The New Paradigm - Part 4 second half

The New Paradigm - Part 4 second half

The Mystical - First Hand Religious Experience

For a long time I have held back writing this up. It's importance to me is beyond the value of any other moment in my life. Words will fail. They will sound as though I describe an illusion. Life is illusion. It's depth hidden. What we use is working construct created by the brain to operate. Scientists, psychiatrists will agree on this in theory, yet, when faced with a human experience differing from their reality construct, they abandon that knowledge and revert to a pre enlightenment outlook where reality is a fixed environment that we are able to see clearly or defectively. Our sensory spectrum is small, providing a subjective and limited view. Enough to get by. Yet only a fool thinks any animal can see all there is. My dog sees a lot I don't, and I see much he can't. Within our materialist culture there is no framework of context. Stripped of a spiritual dimension, be it metaphorical or literal, any experience beyond causal effect can only be an example of brain malfunction. A schizoid delusion. Madness. Everything we experience is an illusion. This experience by that law, must have been an illusion. So equal to, and in my opinion, an illusion far closer to the true nature of reality than all other times in my life.

I remember mocking some Christians or other religious types as deluded, 'they've seen the light,' I would smile. Now I have seen the light. I assumed this was metaphorical. A turn of phrase. But it is both metaphorical and literal. The light is unlike any other I had seen before. My words can not begin to convey my experience. They are not so much inadequate as inappropriate. Our language is constructed to describe material reality, normal experiences. There is no vocabulary for the numinous. And it isn't so much a single light but a kind of light. And, for me at least, not the bright white glow of near death stories, the blinding clinical light of abduction tales, more a multiplicity of colours. A spectrum way beyond normal vision. Constantly moving and shifting, forming into structures of vast complexity. A fractal growth or rearrangement of lights of impossible depths, an extra dimension of macro and microscopics, an effortless surge in perspective from universal overview then, with a blink of thought to molecular detail. Yet there is metaphor, for the deepest sense of grasping what was always there, an understanding of what was, previously, confused. Something so inherent and obvious it is overlooked, its relevance to the everyday both total and nil. Familiar and reassuring yet jaw dropping wonder. A clicking into place. All experiences from birth on, every moment, that had been seperated and uncohesive, slipped into a logical whole. Individuation of self, matter, animal to vegetable to sea to rock, as looked upon from my singular perspective, had always seemed of beautiful but random drift to natural laws of physics, chemistry, biology. Yet, in that place, viewed from that angle, all was one, all interconnected, all made sense. As though Trapped in our limited sensory perceptions, human conception is inherently unable to make true sense of reality. Looking, if only for a brief window in time, a simple peep through the lens of a fifth contextualising dimension, all fell into place.

My life had been an incredible series of experiences and sensations, an incomprehensible tumble through time. Even the idea that sense could be made of it all seemed to require dependence on pillars of assumption. Making coherence must assume a knowledge beyond human minds. Yet that day, everything made sense. So obvious. So simple. My whole life I'd walked within reach of this clarity yet always unable to touch it. As though everything had been positioned slightly off angle, each subjective perspective looked at from the wrong side. For three hours all that I had known or felt slid into context. An alignment that placed me exactly at the single point from where the picture could be seen. I got it. I understood.

We've all had moments when the lines of a song we've known all our lives but never made full sense of, suddenly are heard for the first time. Of course. How could I have not seen? The lifting of the veil, the clearing of the mist. To know it once is enough. Life's complex planetary drift of multiple orbits may never position me again at that point, that viewing position with all else in pattern. I doubt it will. But once is enough. I now know.

It is only of value to me. I hope everyone could have such a moment, but I can't show it to another. I can't explain in language. Yet there is knowledge. Akin to tacit knowledge. Somatic knowledge. In large part it is a feeling, non cognitive, yet a combination of thought and feeling. Beyond these categories of awareness. Inseparable into frameworks of human normality. Prior to the mystical experience my perspective was comparable to the confusion over the sexual  dimension of human being seen from the eyes of a seven year old boy, by eighteen understood. There isn't a way to tell his seven year old brother, it must be learned through doing. Somatic knowledge. Illumination. Gnosis.

