of the way in the present moment. I constantly live a historic dream of my own making and continually try to wake up, but I find my self falling deeper into a waking sleep, as linear time shows tracks of my past on my physical body of now. I identify with those tracks and in a way wear them as badges of achievement and perseverance. The self that exists in the now is stuffed in a body of distorted memories that create a future with similar distortions.

As Ken Wilber mentions in his book Spectrum of Consciousness, my ego seems to be happy today if I promise it a happy tomorrow. The good news seems to be in a bright future, not a bright present. I endure pain and misery waiting for that future, but I don't enjoy it, because it doesn't exist now. When it does arrive my ego will only be content if I offer it another bright future. I continue to create insanity in order to be sane. I spend so much time running towards the future that I identify with running and I run right past it in the present, so I never really know who I am or enjoy that self. I find my self not enjoying the present because it has no future and if it has no future then it is dead in my belief system.

Trying to get a handle on the present and living it without associations that form from past beliefs is an enormous challenge, but it is one that I can experience. When I start to examine who I am from not only a physical and linear perspective, but from a psychological and metaphysical perspective, I open the door of awareness a little more. I still have beliefs about the past and the future, but I begin to immerse my self in the present. When I use my imagination in the present I create thoughts that are expressed as energy in some way. By following those thoughts from pure energy to manifestations, I find hidden fragments of my own consciousness waiting to be accepted and released in some form. Life in the present is about action and expansion and the awareness of different realities, so I can experience them. I tend to fear them for I have no past experiences to associate them with, but when I allow them to show themselves, I sense the incredible amount of energy that I have in every moment and that is enlightenment.

By accepting a changeable past and a probable future, I learn to live in the now. Both the past and future are creations of the present, which in psychological time happen simultaneously. Like the bark on a tree my ego is the buffer for this camouflage reality. I keep it healthy by making it aware that I am like the roots of a tree that need the energy of life now, not in the future.

But the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent the awareness of reality. . .

Every society, by it own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the form of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially conditioned filter; experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. . . I am aware of all my feelings and thoughts which are permitted to penetrate the threefold filter of socially conditioned language, logic and taboos (social character). Experiences which can not be filtered through remain outside of awareness; that is, they remain unconscious.

Eric Fromm was a 20th century internationally renowned social psychologist, humanistic philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Fromm taught at the University of Mexico, as well as at Michigan State and NYU. He moved to Switzerland in 1974 and maintained a clinical practice and published a series of books. Fromm believed that freedom was an innate aspect of human nature and we either embrace it, or we escape from it. Embracing freedom is healthy and escaping freedom using escape mechanisms is the root of psychological conflicts.

 The main escape mechanisms that Fromm identified are: Automaton Conformity, Authoritarianism and Destructiveness. Automation conformity is changing one's ideal self to what is perceived as a preferred type of personality to conform to society, which means losing or hiding one's true self. We then are able to place the burden of responsibility on society instead of self. Authoritarianism is allowing one's self to be controlled by another. This removes freedom of choice by submitting to the freedom of someone else. Destructiveness, aims to eliminate others or the world as a whole to escape freedom. Destruction of the world is the last desperate attempt to save my self from being crushed in it.

Awareness, as Fromm describes it, is created by me once I allow it to manifest. Several factors determine whether I allow my self to be aware of different experiences. I do pass all I perceive through a belief filter and separate them by associations in order to identify them using an accepted mode of knowing. If my experiences get stuck in one of my filters, I put it in another category and mark it as not real, or a fantasy, depending on what is contained within the experience. I cover my awareness with a blanket of doubt and disbelief in order to protect my self from experiences that are not in my memory, or cannot be associated with another similar experience that is lodged in my body consciousness.

Fromm explains that different society's have specific filters that are filled with escape mechanisms, which inhibit awareness until these filters are reconditioned or are expanded to accept new experiences as acts of freedom. Embracing all experiences and accepting them for what they contain, in terms of awareness, is true freedom. But in order to expand in awareness, I consciously put these escape mechanisms in place in order to experience the pain that results from my own creations. I separate my self in order to conceive awareness. Consciousness is not aware of itself unless it separates and forms contrast in this reality.

 As the 20th century philosopher and Taoist Terence Stannus Gray, who wrote under the pen name Wei Wu Wei explains:

What, then, could be inconceivable, what in fact is and must be inconceivable? Only that which is conceiving, is itself inconceivable, for only what is conceiving cannot, when conceiving, conceive itself.

