Consider what follows not as scenery from a life, but as scenery from all human life. This is all of us. This is hard to articulate and harder still to read. But it is the jumping-off point for some deeper essays in the pipeline. Deep breath. Rub your eyes. Here we go….
From within time, our spiritual transcending and including looks like we’re growing up or gaining in depth. However, these enlightened stages we move through are not just limitations, they are imitations. Verbosely put, because ultimate transcendence is not the maturation of self, but spontaneous transformation into you as wholeness, each level, each move, is the illusion that this spontaneous realization is unfolding in slow motion, understanding after understanding. It’s an illusion because we can only move through time and so what is being moved into is a facsimile of an aspect of wholeness presented as the final stage of consciousness. (This stage is final, so just relax. No? Okay, the next one, then.)
When you are flowing Truth, that is to say, when you are the self-identity of timeless wholeness, what we call “stages of consciousness” are alivenesses within you. They are not stages, because there is no measurement in timelessness. They are indivisible aspects of you. They are you.
When you are your normal body-projected self, these aspects are presented as stages and each stage is a temptation lulling you to sleep, telling you that it is the whole of your new identity. This, because you are still separate from, and the center of, reality. Whereas in timelessness these things we call “stages of consciousness” are you, in time, they are levels of being that are for you. They are landing pads. You are on them. And they always feel like the endgame. (Get used to this life, kid. This is you now. You’re home.)
And, again, these stages in time are not the actual aspects of timelessness being embraced by you, one after the other. They are imitations. They do not stem from Truth as a living flow; they are facsimiles constructed by dead remembrances. They are past experiences of Truth expressed in terrains. They are you keeping yourself alive in the face of timelessness as a person experiencing higher and deeper revelations. This is because you are time. And time is the experience of expansion.
Welcome To Your Journey. Going Nowhere Fast Begins Now.
You are time. You are thought. The two are inseparable and they are the core of the body-projected self. Note, then, that even if you break through to a new stage of consciousness wherein an entity or compulsion assures you that there are further stages, so keep climbing, counterintuitive though it is, such a one is trying to anchor you in place. Assuredness is that anchor. Self-assuredness, to be precise. It’s you talking to yourself in disguise. And the reason you pretend to be outside agencies anchoring you in place, while egging you on to keep expanding, is because you are time experiencing itself growing. The moment you see expansion for the illusion that it is, you end. Time ends.
Through the ages, folks have posited that “God” or “Oneness” is experiencing itself growing through organisms.
No. Time is. Thought is. And they are contained within that Oneness, which is simply being.
Funny enough, one aspect of this simply being is, in fact, the experience of growing through organisms—but from the point of view of this ultimate Being we’re talking about, it is a choiceless experience. We hear choiceless and we think of slavery, bondage, or an automaton. That’s what it means in opposition to free will, which secretly is that bondage it pretends to run against. But when there is no opposition, choiceless means complete freedom.
What The Hell Did I Just Read?
Let’s Try This Again….
Time is contained within timelessness because timelessness is consciousness being. Being what? Being space, time, and everything in between.
Yes, in simply being, consciousness is being all forms and actions. That is the truth. From within time we are constrained to regarding this truth as either a hypothetical or not at all, which is the same thing. We mistake the oneness of timelessness/time, or nothingness/thingness, as dichotomous. Blinded to the fact that the two are one, we create a conceptual world of duality to match our sense of the physical. This is the obvious thing to do because our senses tell us that we live in a world of separate objects and organisms. It only makes sense to go with the senses. Lo and behold, all of these separate objects and organisms are actually one ultimate Being being.
Okay, so… from within time it looks as if we have divisions in consciousness. Not just between individual organisms, or organisms and the inorganic, with its own atomic alivenesses, but on larger scales. We recognize the collective consciousness of organisms, and if we keep bubbling out we see planetary consciousness, cosmic consciousness, and so on. In other words, when we scale up, we see organisms enfolding other organisms, each with their own individual sense of being alive, as well as a branching collective aliveness.
