When I was initially being flooded with insights on a daily basis, I had the (further) good fortune of understanding that they were not to be taught as lessons. I’d say this was an innate understanding but I think I owe that clarity to Jiddu Krishnamurti. Still, I assumed I had to do something public with these insights and so decided to create a writing experiment called Urgency., a book intended to wake the reader. I knew I didn’t have anything to teach, just something to get—and the only way to get it was to overwhelm the reader’s chattering mind with insights so that they’d shut up long enough for me to speak directly to the brain.
I included in the book a partial insight about why, if teaching is the wrong move, folks who have these hyper-aliveness experiences teach their insights. Of course I didn’t know it was partial at the time, but working on Our Undoing has brought me to a place of even deeper understanding. Thank you for coming here and allowing me this gift. Let’s share.
Reasoning
One reason mystics of all stripes bring back something to learn is that they don’t know not to. They’re exasperated, astonished, and they’re sharing it. Another reason is that they believe through intense sharing, such as a guru situation, that they can arouse you out of your sleep. Another is that they fell back into their own ego trappings and are trying to capture that feeling of being awake through the power of being an authority. Yet another is that they understand it is better to give rules to live by than flounder, because odds are, most folks will remain asleep. Better the dream be of a divine framework than a chaotic nightmare.
Weaving
Step out of time. What do you see? What is the picture showing? Timelessness expressing time like a still-life. Spirit being all things, one of which is the knowledge of Spirit.
Step back into time. The ultimate intimation is that you are Spirit and now the intimation is dead. When Truth hits time it dies and becomes information–fractured ideas coming one at a time as insights. If you think of yourself as a leaky dam holding back a flood called Truth, truths, like drops of water, come through your cracks. If you’ve never stepped out of time to see the NOW picture, you don’t know that these truths are the droplets of one roaring water. And you certainly don’t know that you’re the one holding back that flow.
The statement You are Spirit is not alive and it only has as much meaning as you give it. You will likely discard it or build upon it, as you do any other piece of information. To understand what the meaning is on its own terms, the brain must step out of time. To step out of time it must cease projecting you, the time-bound entity. If there is a meaning to You are Spirit beyond what you make of it, such will reveal itself in your absence. But if you are not careful and attentive in the very next moment–the moment you are yourself again in time–you might be tempted to teach how to become what you just were as if it were a state of mind that can be gotten to through instruction. You might experience those trickling truths and think someone from on high is whispering in your ear the deeply correct things people need to know about themselves. You might not understand that the level to which you desire to teach is the level to which you are in denial that this is all one speaking to oneself.
And the part you’re really not going to want to hear is the part I snuck in earlier: that this is all okay, because Spirit is being all things. One of those things is knowledge of spirit. Someone needs to express it. Odds are, it is you, the mystic.
But it doesn’t have to be, not anymore. Not in the way we’ve seen repeated over and over for thousands of years. In this still-life picture, we are living in the finely painted detail we’ve dubbed, our day and age. And in our day and age it is quite possible that those folks whose brains dissolve them do not come back to teach truths. Perhaps from this part of the picture “onward” we get it right: Spirit shining self-aware through the sentient bodies of its imagination. That, too, must be expressed. In fact, in the full sweep of us, us in the NOW, it is being expressed. We’re simply not experiencing it yet because we’re preoccupied with evolving from detail to detail.
Spiritual evolution is a distraction, you see. It keeps us moving. It keeps us time.