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#2057 -
In response to the Happy Child
excerpt, I hope all those parents and educators who want
children to be well rounded human beings and grow up in a
school that actively tries to protect the child from the
marketing materialistic forces of American culture, know about
Waldorf education. However, what amazes me is that there are so
many spiritual parents who think nothing of sending their
children off into a system (public education) whose only concern
basically is producing unthinking consuming citizens who will
work in jobs that offer little more than the means to buy all
manner of things. Our children are in danger. protect our future!
Janaka Stagnaro
Editor's note: "Developed by
Rudolf Steiner in 1919, Waldorf education is based on a
developmental approach that addresses the needs of the growing
child and maturing adolescent. Waldorf teachers strive to
transform education in to an art that educates the whole child—the
heart and the hands, as well as the head." See http://www.awsna.org/
Maurice Taylor
http://www.radicalconsciousness.net
The general sense of your position is that
of an awareness (Spirit) of a series of Nows but that there is no
awareness of the Ground or Absolute sense of a unity
consciousness except as Spirit-Beings in harmony. The position of
the Absolute, or Suchness, Ground and the like are reifications
to you, and cannot be experienced. You seem to suggest that the
Spirit-Being position is as far as one can go in terms of
awareness. But I am saying something other than this, as you
know. You are aware of the immediate here and now direct sense of
experience but I think you tend to take flight into thought as a
Spirit-Being as an avoidance of a more expanded Now. Part of this
flight is in the subtle defense of exploring past lives as
avoidance of unity consciousness or Suchness. The basis of the
resistance is in maintaining the separation between Subject and
Object, or between the Spirit-Being-Creator and the created. Not
to maintain this separation is the big overwhelm, the inversion,
the going blank or the unconscious position that reverts the
Spirit-Being back into the universe of things; Unity
Consciousness, to you is a fusion of unconscious mega
proportions. I maintain that this is your rationalized defense
and fear, and is your position of avoidance.
The ego position of the usual self has difficulty being present
because it always interferes with thought which intrudes upon the
present in some form. The more evolved Self position is more
stablized in the Now and can see the passing here and now as a
series of moments. Now the secret to dissolving your defense
against unity consciousness is to see your resistance to it as
such. Your very position of a separate Self is the resistance,
and the activity of this Spirit-Being is the avoidance. This
resistance is to a global Presence, in all aspects, an Eternal
presence that is a Unity consciousness, which is the Whole (what
you now term as a reification – or “nothing there to be
known”). But when you avoid this Knowing, you participate in
the first cause (so to speak) of this universe of time bound
things (while still claiming to be Spirit). This avoidance (or
conceptual denial) is the first movement from the Prime world of
timeless Now to the world of a series of nows in subtle time.
This is your separation as Spirit-Being, the Subject divorced
from Object, the first division creating the duality rather than
maintaining the conscious Suchness of Now; so your moments pass
from now to now as a reduction of Now.
The Now of Suchness cannot be grasped by the mind, so the mind
will say “reification,” “abstraction” or can’t
be known. Suchness is here before the mind can grasp it,
Eternally Here-Now. before Spirit-Being makes its exclusive
separation into Subject from It. But this separate Being is now
the resident resistor maintaining flight (and the first subtle
movement of a pre-physical universe) from Eternal Nowness, stuck
in a position where whatever it does is avoidance from
Now-Suchness because it is the subtle separation, the subtle
barrier-identity contraction where it does not see that both
worlds are the same Source; the view of separation makes them
different, experientially. Now-Suchness is resisted in the
separation which is the tension between Subject and Object or
that between two worlds; it is the imagined world of time or
subtle time, past, present, future tensions or the tension
between a series of nows and Now. But to surrender this
tension-separation is to See Self and World as One, which is not
to resist the Present (Now) but to embrace, not to avoid but to
Know the Moment as It is, Eternally, even as the Separation of
Subject and Object, or of Subject- Spirit-Being-Creator;
Ocean and Wave, One, Eternally, non-dual Awareness.
