Thoughts on Levels of Awareness

A start in moving to more advanced consciousness in our society would be to stop scapegoating (the old custom of putting your sins on a goat and casting it out into the desert). Today, the terrorist is the scapegoat coming back home. It could be called a communist, a Russian, etc., but now it is a terrorist. There is a growing chance that terror will destroy our civilization, but not necessarily on the premises that have been presented by our politicians.

Current plans call for the construction of an even taller building on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. We’ll show them. What does this say about our consciousness (and our memorial to those who lost their lives on 9/11). This is what most people do in analysis. Assisting them in building a still bigger ego structure goes down as a dramatic cure and both analyst and patient feel better for a time — the patient is, after all, functioning again as head of the corporation, or a cog in the industrial machinery, or whatever. Too bad his wife left him and he also lost his soul along the way.

A misconception of levels is the biggest problem facing us, both individually and collectively. Jesus referenced this when he was accused of transgression for taking grain from the field on the Sabbath. He was told, "You have defiled the sabath and stolen!" Jesus responded, “If thou knowest what thou doest thou art blest; if thou not knowest what thou doest, thou art cursed and a transgressor of the law." It’s the level of consciousness that defines the rightness or wrongness of an action or a policy. Are we building monuments to ourselves, or are we assisting in the advance of humanity and the evolution of consciousness?

Our Task in These Times: Turning Three-dimensional Consciousness into Four

Dr. Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst who died recently, once examined five historical people who had been hit by what he termed "the Greater Self," and Edinger then contemplated what these people did in the face of the divine personality. He looked at: Job, Jesus, Buddha, Blake, and Nietchze.

Dr. Carl Jung once said that William Blake went farther into the collective unconscious than anyone and yet lived to tell the tale because he hung onto his ordinariness. Blake painted, wrote, and engraved, without being incinerated by his brush with God. Nietchze expressed the agonized cry of a man who had seen something but didn’t have one person who could understand. If he had possessed only a companion, he might have been able to carry his enlightenment through, but he didn’t, so ultimately it destroyed him.

In my own life I do not want to be an enlightened one or a self-styled savior. More and more I enjoy the most ordinary things, they take on a divine beauty. Occasionally just a color or taste, or slant of sunshine is just breathtaking. It is on the level of attitude -- nothing has to change but the attitude we hold for it. It’s not the things, it is our attitude toward the things.

Please understand I don’t live this way each day, and this is not my personal experience at all times, but it is an attitude that is filtering up and getting close to my reality.

People come to me lamenting the obvious break downs in our cultural and economic system. I don’t know how to talk about this without getting into the flypaper of contradiction. I think I finally understand what my old teacher Krishnamurti was trying to say to me 50 years ago, that all physical materialism and objective knowledge is inappropriate. I feel foolish because there is nowhere to go, that is the summation of what I have learned.

We live in such a difficult time. How are we to be when everything is falling down and breaking apart all around us? For our daily lives we still have to balance the checkbook, make choices and take action. We must do our best to lean toward "the good."

All one can do is carry it through to its conclusion, which is absolute exhaustion or paralysis. Christianity was at least potentially a system for waking one up to four-dimensional consciousness, but it has been translated by the church into three- dimensional terms.

How do we realize this new consciousness collectively?

No three-dimensional action or language has the slightest effect transforming things except perhaps bringing it to a ripeness for transformation. All language is inherently three-dimensional because it is based on the principle of cause and effect. In every sentence there is an equal sign, similar to a math formula. In the first half of sentence, the subject, says "this is something," and the second half, which is about the object, says “that is something” and, if we had the ears to hear it we would realize that it says this is that. But we hear it as cause and effect.

Jung did say, quoting alchemy, which was engrossed in this problem, that one begat two. In other words, consciousness splits and is aware of the other. Two begets three, consciousness turns back on itself -- for humans, this creates self awareness. This is the consciousness we have inherited now. We are three-dimensional people, for the most part, living in a time of inadequate three-dimensional consciousness.