That means consciousness is always aware, but my ability to conceive that which I choose to filter is restricted by my own actions. Aspects of consciousness remain outside of my awareness, due to my established and staunchly rigid belief structure. When I begin to massage that structure and it becomes pliable and flexible and awareness begins to manifest, I conceive more aspects of my own innate freedom. It's similar to death in one sense, for I change my focus from one reality to other realities and begin to experience all of them simultaneously within an expanded time-space filter. Conceiving awareness is experienced on my own and does manifest at certain energy points in linear time, when I choose to allow my self that freedom. If I don't allow my self to die in awareness then I am a sorry traveler, but an eternal one nonetheless.

In Goethe's words:

As long as you do not know

How to die and come to life again

You are but a sorry traveler

On this dark earth.

The point is the earth is only dark if I conceive it to be, by filtering my experiences through an inconceivable belief system.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergences later in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting, as it were, in our modes of thinking, and yet what a world of difference will grow up eventually between one another!

D.T.Suzuki was born in Japan in 1869. He was a professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. He was the most respected 20^th century authority on Buddhist Philosophy and Zen Buddhism. Reading his work is certainly a mind opening experience. Just a little twist in a belief and the world changes and everything in it become distorted or sane depending on how I look at a stone, or anything else. My dualistic reality becomes a battle field over words that communicate my beliefs. The hinge on a door can swing in or out depending on how I hang the door and so it is with my belief structure.

Suzuki mentions a monk in the same essay. The monk says:

Drinking tea, eating rice

I pass my time as it comes;

Looking down on the stream, looking up at the mountains,

How serene and released I feel indeed!

My perceptions paint a reality and I live that reality through my choices. Everyone is connected in that behavior, but drinking tea for me may not the same experience as anyone else. I sit eating rice and think and those thoughts become things that are unique to my experience; the same tea and rice are different in the thoughts and perceptions of others. When I accept those common acts without thought, I enter the world of Zen or enlightenment and never leave my seat. When I look at a stone and sense its consciousness, I find Zen sensing me in the common act of being. When I hang a door to swing in and am at peace with the hinge and the door, Zen is the wind created by these two energies.

I could call those experiences by a different name and still sense the oneness of no-thought. I could use my Western religious training and call them the Christ consciousness or Middle Eastern thought and called them the greatness of Allah. I could call them the sign of a new savior or find something in the bible that matches my thoughts and I would still experience Zen without identifying it specifically. Names lose their meaning in enlightenment. The no-thought and how I perceive it creates a different experience for each believer. But as a human connected to a society, I want to merge all thoughts into one common experience and call it a name that denotes compliance and that's when Zen and no-thought move down another stream and over a distant mountain.

There is a collective consciousness, but within that energy there are different energies that create experiences that are not shared in physical reality. There are inner enzymes that are the catalyst for consciousness to expand in non-physical reality and then manifest in other forms, and I experience them without naming them.

 Suzuki goes on to explain:

Even in the twinkling of an eye, the whole affair is changed, and you have Zen and you are as perfect and normal as ever. More than that, you have in the meantime acquired something altogether new. All you mental activities are now working to a different key which is more satisfying, more peaceful and fuller of joy than anything you ever had. The tone of your life is altered. The spring flowers look prettier and the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective revolution that brings out this state of things cannot be called abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse is as broad as the universe itself, there must be something quite healthy and worth one's striving after its attainment.

How serene and comfortable I feel knowing there is no-thought. Expansion and awareness are achieved in my uniqueness. Becoming the air between the bubbles or the flutter of an eyelash is the action of consciousness that exists without uttering a word.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

No drives, no compulsions

No needs, no attractions

Then your affairs

Are under control

You are a free person.

Chuang Tzu wrote those thoughts in Chinese over 2300 years ago. The concept that less is more is now age thought at its finest. Just the idea that I could live without feeling the pressure of modern life is a goal worth achieving, for no other reason than to just be. I know I live in a free world or at least that's what I have been educated to think; the definition of free contains different aspects of human experiences and beliefs. Certainly I do have freedom as long as I conform to the rules that society has enacted and set in motion. Society is me and a group of me's who live to pursue happiness and abundance, and society's definition of freedom is necessary in order to accomplish those desires.