Maurice Taylor
http://www.radicalconsciousness.net
A Complete
Allegorical Manual on
Consciousness & Cosmos,
with
Vindication
Sublime of that
Most Maligned
Terrestrial Species
or
‘The Hog’s
*
FIRST CHARTER
Realms
1: Earth &
Elsewhere
I BEGINNING
WITH WORDS FROM A PEN
II AS HOT
SO BLIND PURSUIT
III IGNIS
FATUUS
IIII
ORIENTING INKLINGS
2: Storms in a
Multiform Teacup
V A
GATHERING
VI THE
ARCH-ENIGMATIC
VII
HYPERLOVERS
SECOND CHARTER
Doings
(‘Doings’,
DOINGS & Doings)
VIII
FIELDFEELS & SEEMSTREAMS
IX CORE
WAVES, SURE BLOWS
X THE QUIET
ILLUMINANT
XI
ENLOUDENING SPACE
XII SHHHHH….
(IT HITS THE FAN)
XIII
TRANSFORMATION ZONE ZERO
XIV PARTS,
TURNS, OTHERLY BURNS
XV EASIER
SHED THAN SAID
XVI
SOMETHING FLIES ON ANOTHER SIDE
XVII ONE
GREAT CROSSING OF LIVING REALITIES
XVIII ALL
OF A NEW
THIRD CHARTER
Flickerings
XIX
ORGANISMS – TIME’S HARMONIC SECRETIONS
XX PSYCHIC
PRESSURE TO COSMIC SHEET
XXI ENDING
WITH VOICES IN VEINS
First Charter
Realms
1: Earth & Elsewhere
I
BEGINNING WITH
WORDS FROM A PEN
‘Realise,
then,’ said the hog, ‘your unfathomableness with
everything – your organic unfathomableness.’
With that, the sty fell silent. The atmosphere was filled to
capacity with charge, the air laced with a bitter-sweet fragrance
from fresh straw and fresh sweat. Presently the humans began to
leave, some with faces beaming and eyes twinkling, some looking
aghast and acutely nauseous; some with a peculiar blankness, as
if their whole sense of reality had simply been spirited away.
Before long the sty was empty, and the hog settled down to get
some rest. For a matter of minutes it slept soundly and deeply,
then promptly it awoke. Soon afterwards, the humans began coming
back into the pen, their faces showing further spins in a
cauldron of feelings, as gradually again the sty became packed
with people.
The hog remained silent, looking around into the eyes of the
humans with its gentle, penetrating stare, with ears pricked,
snout proud, and mouth softly curled in a smile. Gathering up a
little heap of straw as a cushion, it nestled down with its chin
resting on its front trotters, gazing intently ahead as if at a
most fascinating spectacle. Its eyes positively feasted, flitting
every so often from thing to thing – the face of a human,
the brickwork of the sty, drifting motes in a shaft of sunlight
– as if all was of equal significance, equal depth of
interest. Presently its eyes came to rest on mine. I juddered as
if from a trance, while the hog’s smile cordially glowed.
‘So. You'd like an adventure would you?’ it said.
I stood there speechless.
‘Let's see,’ the hog went on, ‘if I can afford you
a little escape... to a bit more of yourself!’ It got up
onto its trotters. ‘Follow me.’
With that it turned and made its way to an opening at the back of
the pen, disappearing into its darkness. I stumbled after it,
getting down onto my hands and knees to get through the opening,
in the grip of some powerful instinct and a kind of paralysis of
thought – so much, too much, was there in the situation to
be wondered at.
I found myself then in total darkness, feeling the faintest
warmth and moisture in the air, and sensing vividly the presence
of the hog trotting off ahead. Not venturing to get to my feet, I
continued scrambling on hands and knees, following the sound of
the hog's sprightly steps over the firm earthy floor.
The hog began humming, which made following it somewhat easier,
and at a certain point its humming turned into singing. And it
sang a little song, which, if I heard it correctly (I admit my
attentions were chiefly focused on keeping up with the hog
bodily), went like this:
‘Burning, sensitising, conceiving openness
Active in the organic unfathomable
Energising liberties, developing sensibilities
Dissolving every door that's slammable.’
Whatever it was, the only real impression I got at first was of a
string of rather lengthy words sung to a rather lively tune,
which the hog sang over and over. It turned out, at any rate, to
evolve from a little song into an extremely big one, as regularly
the hog would make a slight change in the lyrics and then would
adapt the rest; in this way the verse went through a gradual and
continual transformation, with a whole series of final lines
expressing various approaches to the slammable, rammable,
flammable and damnable.