 God is love. This simple phrase that once made no sense now has profound accuracy. The experience I had has the knowledge of love. Existence is good. A cosmological benevolence. Natures random violence has a contextualising other. My concerns and niggles came back in time though they've never seriously upset me since. Life is good. Love settled over everything. Time may be an illusion but not love. It seems unworthy of saying. Time, space, energy, pillars of scientific certainty I take on trust. Yet love that I know is biological happenstance to the scientific mind, is a personal certainty.

A small party one afternoon ended after a few cans. I drove back to a freinds house. Here me and an old friend both took AL- LAD 300ug, I think. But the freind I tripped with stays indoors. Tripping for me has to be taken out doors. It's containment within confined interiors is a waste. The trip took hold and I walked to some nearby woods. A strong trip like many before. This trip state then altered hugely. Something happened that I've not experienced before or since. An expansion of awareness a thousand or more, a shift of incomprehensible magnitude. Every particle of my being shot away like an explosion, a personal Big Bang. The magnetism that held my molecular composition in human form switched off freeing all particles to move outward, away from the central point that had been me. There was no me. All relaxed into the love, given up in complete trust to be taken by a greater power, where they chose, knowing I was in loving hands I did not resist, could not resist, and the trip exploded outward to something thousands of times greater. The AL-LAD may have been the trigger but this was far beyond any experience I have had. The individuation that is human existence, the seperation of us and the reality we explore, the object world that the self moves within, this dissolved. There was no me and it, no subject and object, being was. All was one. My identity had gone, an irrelevance, as the whole, the one, the molecular field of which all things are aspects of took on its truth, there was no me, just all. For the next three hours all was a singular. In this state of collective awareness, personal consciousness had no meaning. 

Though now dissolved in to the greater whole there remained an ability to address specifics. Awareness attentive to material zones. Firstly drawn to the earth that hummed with life, becoming the awareness of the soil, this mass of particles of rocks, plants, micro life forms, a living blend where molecules from millennia past bristled against tree particles, memories of acorns of medieval shoots,  growing into trees that lived for century's, before breaking down and decomposing, their memories in particles. The planets memory, microscopic particles from sources vastly diverse in time and substance, this black peaty loam of decomposition, the life and food of the forest. This earth held such an inconceivable volume of life and within its cool moist depths the drive or predisposition to pull toward life and growth was the pull of good. That direction, to live, to emerge from the matter. The drive to grow, to live, to emerge, to form, to be, this force of direction and purpose of strength beyond conception.

Next awareness within the earth connected to the woodlands root mass. A tangled under ground interwoven connection tying the woods to a singular sub surface interplay. A mirror of the trees above. These growths patterns, of central shoot, dividing offshoot, division, trunk, branch, twig, this pattern was the neuronal structure, brain cell patterning. The earth, life used this pattern again and again. Awareness throughout which I was dispersed was the woods. I was nothing of individual aspect. I thought not again for some hours of me, myself, my body, I, as a concept was no more. In each leaf tickled by wind, in undulation of air waves, in vegetation, in water molecule and rock and fish, yet in the energy of flow arranging stream pattern, the stream is the waves, whirlpool, Eddy that animate the material. Volition is a property of the individual, in awareness to be, to feel was all. 

In the one that is all it is obvious everything is inter reactive. The bio systems singular balance hits a fragile harmony that rings out or coalesces to a beautiful inter vibration reaching a peak before sliding gradually out of harmony, off into memory as new arrangements begin to form.

