The image above comprises an approximate analog of the relationship between the Sun (lower Right - dandelion) and the Earth (waterball).
If you understand the model correctly, you can use it to to contact them. Why is that possible? Because you’re all elements in a single transentient symmetry. You are an instance of their union, and more. Although they are not ‘beings’ as we understand them, nor ‘gods’, the supralogue of consciousness they represent is directly accessible to you — as you. You, like all of the organisms within and around you, are an instance of transentience. Of course, initially, when you make contact, you will definitely not believe you are merely contacting yourself. In fact, you may not believe what is happening at all.
But should you manage to gain this experience directly, in person, you will forget about all of the interesting stories about religion, psychism, aliens and other frames of reference you may have heard for a simple reason:
the story you will become will trump them all.
^; . ~ o ~ . *:
Reflectophore
Think about your consciousness as flow. Not necessarily something flowing, but flow itself.
Primordial. Inchoate. Impossible to circumscribe with any kind of definition — even this one. Yet, as we need something to grasp onto in language, I will use this ‘handle’.
Within this model, your body and its many organs and elements become a bit like a tuning fork, or a strange set of peculiar nozzles, whose function is to modulate, encharacter, and direct this flow. Your ‘growth’ endows you with new capacities and also tends to structuralize these processes in order that they can be preserved and elaborated to varying degrees.
This process eventually translates into abilities, such as the ones you are using to read this text. But I suspect you may be confused about how this works, because the models we are commonly taught put you in the impossible position of a ‘witness’ who is a ‘recipient’, rather than the role of an active agency of consciousness — an ‘assembler’. The latter is much closer to your actual nature. Let me explain…
You direct your flow at this text, and it bounces back to you, carrying ‘information’. No you directing flow? No text. In order for this text to exist, you must existify it.
Through painstaking practice, you have learned to retrieve the content carried by the reflection of your own directed flow, in a fashion that recurses (actively folding back upon itself in a way that informs the flow) — modifying both you and the flow you direct. When used for ‘reading’ the content is parsed in a specific domain of your flow-awareness — that of formal representational comprehension.
An analogy may be of use here. The sending gesture is a little bit like a blind person tapping a cane as they navigate along a walkway. The sender directs the tip of the cain to and fro (usually in an arc) tapping around and forming a kind of analog of visual sight by generating and then receiving tactile feedback. The receiving gesture is a bit like what they do with the results that travel back to their hand along the cane’s sturdy length. So, to experience awareness, you must emit something to receive something, even though the process sometimes seems much more passive than this primarily because of the character of the models which were impressed upon us by peers and culture.
We do not possess consciousness, in fact, there is nothing to possess at all because there are no things in the way we are commonly taught to perceive them — but your body allows you to encharacter the movement of consciousness in an ever-evolving spectrum of methods or ways which are at once unique to human beings and generally shared by all organisms. Each of the ways evolves as we grow or perish; new ways can be ‘engineered’ and it is possible to ‘recycle’ old, unused or partially established methods into new potentials. Growth causes them to evolve, as does ungrowth or perishing. Our ‘physical’ capacities are focused instancings of the many aspects and forms of this flow.
What it means to ‘be you’ is largely a matter of the methods and habits of flow modulation that you have established, developed and sustained. These methods are crucially fundamental to every aspect of your waking life, and many aspects of your dreaming life as well; from the basics of assembling your sensory experience into comprehensible continuum, to the most elaborate skills you may develop.
Language, art, mathematics, dance — everything humans do and experience — is, at its root, flow-based. All of these are methods of using flow to generate, reveal, or eliminate structure of various kinds. In this sense, we can understand that there is a polarity at work, where flow establishes, sustains, modulates, and dissolves structure. Structure, in turn, encharacters flow that encounters it, and to some degree prefigures the potential modulations of flow…
The cessation of flow is physical death. When you look into the dead eyes of a being you have known and loved, what is missing is precisely this: flow. The universe no longer enters the world of timeSpace through the vessel of that body. The peculiarly intimate sense of this is uncanny and often terrifying. For us, it seems that the spirit (i.e. the movement aspect) of the being has been stilled. The body appears now as an object, something previously unthinkable.
Flow, and context. Movement, and containment.
Primordial binaries.
-| . ~ o ~ . \|
An ant laying down pheromones.