In the meantime, still engulfed in complete darkness, I scrambled
breathlessly on, perspiring profusely – or, as some would
say, sweating like a pig (or, as a pig might reasonably say,
sweating like a man in a stew). As for the hog ahead, I couldn't
say – and was little interested in – what levels of
secretory activity its complement of sweat glands may have
reached. I did wonder, though, at the physical sensation of
warmth and moisture in the air that seemed to be growing, unsure
whether this was just through me getting hotter and wetter, or
whether in fact the atmosphere itself was. By and by a moment
came, as it often does in such circumstances, when the sensation
became unmistakable – it was getting hotter and wetter.
It quickly became like a sauna, with the heat at first prickly
and then stinging all over, my nostrils and throat soon burning
in the unseen vapour, scalding as I struggled quite erratically
to catch enough breath. More than a sauna, then, with the
darkness and all, it seemed actually like a sweatlodge, a vast
one in which I was undergoing some strange initiation ritual with
the hog.
With a precipitant feeling of breakthrough, of acceptance, as if
I'd come to acclimatise, all at once the scalding heat ceased to
trouble me and my breathing of its own accord settled into a
steady, though very unusual, rhythm. Thereafter it either got not
a lot hotter or I was just automatically acclimatising, as,
continuing 'on autopilot' with the unaccustomed breathing
pattern, I went on happily enough scrambling blindly through the
vapour behind the hog – who, incidentally, was still singing
as it scampered along, and seemed altogether in the very
brightest of spirits.
II
AS HOT SO BLIND
PURSUIT
In this
peculiarly heat-tolerant state, my senses were somehow
heightened, my sense of hearing especially. The combination of
sounds I was generating myself came as greatly amplified, filling
my ears with a vivid scuffle of acoustics, in amongst which beat
the sprightly patter of the hogtrot. On top of this yet another
set of sounds was discernible, quite distant, getting clearer by
the moment – all slight variations of ‘oooep’ and
‘oooup’, like big bubbles surfacing in a liquid. Then
hearing also trickling and the occasional drip, I surmised the
source – which we were now closely approaching – to be
some kind of spring; a hot spring perhaps, source also of this by
now all-saturating vapour.
The hog came to a halt. I drew up close behind it, dripping wet,
intensely yet indifferently hot, remaining on hands and knees. A
sudden thumping splash in front of me, accompanied by a great
squeal of pleasure and followed immediately by my being
thoroughly drenched in piping hot liquid, told me clearly enough
that the hog was having a whale of a bathe.
I slowly edged forward, finding my fingers thereby dipped in the
brink of a pool; gingerly proceeding, I crawled and slipped into
it, feeling a rush of exhilaration as my body flounced down into
total immersion in fluid, with no solid foothold or handhold in
reach. Great bubbles nudging up around me, with voluminous
belching refrains, I floundered my way smartly to come up safe
treading water (or what certainly felt like water). Lolloping at
the surface, then, I picked up the pressure waves – namely
sound, plus other bodily-sensed vibrations – of something
swimming briskly towards me.
‘Nice, eh?’ said the hog, as it swam up. ‘It's the
best way to get cooked I can think of!’
It dipped down under the surface and started swimming around me,
looping and figure-eighting round my legs, rolling and
bubble-chasing (so far as I could feel or figure from the
pressure waves reaching me) – it then moving off a little
way to just frolic amongst the bubbles, punctuating their ‘oooep’
and ‘oooup’ with its own merry, watery ‘oink!’
As the hog came up for breath, its remark about getting cooked
came back into my mind, and I noted it as either a not
particularly amusing joke, or.... what? A bit of a funny thing to
say, in any case.
‘Cooked... ?’ I ventured uncertainly.
‘Mmmm,’ returned the hog, ‘Doing fine thanks.’
And with that, it took another dive.
Well bemused, and actually a tad concerned at my general slowness
on the uptake, I heaved back a gulp of breath and launched myself
downwards, making my way into the inky blackness in what I'd
thought was the hog's direction. Unable to read any pressure
waves distinct from those generated by my own movements, or those
of rising gas globules, I abruptly turned and pushed back up to
the surface. There I emerged with a gasp, as a steady stream of
bubbles came swirling up from beneath, tickling my toes and
coming bursting in a circle of pops around me, as then the hog
came leaping out of the liquid right beside me, going over my
head and coming down the other side. Compelled by some instinct
to take up the chase, I dived after it.