A two-dimensional person sits in a dual world, and is played upon by that world. He or she wathches the gods fight; evil comes, good comes; he/she is sublimely childlike in watching it. That’s the unburdened simple man we are so envious of and try to go back to emulate, hippie-style. I have seen this consciousness first hand in the rural villages of India. For a time I thought of moving there, where life is filled with meaning and people, despite material hardship, are actually more at peace. There is no chance of succeeding at this regression to an earlier form of consciousness, however. Two-dimensional man is helpless -- at times delighted and at other time terrified -- by watching the gods direct his fate.

To satisfy this passion to get out of the contradictions of three-dimensional consciousness, we seek after money, or we try to get the right love partner, or we seek relief on Saturday night at a movie, and the "10,000 things of the world" (as Buddhists describe it) quickly follow. The passion is right, the level is wrong -- the true problem is three-dimensional consciousness itself.

Dr. Jung, one of my heroes, could’t explain it well, but the trinitarian symbols he wrote about in his later works refers to this level of awareness. Dreams that come out of everyone badger people half insane trying to solve in the unconscious the problem of the three. All the dreams where there are three things waiting for the fourth, something is incomplete. In a key dream from my own life, one that I took to Dr. Jung, three Buddhas are born and I am waiting for the fourth Buddha to arrive (This dream and the encounter with Dr. Jung is described in the book Balancing Heaven and Earth). Then, in my dream, a big snake scares the devil out of me. This is code language for the steps of consciousness. In three-dimensional consciousness, something is always thrown out.

All taboos are so holy that they are forbidden.

It is inevitalbe that the fourth thing will show up, the solutiion is not to go on a witch hunt trying to stamp it out. I’m amazed speechless that so many otherwise enlightened people don’t get this. Jung made a few opaque statements on this topic. He wrote that your neurosis is your salvation. Another time he wrote that "your inferior function is your enree to heaven." At Jungian workshops people nod their heads in affirmation, but clearly they don’t get it. People challenged the contradictions in his writings and Dr. Jung replied that he was trying to make it as paradoxical as he could because this is the nature of Reality. His famed book, Answer to Job, is almost universally misunderstood. A sentence at the end, which should have been the opening line, states, "I am not talking about the God in heaven that Christianity keeps making pronouncements about. I’m talking about the god complex in man!"

Theologians and oher scoffers never get that far or are too mesmerized to hear it when they get there.

Waking Up to What Has Always Been

A few years back I had a most interesting dream. I had read J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a boy, and was fascinated by these stories. As dreams often do, this one picked up imagery from outer experience and applied it to the inner situation of the psyche.

“I dreamt of a power that controls the world, and whoever has the ring has absolute power. He (or she) can teleport, become invisible, and is essentially invulnerable; no one can contest him. This condition lasts for 20 years, but over time the power of this ring kept diminishing for the person who possessed it, until there was almost no power left. Then, just at that point of realizing the power is gone, a young man comes running; he is exhausted and panting, and the police are after him trying to get the ring!

The boy in the dream alters his path slightly and chucks the ring into my hand as he runs by. I knew instantly that I had about five seconds to decide whether or not to accept the ring. It was very tempting, the power of the ring, but I intuitively knew somehow it would fade in twenty years; so, in that five seconds while I still had the power of decision and before the ring could overpower me, I threw it into the ground with all my might. I did this just as the police converged on me. We all got down on our hands and knees to see that the ring had completely disintegrated. The ground around the ring was golden, but there was not a piece of it anywhere. All power had been grounded by my action.

And then, in one of those strange shifts that occur in dreams, the police and I went together a distance away to look in a pool. We were admiring the golden fish. With that the dream ended.

Like all dreams, this one provides a brief history of what was going on inside me at the time. I believe this was a dream of discovering that my thoughts create what is “out there,” and this dream heralded a change of consciousness. During my nineteen years of wintering in India, that traditional culture helped distill a wisdom represented in this dream of the ring: the objective reality that we think is “out there” is actually only of our own inner construction.