Transtranding
Your body’s capacities allow you some leeway in how you encharacter the flow that you are a unique transport of. As a human being, this leeway seems profound compared to say, an ant. But both you and the ant share this capacity to encharacter and direct the flow into the world — a process which changes all participants — and neither the capacities of you or the ant are entirely stipulated. Moment-to-moment, you both depend upon feedback from the world in order to determine how to modulate and employ your capacities to shape, direct and enact this flowing.
Now here’s where things get interesting: you may think you know what the possibilities of this flow and its direction are, but you must always be mistaken in thinking this — the nature of the flow guarantees this seeming paradox. Even the ant would be mistaken, and here’s why. When you and the ant meet, a rather miraculous and very unpredictable series of feedback events begins during which both of you may access intelligence and relational assets otherwise unthinkable — if you both agree.
If you could follow the flow out of yourself and into the ant — backtracing along the routes it takes to arrive as the ant — it’s hive, it’s species, it’s world — and beyond its local star, solar system, galaxy and universe — you’d encounter something at once inconceivably shocking and familiar — the source of your own flow. Although you might think you don’t need the ant’s help, that’s precisely where you’d be mistaken, because, quite literally — without that ant? There is no you.
Although the reason is sophisticated to map, it is relatively easy to state: the living flow you transport only occurs in a complete universe like the one we are born as instances of. There is no separate you, and no separate ant. You’re somewhat like two ends of an incredibly tangled strand of something amazing. You might call it: ‘superChild’. It looks a bit like this: One end of the strand is you, and the other end is every moment of experience of every being in all of timeSpace, including all possible futures.
When you heard people blathering on about ‘everything is one’ you were right to be skeptical.
It’s not.
It’s far, far, more amazing than that — and vastly, shockingly more beautiful.
{[- . ~ o ~ . o'•
Triple play
The flow that I am calling being (consciousness) is more sophisticated than these models illustrate, and there are a few features I want to explore together before we proceed. Like your own circulatory system, there are essentially two(three) domains in which flow is happening. The (third) is the domain of their unification. At the local scale, that’s you. At scales beyond you, you participate in it.
A good analogy is your heart; it sends oxygenated blood out along one set of transports and simultaneously draws in deoxygenated blood along another. The flow of being(consciousness) is similar: you direct the ‘charged’ flow into the world with your awareness and attention, and it is (simultaneously) drawn back into you, and assimilated by a ‘stream within a stream’ paradigm. In other words, within the stream you are directing out, there is another stream returning to you. The actual character of these processes is sophisticated, but a simple model is sufficient to introduce a some of their more crucial peculiarities.
In the day the precedence is on the outward stream — the one you direct; however, without the returning flow (which is partially physical and based in your senses and partially energetic and invisible) you would not be able to make sense of your experience. By night, this begins to change, and when you sleep, the precedence inverts. But it is not a mere inversion, it is also a modulation of orders, such that you become a recipient of something which nourishes and heals you, as well as teaching you.
The entire paradigm approximates the penetrative/receptive paradigm of human sexuality. By day, we penetrate and receive feedback. By night we attract and receive penetrations. Again, this is at best a crude simplification; there are many possible arrangements of reception and transmission within this general schema. However, it is worth noting that most of us spend a great deal of effort to refine our waking capacities and nearly none refining those of dreaming. This may be, for many of us, just as it should be — but I suspect otherwise and encourage you to be similarly suspicious.
The changing of orders which happens during sleep is more complex to explain. For now, suffice it to say that it is not our own familiar scale of flow that we are involved in. At night, particularly during dreaming and related events, other orders of being(consciousness) may direct flow into us — as though we ourselves were worlds. And, to the degree that we are instances of Creation and all its orders, this makes some sense.
It is useful to note that the paradigm in obvious precedence during the day or the night is inspired by the paradigm which hides within it, such that the penetration is driven by the desire for reception, and vice-versa.
Our brain hemispheres and their differences play crucial roles in these processes, and their inversions. Interestingly, the one interested in directing the flow is largely or completely unaware of its compliment (the R hemisphere in nearly everyone), but the other hemisphere is well-aware of its seemingly myopic and extremely self-aggrandizing mirror-twin.
Many illnesses, visionary states, ‘nonordinary abilities’ and mental disorders have to do with uncommon methods of directing the flow — or partial misdirection of flow, or partial or complete misdirection of the gesture that turns it back upon its source; in either case the forms and peculiarities experienced as feedback become, for the experiencer, either an overlay to reality, or a replacement.
In the case of various states we call ‘mental illness’ it is common to mistake feedback for the real, because, for the experiencer, it is practically impossible to distinguish between them.
