The Pipe

While I slept it was all over,

Everything. My eyes, squashed white,

Flowed off toward dawn.

There was a noise,

Which like all else, spread and disappeared:

There's nothing worth seeing, listening for.

When I woke up, everything seemed cut off.

I was a pipe, still smoking,

Which daylight would knock empty once again.

Shinkichi Takahashi the great 20^th century Japanese poet has an interesting way of expressing what we all experience. He uses words and images that teeter on the border of the unreal and that's what makes his work so real. He crosses the line and draws another one, which is deeper and more pronounced and less rational, but very real. Each night I draw a line and leave one reality and visit others without a body. I create my own form and dabble in psychological time in a space filled with clusters of consciousness. I experience without beliefs and choose without judgment. Each night I become something more than a physical human; I become a smoking pipe filled with the tobacco of my own awareness and taste the essence of my own mind.

Dreaming is an amazing act of transformation where the complexities of being human are shaped into a blueprint of physical life in order to expand one aspect of my multi-dimensional existence. The word sleep poorly describes the transformation from human to spirit. Sleep denotes a tranquil state where I energize my self in order to function physically, which is just one aspect of what I create as I leave my body consciousness. Dreams are a mixture of remnants of body consciousness experiences, which act out in other realities and I get a glimpse of that action. I dream for a short period as I return from my diverse realities, where I feel the energy of the consciousness that is responsible for the acts that keep me in a physical state. Physical memories are stored in body consciousness; the simultaneous action of dreams are never stored; they are always in motion expanding within to reveal other clusters of awareness that create vitality and life force. Mental enzymes build physical matter from the vital energy of consciousness, which describes me in the state known as sleeping.

When I wake up everything seems to be cut off; my focus is back in one reality where I can rationalize my existence in the form of dualistic separation. Unnecessary separation creates more awareness as the mental enzymes reveal other forms of matter which were actually created while I was sleeping. When daylight comes I am empty once again, but I am filled with thoughts for a linear day, which create the beliefs that generate the awareness I need to keep the action of my consciousness in a continual stream of vitality which I call physical life. I do it to sleep again and find the light that knocks me empty with the force of nothing.

www.shortsleeves.net
http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

And a man said, Speak to us of self-knowledge. And he answered saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge. You would know in words that which you have always known in thought. You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

The hidden well-spring of your soul must rise and run murmuring to the sea; and the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes. But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure; and seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff of sounding line. For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, I have found the truth but rather I found a truth. Say not, I have found the path of the soul. Say rather, I have met the soul walking upon my path; for the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Khalil Gibran was born in Lebanon in 1883. He was an artist, poet, writer, philosopher and theologian. He is history's third best selling poet behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu. Gibran paints a very vivid portrait of the soul and doesn't use may words to accomplish that mission. His intention is awareness and he wants to share that awareness with all energy in all forms. The vision of the soul unfolding like a lotus flower is a grand thought. The lotus opens at dawn and at night it closes and sinks under the water. I can feel my self opening and closing as I revolve around the sun in this ancient dance of expansion. Like the lotus I simultaneously fruit and flower as I emerge from I reality to another. The lotus has 15 or more petals and an unusual flat seed case in its center, which is a metaphor for the complexity of my own entity, as well as the multiplicity it creates.

The self is boundless and measureless and it continues to open as I become aware of the petals or selves that surround it. The process of awakening each morning is a reminder that selves exists in other worlds, while I have a presence in this one. My dreams create thoughts and I pack them in an empty corner of my body consciousness until I'm ready to use them. The treasures of my infinite depths wait for me to reveal them. I do it as I uncover a belief and expand it in the muddy water of my own forgetfulness.

Truth by truth I become aware of what I already know and I begin to recognize the diversity that exists within my own seedcase. One seed after another germinates in the fertile soil of my consciousness and another petal of life blooms from my awareness.

Murmuring vibrations reach the sea of awareness and I become a maven dripping in self-knowledge. An echo of appreciation bounces off the unfettered walls of eternity and my heart knows in silence the secret of days and nights. That is the process of enlightenment; it's the personal act of expanding my own entity. One self walks a focused line while others cross the line in freedom. Each one is aware of the others, just like the petals of the lotus.

While evidence of our intellectual and technological genius is all around us, there is growing concern that in other ways we have seriously underestimated ourselves. In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs, we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought outside for answers that can only be found within, denied the subjective and the sacred, overlooked latent capacities of mind, imperiled our planet and lived in a collective trance, a contracted, distorted state of mind that goes unrecognized because we share it and take it to be "normality."

That description of our ego state of consciousness is in the Introduction of the book, Paths beyond Ego edited by Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan. I think we all can shake our heads in innate agreement when we read those words. My reality is a padded cell of memories and achievements, which expresses only a sliver of a universe filled with active realities which are waiting for me to become aware of them. In order to reach these unknown but known experiences, I must release my self from my self created cell by accepting it as a partial aspect of my consciousness. This cell is a necessary expression of my limited awareness and I expand in its bubbling contrast. The normal I experience is just one key to normality without restrictions, which is introducing itself in the now.

Transpersonal integration is opening avenues of thought that have been covered with the sludge of my own backwater. I am emerging from a bay of cryptic seaweed and discovering a sea of eclectic epistemology, which includes other aspects of my entity. The far reaches of polluted beliefs are disintegrating in my own mixture of consciousness and are being recycled into a basket of wisdom that has no bottom or top. There is no creed or dogma to control the realms of awareness that circle in and out of the basket in a relentless figure eight of energy, which passes through the constant, but changing truth of nothingness that ignites my mind. I move from awareness to awareness on a chosen track of indulgence in order to expand endlessly in other inner individualistic realities.

Sri Aurobindo explains these inter-universal realities this way:

And yet if we only knew how each loss of one's viewpoint is a progress and how life changes when one passes from the stage of the closed truth to the stage of the open truth; a truth like life itself, too great to be trapped by points of view, because it embraces every point of view . . . a truth great enough to deny itself and pass endlessly into a higher truth. 

My outer world is a curtain that opens to reveal another play, another reality and then another universe appears filled with aspects of my entity and the inner consciousness of a blinding brilliance, which I now call my creative genius.

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.

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/

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/