This has been going on all the time: but in my 80s I began waking up to this reality of the psyche. When you wake up to it, nothing has changed in the outer reality -- yet everything in your experience changes. I suspect that is true for everyone on the journey into wholeness. No change, yet at critical points of transition there is a 180-degree shift of perspective. My attitude changed dramatically after having this small dream. The feeling for days and weeks was pure joy and revelation. Also a huge sense of relief. I believe it was the dream of a new level of awareness, a state that my ego had been preparing for (yet also fighting at every turn) for many years.

We all fight until there is no fight left in us before we find out the goal of heaven for us.

Please note there is very little drama in this dream. It states in simple, symbolic form a transformation that theology fills volumes speculating about: a shift from ego-centered to a different sort of consciousness. There isn’t any movement required at all to get to this consciousness, just waking up to what has always been. It’s no big news, and yet it’s the biggest news in the history of the world. There is substantiation for this from Zen Buddhism, before enlightenment you chop wood, draw water, after enlightenment, chop wood, draw water. Nothing needs to happen, because it is already so.

Another dream two years ago was much the same: I suddenly had the power to heal physical illness in people. By a nod of my head anyone I passed on the street was healed. Word got around very quickly. Soon a mob of people with their various maladies was rushing to me. I woke up on my naivite and realized I would be trampled to death by this mob of people. If this got around it would be super destructive…I thought, “what do I do now that I have been naïve? I couldn’t go home because people would be there, so I got a hotel room under an assumed name. I thought who is the best person who would understand and not lock me up? I have a friend, Dr. Dolph Arnicar, who shares an office with my friend David, so I went to talk to him for objective help. He saw what it was. First we must get you protected to cope with the mob, when that is accomplished…and there the dream ended.

Getting enlightenment isn’t difficult, or so I’ve read, surviving it is what’s difficult.

Our Place in the Great Dance

I recently had a dream in which I was nearly asleep in my tiny bedroom , a single room (amazingly small dimensions) in a hotel or apartment house. I became aware of superb music coming from somewhere outside my room. The music was classical, finely crafted, a male voice singing with large orchestra as accompaniment. I was amazed at the beauty of it and wondered where such sublime music could be coming from. Then a door from the next room, which I did not know existed, opened a crack and the music was louder indicating the music was coming from that room, Also a ray of light came into my dark room. The door opened very slowly wider and wider, people began to come into my room and soon were very near meand some sitting on my bed beside me. I was greatly surprised, pleased and very puzzled. More and more people came, more light came into the room, the room very slowly expanded in all dimensions and finally became a great hall as if in a castle or Medieval building. It was lighted with golden light, perhaps from cut glass chandeliers, many candelabra, elaborate furniture, much gold, rich sculptures, tapestries, inlaid marble floor, everything one could imagine to portray a royal place of immense beauty. The music grew in volume and reverberated in the great room. The many people who had accumulated by this time were royally dressed and were dancing with great dignity on the great floor. Somewhere along the way (though I was not aware of it), I had gotten up from my tiny bed and taken my place in the great dance which was going on. A profound happiness filled me and the atmosphere of the dream.

From my teaching in Zurich, this sounds like a death dream - being ushered into the next world in all its glory. Aging or ill people approaching death often have such dreams of the Golden World. If we can accept them rather than running away from their majesty, they can provide deep meaning and inform us of the glory of our lives.

Man the Complainer

It is doubtful that human beings can live outside the yoke of necessity for long. Much of one’s life is set; most people have to get up in the morning and go to work. We complain and have daydreams, “If only I could win a million dollars things would be great,” but in fact they grow worse. The meaning of life often falls apart for those individuals who actually win the lottery or unexpectedly come into a great sum of money. Recall this recent news item:

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (AP) -- The wife of the lottery winner who took home the richest undivided jackpot in U.S. history says she regrets his purchase of the $314.9 million ticket that has thrust her family into the public spotlight.

"I wish all of this never would have happened," Jewel Whittaker told The Charleston Gazette for Tuesday's editions. "I wish I would have torn the ticket up."

Since winning the lottery two years ago, her husband, Jack Whittaker, has been arrested twice for drunken driving and has been ordered into rehab. He pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor assault charge for attacking a bar manager, and is accused in two lawsuits of making trouble at a nightclub and a racetrack.