The belief system that has been established as free, in terms of political unity and social righteousness, is nothing like the freedom that Chuang Tzu thought about. It is like daylight and dark. His words are so foreign to my thinking that they are hard to understand. How can I not be driven or compelled to push and fight in order to get what I want? If I left my affairs take care of themselves, I would have nothing but broken dreams and loneliness. I would watch the world pass me by, as I sink in the quicksand of doing nothing. Life would be unbearable and my misery would overshadow any thoughts of changing my situation. No action is what I call death in this modern society and that is the end of everything. Some say it's another life, but that doesn't count because this is reality; the reality of power, of righteousness, of control and conformity. My freedom depends on my ability to believe in that social structure. Without it I am nothing but an outcast; a misfit that is off balance, confused and distorted.

Chuang Tzu didn't buy into any of that. He believed that I innately create my own freedom. It is not something to be earned by external acts of compliance; it is within me and always will be. By believing that I must think and act a certain way to achieve freedom is an illusion created by me. I consider my self a human and only believe what is humanly real. I forget there is more to me than my physical system and I live strapped to chair of a three dimensional world.

I begin to incorporate Chuang Tzu's approach to physical freedom by becoming aware of my beliefs.

 Joseph Campbell the 20^th century mythologist said it best:

Follow your bliss.

Bliss is awareness. My inner consciousness is the doer and the driving force on the road to bliss. The external world is nothing more than a picture of my own thoughts and beliefs. I create it in order to expand in awareness. Bliss is a taste of another consciousness, which is the true nature of my being. It's understanding there is an aspect of pleasure in all the things I create. This is what's known as effortless effort; the spontaneous activities of inner consciousness manifested physically. My body consciousness dissolves into this aspect of self which is free; all striving and doing drops away in this stream of awareness.

Lao-Tzu, who lived before Chuang Tzu, explains this inner doing without doing this way:

Less and less do you need to force things,

Until finally you arrive at no-action

Where nothing is done, nothing is left undone...

The Master does nothing

Yet... leaves nothing undone.

Bliss leaves nothing undone, but does everything freely. When I dip my self freely in bliss I find freedom.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The mind is like a crystal ball with no color of its own. It is pure and perfect as it is. But as soon as it confronts the outside world it takes on all colors and forms of differentiation. This differentiation is in the outside world and the mind left to itself shows no change of any character. Now suppose the ball is placed against something altogether contrary to itself and so becomes a dark colored ball. However pure it may have been before, it's now a dark colored ball and this color is seen as belonging from the first to the nature of the ball. Even those who knew it when it was pure now pronounce it soiled by seeing it so and will endeavor to polish it, to enable to regain what it has lost.

That thought is a fundamental belief of the Northern School of Buddhism, which was started in China sometime in the 7^th century. The English translation of those thoughts may not be the exact meaning of Zen, but it does show that consciousness does take on the color and the shape of beliefs.

If I substitute the word consciousness for mind and use the word ego as a metaphor for the outside world, I can begin to understand some of the non-physical aspects of my own being. Inner consciousness can be considered pure and perfect in its own action and it has no physical color. Ego consciousness however is the buffer between the inner and outer world and it absorbs whatever color I choose to believe. Color is truth within vibration and my beliefs create different vibrations, so my ego is continually changing in color. The color of my ego attracts similar colors and I experience those attractions in some way. My inner consciousness is not changed by these vibrations, but my body consciousness is.

Body consciousness is the consciousness that exists within every cell, molecule and organ in my body. My memory is actually stored in my body consciousness; the brain is just the interrupter for those thoughts. The ego and the body consciousness create the reality that I experience, so if I vibrate in dark colors or low vibrations my body consciousness changes and vibrates at that frequency. The inner consciousness continues in its pure state and will raise my vibrational level at any time, once my ego asks for help. Trying to polish my inner consciousness is pointless, but using it as the polish for my ego and body consciousness is essential.

Misunderstanding the nature and action of consciousness creates the distorted beliefs that fuel my choices and I experience probabilities from the action of ego. My ego is always connected to my inner consciousness, but has the free will to ignore it. This consciousness scenario is the foundation for the diverse collection of belief structures that exist physically. There are endless vibrational frequencies that create different colors of ego consciousness.