Thrusting again into the inky depths, this time I was hard on the
hog's tail – and actually managed to catch hold of its curly
stern and give it a little tug, which elicited a most exuberant
gurgling squeal. Finding myself then turning tail as if to avoid
some due retribution, I swam off sure of the hog being hard on my
heels. A sudden ‘Oink!’ right in front of my nose thus
caught me by such surprise as to completely take my breath away
– sending me helplessly choking and spluttering, nearly
drowning with laughter, back up for air. Flurrying aloft,
coughing, gasping and groaning in relief, I remained bobbing up
and down at the surface, buzzing and pounding with sheer
exhaustion and exhilaration.
Presently the hog surfaced in front of me.
‘No joke,’ it said, with a tone half-serious and
half-mischievous; ‘We're in really hot water.’ It
sniffed and snuffled. ‘We've got to get down to the barest
bones – and this should boil us down to them pretty quickly.’
Lurid images welled up in my mind, of pale boiled flesh sloughing
off our bodies to leave us as two swimming skeletons, as then a
delicate tingling sensation went right through me, coupled with a
sense of lightening, of in some way rapidly getting lighter and
lighter – a liberating, profoundly uplifting feeling
sweeping through my whole system. In the wake of this, I felt
myself somehow disengaging, lifting out from my well-poached body
of flesh and bones, and going not simply upwards but some way
quite indeterminate, seemingly all ways at once; best describable
perhaps as like both expanding far outwards and falling deep
within at the same time. What could a candle tell of the
'feeling' of its flame flickering out? I couldn't say. But maybe
it would have something very subtle in common with what
registered in my consciousness when, hearing a snuff, a sniffle,
and a belch of bubbles, all with a strange echo as if being
sounded in a dimension fast fading into the distance, I slipped
willy-nilly into an absolute blank.
III
IGNIS FATUUS
From a blank, I
suddenly became aware of my awareness, finding myself in a state,
in a world, of an altogether different order of being.
Instead of having a body in water or air and a mind kind of
isolated on wavelengths, I seemed to exist as something more
interweaving, merging, and actually composed of the same
substance as the medium I was in; I felt literally 'in my
element', yet in an element quite new to me. Strange in its
nature as fire may seem to one on earth, still stranger and more
primal was this that I was in compared to any earthly cavorting
of flames – and there was only this primal strangeness, in
me and all around, nothing else, nothing ordinary or understood
to take as a reference point. All the same it did seem to share
something of the character of familiar elements, being like a
fiery, ethereal squall – consuming and self-illuminant, as
if all I consisted of and all I was surrounded by was a furious
fusion of consciousness itself.
Little but ardent perceptivity, then, I continued digesting my
situation.
‘Oi-oi,’ came a voice out of the blue – or rather
from, through and into the blaze of this numinous conflagration;
uncertain at first whether the voice was 'my own' or 'someone
else’s', abstract and artificial as any such distinction did
in fact seem, I became certain enough of its owner as it gruntled
again.
‘Makes a hell of a change, doesn't it?’ it went on.
Pausing as if to let the remark sink in, it then rhetorically
added: ‘Or perhaps you find it more of a heaven… ?’
‘Actually,’ I began, about to express how I was finding
the experience unspeakably awesome and unlike anything I had ever
known before, except in so far as it struck me as the sort of
thing I might have imagined it to be like in the midst of a
nuclear explosion, as in the gravity-balanced self-contained form
proper to a common stellar body, and perhaps to add that I didn't
care too much for the slightly patronising tone with which I felt
these rhetorical questions being put to me.... but I was so
startled by the roaring blast and swirl of sensations involved
here in simply uttering the word 'actually' that I didn't get
further than that. I did have a feeling that there was no
particular need to say all this in any case; and I did wonder
what it actually meant to say or hear anything in this particular
condition of existence.
There then came a sort of yawning sound. A sound not unlike the
kind made by humans savouringly stretching their arms after
waking up from a good night's sleep. A gruntly sort of yawn, as
proper to the porcine, accompanied by a crisp rustling –
which could have been anything (anything that could rustle
crisply, that is, in these particular conditions of existence).
My whole attention was drawn into this sound, with the sensuous
lucidity of one body being drawn into another, dissolving, the
one engulfing the other, when I abruptly snapped into such a
wakefulness, such a bracing clarity, that I was left stark with
the sense that I'd just been 'dozing' for a while. It seemed that
from a state, a world, of nothing but ineffably raging
consciousness, I had lapsed, fallen into dreams, and had only now
come back into realness, into reality; and the dreaming, so far
as I could trace things back now, seemed to begin with the
hearing of a voice. Alarmingly enough, then, a voice came again.