There have been several thefts involving Whittaker's vehicle, his office and his house. One of the thefts occurred at his home in September on the same day an eighteen-year-old friend of Whittaker's granddaughter was found dead there. The death remains under investigation.

Last week Whittaker, 57, reported his granddaughter missing. Putnam County sheriff's Sgt. Lisa Arthur said the granddaughter is not considered a kidnapping victim.

***

It is true that too much grinding necessity dulls a person and reduces him or her to the lowest common denominator. But not enough necessity is a guaranteed ticket to neurosis for most people. So we complain – about our family, about our job, about where we live, about the weather. Instead of homo erectus, the human species should have been called homo complingere, which means man the complainer.

It is difficult for us to accept that contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is.

Sacred and Profane

I was surprised to learn recently that PROFANE means The Porch of the Church. In medieval times the sacred myths of the church were carried out in private at the altar for an elect few; the same myths were played out on the "porch" of the church as morality plays for the illiterate populous of the town.

This puts "profane" in an entirely different meaning for me.

Fountain of Youth

The Fountain of Youth is a legendary spring that reputedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks of its waters. Florida is said to be its location, and stories of the fountain are some of the most persistent legends associated with that American state. No wonder so many retirement communities exist there.
While our modern economy profits from the cult of youth, selling us a plethora of material goods and services with promises of youthfulness, what is really needed as we age is the inner resource of the Eternal Youth. This energy is free, refreshing and always available. To access it only requires an attitude of tinkering, discovery, and play.

In the spirit of play we may toss together elements that were formerly separate, and in this sense symbols are a highly sophisticated form of play.

To keep the spirit of Eternal Youth active in us during the second half of life we must learn again to play with our experience. Recall the joy of discovery before it bowed to work, obligation, and duty. Movement is alive; inertia is dead. We become more “unalive” as we cling to that which is predictable and unchanging

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these
are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real
something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem)
as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they
would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely
changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my
lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me
by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason
hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I
require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity
beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

-- Walt Whitman, from the collection Leaves of Grass (1867)
(With appreciation to Ulrike)

Cultivating Our Talents

talent [ˈtӕlənt] noun
a special ability or cleverness; a skill
Example: a talent for drawing

According to the dictionary talent may refer to:

A personal gift/skill
A show-business personality or group of them
Tarento, the Japanese pronunciation of the word; a variety entertainment personality in Japan
Talent agent, a person who finds jobs for actors, musicians, models, and other people in various entertainment businesses
Talent manager (or personal manager), one who guides the career of artists in the entertainment business
Talent scout, responsible for finding and developing talent
Talent show, a live performance spectacle (sometimes on TV) where contestants perform acting, singing, dancing, acrobatics and other art forms
Talent (unit), an ancient unit of weight and currency

Everyone has God-given talents. Other qualities can and should be developed with work and dedication, but when we are in the realm of a talent then we are truly co-creating with the divine rather than willing our way through the world. A talent is like the higher Self whispering in your ear or directing your hand. Sometimes it is all we can do to keep up with this inspiration. As with all relationships, we cannot legitimately will or overpower a muse without damaging the relationship. Neither can we ignore it without making our lives miserable. We can, however, stop drugging ourselves with things of the world or activity so that inspiration allows our talent to flow.

Practice is an organized allotment of time and energy to converse with the divine through our talent. It is, at best, a conversation. When we don’t practice we don’t create anything and fail to participate in the celestial dialogue. When we try to muscle our way through practice the small “I” (ego) has taken possession of the work and it soon becomes dry, boring, empty and frustrating. We are likely to quit when this method of practice is pursued for long. Practice, or having a practice, is best when we can take delight in the conversation, relief in letting go the burden of consciousness.

Consciousness is a burden. To be forced to make decisions, to feel torn between “this versus that” takes a lot of energy and wears us down. Eventually we can’t stand it anymore and find some way to blot out consciousness through food or drink, drugs, pornography, or diverting attention by purchasing some new bauble. Such distractions are not inherently good or bad, it’s just that they are empty and ultimately unsatisfying when used in this manner. We need to learn to go “decently unconscious,” that is, to deliberately let go of the burden by participating in creation or celestial dialogue.