The collective consciousness may be a metaphor but it's closer than any separatist reduction. To this day my prior assumption of the value of separate identity has slipped away replaced by becoming a fragment or aspect of the species that in turn is an aspect of a singular system. Gaia need not be self aware, only self balancing. At such magnitude the concept becomes misplaced. A human vanity projected onto something so much greater than us that to suppose the simplicities peculiar to the human animal could be of relevance is to miss a thing of such magnitude it would be like looking for peculiarities of a frog. Consciousness now lost its sacred place. Worship of our consciousness, of a higher consciousness, of a collective consciousness became the human vanity it is. Birds in flight shifted body shape in direct response to air currents. There was no conscious shifting of their form, feather or wing. The movements to the wind were simultaneous. Unconscious. This epiphany remains. Each creature has its speciality. The cheetah its speed, the eagle its sight and wing size that is able to negotiate these sight distances, the shark its stealth, speed in water, other none human senses. Consciousness was our speciality. Reason. To see, think, then act. This process separates us. Consciousness is our movement apart from the whole. Once taken, any subtle distinctions of humanist mortality and Christian soul transcendence were minor hair splitting. Man is cast out. Forever stood at life's  edge, watching the other creatures dance free of self consciousness. Religious people create an anthropcentric deity. A conscious God. Modern neuroscience, psychology, philosophy fought over free will. The fear of having no control. Consciousness is humans condition of unique and superior worth. It's worship through science or theology, the perverse obsession with artificial intelligence, studying other animals looking for its evidence. Most believing self awareness is the ultimate conclusion, even the goal of any sufficiently complex system. Yet watching a swift in flight it was clear, a micro second of consideration would see control lost. Once reason enters a system, separation begins. The clumsy, primitive human mind our reward for the fall. Eating of the fruit in genesis cut us adrift. Skill now must be practiced till thought is driven out. The cost has led mankind into psychotic curiosity in scientific exploration at blind speed, destroying planetary systems of harmony we can't see until lost. We have no control. Here my thoughts returned me to self.

Returning to myself I thought back on my personal life journey. For a time, in my teens, I had it. I had self belief. I trusted my instinct. Like an animal if something felt good I did it. Never asking why, never hindered by reason or doubt, each opportunity, each fork in the road, I knew which was right for me. At some point I had lost confidence. Trusted others. Took routes that felt wrong yet having no rational explanation for these concerns, I drifted astray. Taking pills from doctors to help me down these mistaken life journeys. Then to drink to continue away from my true self. Drugs used to block out the sensations of going against my inner compass. I abandoned psychedelics by twenty. I'd grown scared. Thirty years I lost my way. Why had I grown to fear psychedelics? Why does anyone? Because they are living lives they can't face up to. Psychedelics will strip away your affectations, hold you up naked and ask? Are you happy with what you've become? If you're not in denial, not self deceiving, if your persona is no fake construct, then you have nothing to fear. 

For three hours I was taken. What took me I don't know. We know so little that everything is a metaphor. Pagan gods, powers we can't control, we name, Thor, Odin, Katrina. Attributing consciousness to the earth as a singular bio system is human sentimental nature. We do it to our dogs, teddy bears. Two close freinds had epiphanies around this time though neither changed the individual as mine did me. One, a catholic boy saw gods and Angels. The other, enamoured by space saw the universes origin, the Big Bang stars collapsing, other cosmic events. Mine ran consistent to my personal love of the wild, my connection to nature. We reflect our cultural matephors. Construct with tribal imagery.

This isn't a call to abandon reason, to embrace superstition. Reason serves as a secondary system. A corrective to bad habits life caused. At heart most people are racist unless they grow up in mixed communities. Reason can correct the impulse. Looking back at the years leading up to this mystical experience I recognise that turmoil was boiling in my unconscious. Having followed a pathway that strayed from my inner needs. A path supported by the rational of others, a reasoned career. Addiction, depression, building until the animal in me rose up, in a cluster of psychotic episodes exploding . A violent eruption. Tearing me free of this trap of reason. At the time I thought I was mad just as others said. Now it is clear my conscious self could never have saved me. Only the animal, chained and enraged, uncaring of who or what he tore away, it's sole objective escape. My animal self rescued me.