‘It does take some getting used to!’ It was the hog,
quite definitely, full of beans as could be. ‘Transmigration,
you might say, is easy,’ it went on; ‘Interdimensional
travel, bio-forcefield transition, complete metamorphosis –
any such thing tends to be so much beyond your conscious control
that if it happens at all, it happens as if by magic. But just
staying awake, on the other hand, always gets extremely tricky.’
A swishing, crackling, shuffling noise followed; then the hog's
voice rang once more out of the ineffable. ‘I tell you,’
it went worldly-wisely, ‘once you get the hang of this, you
may well wonder how you ever managed with what you had before.’
It paused, as if purely for effect, or as if attending to
something else entirely. ‘Then again,’ it continued,
‘it might make you wonder how you ever managed with it so
badly.’
IIII
ORIENTING
INKLINGS
There was a
combustive flaring and fluttering, and a moment later a
shimmering radiant figure emerged before me – kind of
ghostly yet vivacious, and with a magnificent pair of wings, it
was the hog, beaming resplendently.
‘Eh-eh. That's a lovely pair of wings you've got there!’
Just as this was said, and just as I was sure that it wasn't me
that said it, an eruptive surge came overwhelming my every
sensibility, and I found myself delicately suspended –
sporting, getting the feel of, the lightest energy-form of a body
(which included forelimbs evidently specialised as organs of
flight).
Flexing anything that felt flexible to try to get myself some
bearings, it quickly became clear that there was just the
scantiest, flimsiest difference between this body and my
surroundings, in all still little differentiating my very 'self'
from my 'environment' – hardly more, in fact, than an idea,
or flow of ideas, superimposed on this ineffable sentience. To
stretch and start flapping my 'wings' here was but to wish and
find myself moving, mingling, in a way that the word 'flying'
barely begins to describe. Otherwise this will-o'-the-wispy body
simply hung lambent, so to speak, hovering over the background,
threading in and out in an intricate dance with it; a dance in
which perceiver, perceived and perception itself continually
entwined and mutually absorbed into one seamless pulsing being.
Divine as it might sound expressed in such terms, far from any
supernal bliss it was all shatteringly physical, experienced as
nothing in bare fact but a tremendous sentient storming, a rage
turning in on itself with the utmost speed and violence –
like some everlasting, all-embracing, brawling bolt of lightning.
‘Right then,’ cracked the hog then, with an air of
blistering dynamism, ‘Let's be on our way.’
So saying, with the whole of my new body rumbling in resonance to
its words, my angelic porcine 'host' in this new world took off
– going I couldn't really say how and I certainly couldn't
say to where, but all the same I spryly flew off behind it.
*
Winging wispily wilfully along in this most interfusive of bodies
and worlds, it came to me clearly that these things were not so
much 'new' as newly-perceived – that they were in reality
there before, and had always been there, as it were 'underneath'
the old earthly body, 'behind' the old earthly world I had lived
in, hidden deep in subtlety, as the fine eclipsed by the crude.
And since, as was apparent, both that body had been jettisoned
and that world left behind, my essential being was left free to
attune to what, and where, I had been at another level of
existence all the time – in an 'astral' body, in the
'astral' world to which it corresponded. This was all, of course,
a theory, yet it did seem to fit with the basic facts of my
experience; and as I strivingly soaringly spirited forth, with a
sense of such potency and power in what raged through and all
about me, I certainly began to wonder how I ever managed with
what I had before, but then again wondered on the contrary…
It dawned on me then just what 'astral' really meant – that,
in this, I was in the very psyche of the sun, amid the realms of
a star's most elemental being, blowing a spectral tempest of a
psychic solar wind, with galeforce thoughts, thundering feelings,
and all but complete delirium of senses – on top of which I
could only ask myself if my imagination was perhaps running away
with me...
… It seemed that it was, and that it wasn't; that my
interpretations were in some respect arbitrary, fuelled by and
fashioning a living experience that was in one way persistent,
doggedly continuous, while in another way went through all kinds
of phases; and just how far I might be pawn of illusion or adept
of insight, surely only time could tell. And as this recognition
went through me, I noted and followed as the hog swooped down
sharply to one side and glided off like a rocket up ahead,
blazing a trail as a veritable shooting star in the stellar,
wherever exactly it was that we were in the cosmos.
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