FROGS INTO PRINCES

FREEDOM!

It is so very, very difficult to be free of all the stories you carry in your mind because the reality you live in is all about stories.

When I was a small boy first reading about atomic physics, the only model I could readily find was the Bohr atom model: a nucleus of protons and neutrons with behaviors governed by gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, surrounded by spheres of electrons of different energy levels.  That was truth then. This model produced the atomic bomb. This was the truth back then, 1942.

Einstein had overturned the Newtonian model of space and object movements with a model of spacetime geometry being a function of mass and energy.  Space was not flat as per Newton, it was curved. That was truth then, 1917.

New scientific models are born when old theories fail to explain new phenomena and scientists conceive of new solutions, either of an imaginal process, or a new mathematics waiting for someone to interpret the rquations in a way that “explains” the new findings of physics, astronomy, whatever.

Philosophers, Eastern and Western, had been describing the nature of existence, of the ‘real’ for thousands of years with each generation feeling the contemporary models of astronomy and pre-physics being ‘truth’, and providing arguments why the old model failed. In the West, concerning existence, existence was deemed illusory by Bishop Berkeley, subjective by Hume, transcendental by Kant, and dialectic by Hegel. Nietche gave us Nazism, while Hegel gave us Communism. This was the truth back then. 

These basic truths became covered in symbols and other dressing so that we did see that the underlying models were not truth, but opinion or point of view.

But we know really, truth is not truth.  What is real or true is based on the length and quality of your education and other influences.  If you are a physicist, you may now join many mystics who hold that all of apparent existence is based on vibrations of energy, strings, or some such, while a physician would explain everything in terms of nervous systems, information, and biology. Six years of physics education brings you solidly into science fiction while six years of medical school give you tools to help some sick and injured, and a very healthy annual income.

The point is, truth changes from decade to decade let alone century to century, and it is all a matter of point of view within interacting matricies of cultural, scientific, and conventional knowledge, all of which are changing.  I call these the truths of the moment.

You see, there is no truth here that lasts more than a decade or two, or maybe a century.  I consider all knowledge to be no more than convenient fictions, including all physics, all religions and philosophies, including Advaita, Buddhism, Kashmir Shaivism, Nisargadatta, Ramana, that may be operationally useful, yield inventions or treatments, or provide help psychologically from time to time.  Just as physics has evolved, so has psychotherapy, from Freud, to Klein, to Guntrip, Carl Rogers, etc., each providing different tools and concepts of self and mind. Then the Ken Wilbers come along and create models of psychological and spiritual evolution that put all these models in a meta context that explains everything for a time.

The Sixth Buddhist Patriarch supposedly stated, “The only truth is that there is no truth, but beware of even this truth.”  This leads ultimately to Seung Sahn’s position that everything is all mind, don’t get lost in it or captivated by it.  His teachings are not to get caught in models or concepts. Just relax and have a cup of tea.

So what to do given this conundrum?

There is another way to live life, not from knowledge and having goals, desires, wants, or planning for the future, but by becoming as still as possible and just feel everything within and without.  If anything arises, just rest in the feeling or sensation. Don’t interpret it as painful, scary, or anything else. Examine all desires and emotions, as well as your body’s sensations, and feel what they feel like as opposed to the interpretation your mind gives to these energies and feelings.  It is a very difficult path to go from being immersed in a quagmire of interactive and interpenetrative thoughts, emotions, desires, appetites, goals, and current social and scientific knowledge, to an ability to be relaxedly immersed in the waters of constantly changing experiences.

When you are able to step outside of knowledge, a whole new world of feeling opens to you.  Once the center of gravity of your awareness leaves your head and sinks into your heart and gut, you leave the dimension of mundane humanity and enter a realm of “magic,” where everything is always changing, second by second, and nothing can be described or grasped by concepts of words which do not evolve or change fast enough to “grasp” reality.  One gradually sinks into a new dimension of existence where you become the ever-changing real, instead of knowing the real.  But even this new real is not real because it is ever changing and can’t be captured at all.  It can only be experienced and in that  experience, there you are, both as a constant observer, but also as the experience itself, simultaneously. You are both the ever changing forms and the containing observer, both at the same time, not two.

When entering this way of being, talks about existence, beingness, knowledge are of no use, because you have become it, and magic begins to happen.  What was real no longer is, and you develop powers of seeing and healing from this different dimension.  You have become a mystic, a sorcerer, a witch, with witchy powers because in this dimension the laws of reality, of cause and effect are very different because you are that reality and all that is, is you.  When you realize that, you can begin to change that reality directly by intent and using the universal energies around you because they are you.

You can begin to create stories that free people from a problem or even an illness through a model of energy healing.  You can tell stories that millions can follow like FDR’s New Deal, or hypnotize people with speeches, or lead them to tears like a great poet, or to love, like Rumi.  

You learn how to create emotions, happiness, energies in others, even hundreds or thousands at a time directly, by controlling your own energies and feelings their’s, and just abide there, and a new configuration will be born.

This is how a mystic operates by manipulating or playing with energies within his or herself and within others, including any life form, not by knowledge, but by direct hands on manipulation and use of intention.  You create a model and Shakti follows by filling that story with creative energy.