Crucial to understanding this experience was its unique clarity. I felt no intoxication nor any of the falsity one associates with MDMA, alcohol or any drug. The mind frame I was in prior to taking the entheogen I believe was the pivotal factor, requiring a negligible trigger to open the veil. Throughout the experience there was a divine clarity. It was as though this was the real reality. Normal reality is clouded, muddy, false. This was more real than anything I've known. I trust its truth beyond the illusion of life before and since. I was not intoxicated. This was no delusion. The polar opposite. This was the truth. 

This religious experience has corrected my life path. Returned me to trust my instincts. Who knows the physical illnesses that grow from ignoring instinct. From repressing human needs. Sexual. Spiritual. Trapped in hated jobs. Trapped in unhappy marriages. Cancers, heart disease, depression, addiction, all thought to be related to emotional suppression. I am no born again. No claim to know higher truths. My darkest times saw my self medication supported by a materialist neuro philosophy. Problems that developed over several years beginning with anxiety, to depression and the negative strategies I fell into as ways of coping; alcohol, drug use, all this has gone. The spiritual need is as strong as the sexual. My suppression of instinct and refusal to accept a spiritual dimension to life nearly killed me. It matters not what cultural or personal taboo shape ones spiritual dimension nor whether you regard it as super natural, bio chemical, metaphorical or religious. The human need is powerful and cares not for your beliefs. We can argue over how the qualities of the mystical, a material reality, an emotion, a place, how much a metaphor for something else. But denial of this most human need damages the individual. Reason and logic may refuse to accept this, however, we don't need to know how a internal combustion engine works to drive a car. Love is the bridge of understanding. A thing with no physical aspect. No material evidential proof. Yet few would argue against the existence of love. Few would argue it is at the higher most levels of the mountain of life's possibilities. From outside a man in love is mad. Subject to immaterial forces. Yet this man is experiencing the highest human condition. Mystical states are every bit as real as being in love. The mystical is a step beyond the wonder of falling in love. I describe what I experienced but draw no conclusions other than those I have mentioned. God remains a word meaning different things to each person. I find no reason to bring God or any religious traditions into my experience. The gnosis is not knowledge to say the universe is a conscious whole, that a higher power exists, no revelation of divinity. The mystical experience would comply to any individuals religious framework. A condition so profound it would confirm to absolute certainty any moderate of faith. The most notable aspects were that what I experienced was real. Real to an extent I have never felt. There is connection. The point where Buddhist ideas of seperation illusions, and the metaphor of self meet with quantum theory, everything, everyone arrangements of particles in the same molecular plane. There was a feeling of love, benevolence, that reality, whatever it may prove to be, is good. What I will say is the portion of reality we are able to sense and this sense data construct through neural systems, provides a workable reality existent only in our minds. We are forever cut off from reality. But there is far more to it than anyone can imagine. Some science I read estimated we could access some 3% of what is. Such an idea reflects the autism of science. These are fascinating times to live in. The journey of western civilisation, through its various philosophical and religious perspectives, leading finally to the scientific method. Science was the hiatus of reason. A methodology where man could find out the answers to the big questions. Now it's limits are evident. Separate schools of science built on differing pillars of assumption delivering hypotheses that can not be united. It's final conclusion being that humans could never know,  never touch or see reality as it is, forever visible only from our subjective viewpoint. And the return to knowing we are only animals. That free will is an illusion. That we act and react to our animal nature, consciousness no more than a secondary tool, a story post scripted to explain our actions. All that seemed real, all we knew, was discovered to be quite different. To be aware, to live, to see is a most wonderful opportunity. God only knows what all this is, but it is so utterly mind blowing. Perhaps that is all epiphany is. Accepting, just for a while, the transcendent wonder and sheer strangeness of being.

Next I shall be looking into what the mystical state is for. Why it continues throughout history, never evolving out. These five hundred years have seen science and reason leave the spiritual behind, causing the extinction of half the planets species. Clever.

Sent from my iPad