Life becomes a dutiful drag when our activities are one dutiful practice session after another, preparing or ploughing through, waiting for something to happen that feels vital and alive.

A practice, is deliberate stopping of the hum and buzz of the mind “stuff”, quieting the mind so that one might participate in the celestial dialogue.

We are co-creators with the divine force, which needs us to manifest in time. Our talent is the arena in which we have the highest capacity for conversation. When we are culturally rewarded for this talent it is natural that should begin to exploit it for all the wrong reasons. When this happens we often “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” When our talent is exploited – for money, for fame, for power – then it loss the divine connection and dries up.

Perceived from a more penetrating perspective, the oppositions which present themselves each day are the play of energy. They are not really opposed, but rather two sides of poles of an essential unity. To move from contradiction to paradox is to recognize the underlying unity. From a less penetrating perspective it seems that the oppositions victimize us, tearing apart our feeble and temporary attempts to get things under control, lined up, and settled. But the universe doesn’t seem to want to be settled. It is continually sifting, shifting, changing, and reinventing itself. Though cycle after cycle of birth and death, creation and dissolution. Forms take shape and then recede again into undifferentiated flux and flow. But along the way there is an accumulation and an accretion of awareness that builds upon itself into increasingly integrated.

Unity and diversity are two interesting aspects of celestial conversation or dialogue.

Practice should be a time for communing with the divine, allowing it regular space in our lives to inform and inspire us. Like the basic rhythm of breathing in (inspire) to take in the “other” and let it commingle with us, and then giving it back again, the conversation is allowing ourselves to be played.

To "Fall" in Love

To fall in love is an abyss of ecstasy and bewilderment that is far beyond our western understanding. It is nothing less than seeing the image of God in the form of another person and being transfixed by a splendor beyond our comprehension. The art of falling in love is recent in human experience, probably not much known before the advent of our own modern age. It is still not known, or honored, in the eastern world except as they drink up our customs and ideals by the sudden deluge of the information age. It is astonishing to see how quickly an easterner takes on western characteristics - both good and bad - as he or she adopts the English language and western customs. Only one generation is required to turn a traditional easterner into a jeans-clad ambitious youth clambering to get to America where the streets are paved with gold.

So, what is the strange love required on the spiritual path? It is very much akin to our romantic love, or falling in love. I am inclined to think that our capacity to fall in love is a new faculty of religious comprehension for which we have so little insight as to be catastrophic. We naively presume that falling in love is the ideal preparation for marriage, when the facts are that virtually no ordinary human arrangement can hold the immense power of the Divine Love which has fallen upon us.

Perhaps romantic love, falling in love, appeared when our traditional religious forms began to lose their power to mediate the Splendor of God for us. To ask another fallible human being to carry this splendor is to ask the household wiring of our ordinary life to carry the hundred thousand volt power of the Vision of Heaven.

I once observed traditional Indian youths going to the temples frequently, sitting in yoga position before an image of God, tremble with the power of the experience, then go about their daily work and family without being tempted to ask that vast impersonal experience of a mortal human.

Probably the most volatile problem our modern world faces is what to do with the uncontrollable power of the love that is greater than any individual. Little wonder that romantic love, that lightning bolt that falls from the heavens, when laid at the feet of a mortal human , fails both persons involved. The origin of the term Honeymoon implies that it
lasts for a month.

But what about "reality"?

It is possible to invest the great love in a way which can support it and thus leave our human love to a realm which is
appropriate for it. To mix the two is a sure program for disillusionment and bitter disappointment.

All models prove inadequate finally, and it must be admitted that all loves are the same love - of divine origin; but this is a rare experience to be found only after the most careful differentiation. Freud was right: everything depends on sex as the origin of its power: however, he declined ever to define his term, perhaps in humility at the power of it. He might
have been better understood if he had used the term Love. But it is a rare individual who has earned the right to this Unitive vision.