Big Tent Revival
In the way we’re using the term, collective consciousness refers to the collective unconscious when we talk about people, instinct when we talk about animals, and force when we talk about atomic and subatomic structures. The giant tent for all of these consciousnesses is thought. Thought itself appears to be alive. And from within time, it looks like collective consciousnesses are themselves formless awarenesses who live symbiotically with each multitude whose knowledge they store. This, because the behaviors of the connected multitudes are directly affected, or predicted, by that collective consciousness, which we generally deem unconscious. Collective consciousness, then, does not just store knowledge, it gives unconscious directives derived from knowledge in the form of reflexive and instinctive programming. In the case of humans, at least, this formless awareness further appears to draw from knowledge to present teachable moments and transcendental hills to climb in the form of archetypes, deities, guiding voices, synchronicities, and so forth.
We commonly assume that organisms came first and then, through trial and error, formed this collective unconscious storehouse of survival knowledge, which instructs from the ether and/or gets physically encoded as instruction in DNA. But neither happened first. Both are happening at once and have always been happening at once. We cannot suppose that a force of collective action, whose action is based on stored knowledge, came prior to the organisms feeding it knowledge. Nor can we suppose the opposite—that such organisms were reflexively surviving and following unconscious programming from a collective they had not yet formed. They both must exist simultaneously. In fact, in physics, matter and force are known to be fundamentally inseparable, even though they are spoken of as if they are two. That they appear to be two is the story of time. That this appearance logically falls apart leads us to the real, the story of timeless now, in which time is an aspect. Not incidentally, this is the exact same thing we’re talking about when we say that the brain must stop thought for Truth to be the case. The logical, sensible self must fall apart for timelessness to be the case because the self is time.
If all of that looks like a blur of letters screaming blah!, our important takeaway here is that collective and individual consciousness exist in a state of perpetual co-creating.
Going Through The Motions. Or Pretending To.
Within time, we may experience what it is to transcend personal consciousness into the collective in a number of ways—through dreamtime, through visions, through astral travel, through empathy, to name a few. These are all ways in which we transcend and add on to the personal, but they are not the dissolution of thought. They are within thought. They are aspects of existence under the big tent of thought, because thought and time are interlaced.
The revelation that comes through the brain that has dissolved thought completely is that ultimate formless awareness—ultimate Being—is our true identity. Not the mind of collective consciousness—beyond even that mask. When we reform back into self/doing/time/masks, do we not walk away with the understanding that time (for humans, at least) is a narrow focus, with a limited range, filtered through senses that are presenting to us aspects of ultimate Being as sensations, events, and deities?
If we grasp that then we must acknowledge that to spiritually transcend and include is to go through the motions of growing in time. Why? Because the self wants to live and the self is modeled on the physical, which actually is the experience of growth in time. The physical grows, knowledge expands through learning, and we wrongly try to superimpose this model onto Spirit. But now that you’re enlightened, you are no longer spiritually modeled on time. You are either living as timeless Being or, more likely, faking it because you experienced such but are no longer experiencing such and don’t want to admit it. Either way, what is revealed about thought in that timeless sweet spot outside of delusion can be summed up as follows:
Thought and time are intertwined. But in timelessness we see that the symbiotic nature of the collective and the individual is an illusion because neither came first and, oh yeah, to experience wholeness, one must no longer be a thought construct. The physical body will always represent time and when the body lets go the self, timeless Being becomes the self. This is nonduality. This is supreme consciousness through and through.
All exists in-and-as conscious. One piece of the all is the body, which, because it is consciousness, is conscious. The human body is able to be self-conscious and also able to transcend and include that self-consciousness within ultimate Being. That is to say, the body is able to self-identify as ultimate Being. Another way of putting it? Time is able to channel the self-aware aspect of timelessness when its thought forms go bye-bye.
There is a roadblock to this: because the body is conscious, it has created a self patterned on, and exploring existence in terms of, separation. It believes this separate-self identity is either the broadest consciousness or else is subservient to a broader consciousness separate and above itself, to which it is all-important. In either scenario, you are all-important, so you’re not going bye-bye. Furthermore, because the human self is a thought form comprised of knowledge from various collectives, thought will gladly provide you with countless illusions–deities, events, and sensations–that reinforce your place in its world, the world of time.
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Is all that jazz my personal gnosis or is it a description of what is? It depends on why you’re reading this. Your reason is usually another great deceiver. We are doing nothing if not willfully running cage to cage and calling this freedom merely because it involves the act of deciding.
Is deciding what to believe freedom? Or is seeing the entire mechanism of thought, belief, decision-making, and movement within time freeing?