The blend of the inner, body and ego consciousness is the polish that alters the color of my vibrations. Complete unity of consciousness creates a crystal color, but the crystal color is not the purpose of physical existence. It eternally exists in its own awareness and I am a whole part of that awareness. Physical existence is the experience of different vibrations in order to widen my awareness, using contrast as the catalyst. Crystal clear is always my vibration, but the desire to know my self in other vibrations is the impetus of conscious action in physical form. Every color is a vibrational lesson that is a crucial aspect of becoming. Becoming is the nature of all consciousness.

I am a crystal clear ball but choose to experience other colors and I become those colors to express different qualities of my self. In that process I expand in awareness and never lose what I already have. Purity and perfection are always in a state of becoming. Qualities of my consciousness accept each color and transform it into energy which continues to expand. Nothing is ever lost in awareness.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hope of man, namely, the appeal to experience is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. We must explain this hope. We grant than human life is mean; but how did we find out it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is this universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?

The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis a residuum it could not resolve.

 Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river which out of regions I see not, pours for a season its stream into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and pull my self in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the vision come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay The Over-soul written in 1842 is an accurate description of the self I call human. I am physical energy filled with power from a source that eludes my physical senses. I develop stories and beliefs about the nature of my own multi-dimensional reality and live through the stories that are lodged firmly in my convictions and beliefs. I'm not sure what it is that motivates me to develop the external manifestations of my beliefs, but I have been doing it for thousands of linear years.

The stories change and the people and places within them change in form and substance as I become more aware of my own energy. Stories written thousands of years in the past have a deep rooted truth, but may be covered with the fragile beliefs of the writer. I believe them regardless of their frailty, because my physical senses justify their existence through religion or science. The metaphysical aspects of these stories are woven through each page, but are lost in the translation of human ego.

The history of man as Emerson points out is only partially recorded. The river of man is studied, but the water of life is overlooked and taken for granted. Within the water lies another fragment of unrecorded history that is pack in molecules of mental enzymes, which release themselves in physiological time, as well as linear time. I look at the river and discount each drop of water. Each one is an element of the whole, while being a whole itself. I fail to incorporate my inner senses in the act of physical knowing fearing I cross into the forbidden territory of unknown aspects of my self, even though I feel those aspects every moment. The hopes I feel in those moments are my inner senses expressing a blueprint for me to follow. That blueprint is the ethereal water of wisdom that is a portion of my entity in its completeness. A portion in completeness is a description of one self which is focused on multitudinous realities which express manifestations from a hidden source. Following the blueprint I am no longer a surprised spectator, but an aware component in the action of consciousness. I sense a portion of my own completeness and in that process a drop becomes a sea and I expand using moments as waves of awareness. 

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

If nothing ever changed there would be no butterflies.

That thought has deep roots. Those roots are planted in action which is always constant. I change ever second as my consciousness blinks in and out of different realities. I travel through different mental enzymes to create as well as to experience physical manifestations. My non-physical consciousness creates clusters of awareness for me to experience. I put every person, place and thing in my daily focus, so I can continue to expand in consciousness. Every birth, joy, death, accident and natural catastrophe becomes real in order to expand or to alter my belief structure. The caterpillar and the butterfly are metaphors that explain my transformation from one aspect of consciousness to another.

  Words and metaphors describe physical beliefs, perceptions, choices and probabilities. The transformation from non-physical to physical, or physical to non-physical can not be described, it can only be experienced through the mental enzymes of consciousness. The word change verbally denotes a transformation of action from one wire of awareness to another. I begin as a whole and continue to become more aware of that whole, as I create the events I experience. The butterfly is always the worm and worm is always the butterfly, expressing itself in more awareness. One is always within the other. I am one self as well as other selves in the reality of duplicity, so I can express the expansion of my entity in various clusters of consciousness.

Accepting my self as a group within a whole while maintaining the essence of my entity is a message from the butterfly. My wings of awareness expand from one dream to another. Individual creation has its genesis in dreams and my dreams are always changing and creating other realities, as I transform my self in the action of energy.

 Chuang-Tzu expresses change this way:

In a dream, I saw myself as a great butterfly with wings that spanned all of creation; now I am not sure if I was Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or if I am a butterfly dreaming I am Chuang Tzu.

Change is a transformation from one reality to another. Dreaming is another reality creating action for me to experience not just in this focused form, but in the changing consciousness of my inner transformational butterfly.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The diverse response and grades of significance that an object elicits can be illuminated this way:

An animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious marking. To a western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally to a physicist it may be a profound text on quantum physics.

 Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D. wrote that explanation of significance in his essay Hidden Wisdom. The point is that awareness occurs in stages based on beliefs and the knowledge we comprehend. In all cases the observer's were partially correct in their description of the book, but the full meaning and the significance of the book was not experienced by any of them except the physicist who comprehended different levels of significance. Walsh is pointing out that I may believe I fully understand something, but be completely unaware of its true significance. The universe and my own entity are constantly sending me messages which I overlook, because I am unaware and discount them. My reality is based on my awareness in the moment and within each moment new awareness is being projected by my inner consciousness. When I begin to sense inwardly, my level of significance increases with my awareness.

The Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher explains the state of reality this way:

Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradictions. All levels of significance up to the level of the meaning in the example of the book are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

Schumacher's statement is a bit judgmental in terms of which reality is considered acceptable and which isn't. All realities are acceptable to the subject that is experiencing them even when they don't like them. The more they dislike them the more they stay the same in the vibration of that changing mental enzyme. That is the nature of consciousness. It is in a constant action moving from one aspect of reality to another in order to experience different levels of awareness, so even though I may miss the significance of a particular object at one energy point or self, I will experience it in another, as another self. Once I do experience the complete significance as one self, a morphogenetic reaction takes place and I am able to experience that significance using other energy points or other selves. Consciousness stimulates my awareness by introducing physical messages like the book scenario in order for me to expand in significance and awareness at my own speed. The book is just one basic example of the kind of messages I receive every minute.

Walsh and Schumacher are exposing me to this exercise to make me aware that I don't only see things the way I think they are, I also see them through my beliefs about what I think I am. When I expand my beliefs about my self, I significantly become aware of other realities that are moving through me constantly. When I begin to perceive the complexity of my entity, I expand my awareness in other clusters of consciousness. Everything is significant without degrees, when I allow my self the opportunity to expand outside of my current belief structure. When that takes place the book may become a series of books, which include guided acts of consciousness that make me aware of my own abilities to become multidimensional as well as plural.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Sheba's Gifts to Solomon

Queen Sheba loads forty mules with gold bricks as gifts for Solomon. When her envoy and his party reach the wide plain leading to Solomon's palace they see the top layer of the entire plain is pure gold. They travel on gold for forty days.

What foolishness to take gold to Solomon, when the dirt of his land is gold. You think to offer your intelligence, reconsider. The mind is less than road dust. The embarrassing commonness they bring only slows them down. They argue. They discuss turning back, but they continue, carrying out the orders of their queen.

Solomon laughs when he sees them unloading gold bars.

"When have I asked you for a sop for my soup? I don't want gifts from you. I want you to be ready for the gifts I give.

You worship a planet that creates gold. Worship instead the one who creates the universe. You worship the sun. The sun is only a cook Think of a solar eclipse. What if you get attacked at midnight? Who will help you then?"

These astronomical matters fade. Another intimacy happens, a sun at midnight, with no east, no night or day.

The clearest intelligences faint, seeing the solar system flickering, so tiny in that immense lightness. Drops fall into a vapor and the vapor explodes into a galaxy. Half a ray strikes a patch of darkness. A new sun appears. One slight, alchemical gesture and saturnine qualities form inside the planet Saturn. The sensuous eye needs sunlight to see. Use another eye. Vision is luminous. Sight is igneous and sun-fire light very dark.

That is Rumi telling an ancient story that expresses several messages. Awareness is not always age-related. Individuals from different centuries had acute awareness of inner consciousness and expressed it using different forms. Art is an expression of consciousness and it is always telling a story and sending a message to me. When I begin to accept the messages rather than restrict them is when I begin to sense the beauty that surrounds me. I am immersed in a magnetic bubble that is always in a state of change. I attract what I believe and continue to attract what I resist.

Rumi explains that my inner senses are paved with the gold of awareness. There is nothing I need to bring, I only need to accept and appreciate the power of my own consciousness and see with the eye that needs nothing but my complete acceptance. Worship is an act of separation; acceptance is an act of unity. Self created suffering is not the road that is paved in awareness, it is a road paved in resistance.

Rumi's 700 year old message is being sent now as I continue to experience the eclipse of my own body consciousness.