The Ray of Creation

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There is an ancient story about some blind men and an elephant. Each one felt a part of the elephant and came to the conclusion that it was just as they felt it. The one who grabbed a leg thought the elephant was like a pillar, the one who grabbed the tail thought it was like a stick, etc. The moral of the story is that different people take only part of the scriptures, believing it to be the whole. The contradictions lead to disagreements and religious conflict, but are simply the result of partial understanding.

What if we could feel the leg, the tail, the ear, the belly and the trunk to get a better picture of the elephant? We would have to accept that true as each part is, it is not the whole truth. As a self-professed “blind man”, I have made it my life’s mission to feel the whole elephant.

I have felt seven parts:

I have felt the empty Void within and beyond manifestation, called sunyata in the Buddhist scriptures. I call it Amun, “the Hidden One”.

I have felt the light and energy within manifestation, called kundalini in the Vedas. I call it Ra, “the Sun God”.

I have felt the material substance of manifestation, called prima materia by the alchemists. I call it Atum, “the All”.

I have felt the aliveness of my body, the breath of life, called prana in India and qi or ki in China and Japan. I call it Ka, “the Life Force”.

I have felt the pure consciousness of the Self, called atman in the Vedas. It is the Witness of our life. I call it Ba, “the Soul.”

I have felt my connection and identity with the planet, called the anima mundi by the Neoplatonists. I call it Gaia, “the Earth Goddess”.

I have felt the Universal Consciousness of the universe, called Jah by the Rastafarians. I call it Jah, “God”.

[Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka and Ba are Ancient Egyptian; Gaia and Jah (Jahweh) are Ancient Greek and Jewish.]

These seven “gods” together constitute “the Ray of Creation”, which traces the evolution of the universe from the Void to the Absolute. Each “god” contains all the others below it in a nested hierarchy. They are like the layers of an onion, like the koshas (sheaths) of Vedanta. Each “god” denotes the unified consciousness of the realm or level it presides over: Jah is the god of the universe, which contains Gaia, goddess of the Earth, which contains Ba, god (or soul) of the organism, which contains Ka, god of cells, which contains Atum, god of atoms, which contains Ra, god of energy, which contains Amun, god of Emptiness.

Each time I have an experience of one of these parts of the elephant, I think to myself, “THIS is it!” The experience eventually and inevitably fades and then, at some other point I have a different experience and an equally compelling conviction that “THIS is it! I must put all my faith and devotion into THIS!”

When I experience one part of these realities, I give myself to it heart and soul, and exclaim with the credo, “I believe in ONE God”. In that moment of communion, nothing else exists. This is God for me now. But once the experience has passed, I realize that it was only one dimension of something much larger, only one part of the elephant.

There is another old story about a mountain and a mountain climber. It was a very difficult mountain to climb, but the mountain climber was determined to find a way to the summit. After much effort and exertion, he managed to find a way to the top. He had imagined that once he reached the summit, he could plant his flag and be done with it. However, back home again, he felt a strong urge to climb the mountain again, but by a different route. So he climbed up the mountain again. He did this over and over again for years, always climbing via a different route, until he had covered the whole mountain. Only then did he realize that the goal was not after all the summit of the mountain, but the mountain itself.

 

The Eye of God

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What was it that triggered my satori (Enlightenment experience) twenty years ago? We were stood at a small bridge on the river Isis in Oxford. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as my two companions chatted about this and that, I drifted off, mesmerised by the brilliant dancing point of light on the water. A pair of ducks drifted by, breaking up the ripples into thousands of intricate patterns. I willed myself to “make my mind water” so that I could follow the patterns of light exactly as they occurred without lagging behind. I started to hallucinate endless figures and shapes, which would disappear as fast as they appeared. I remember being impressed by an Egyptian scene with Cleopatra on her barge in full regal splendor.

Once I had tired of this (and it was quite tiring), I began to reflect on the illusory nature of this light show. I imagined Thales sitting on a bank contemplating a similar scene and coming to the conclusion that the world was water. I asked myself, “if all this endlessly changing spectacle is an illusion, what is real?” The answer came fairly quickly: “well, the actual body of water is real.” Then, with a sudden shock of realization, I made a further logical step: the body of water was the shifting patterns on the surface. They were not two different things.

When I looked up from my meditation, the world was transfigured. “The green trees … transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.” (Thomas Traherne from Centuries of Meditations).

It was only months later, as I desperately tried to make sense of my experience, that I came across the following, ascribed to Shankara:

“The world is illusion; Brahman is the only reality; Brahman is the world.”

I had passed through the same logical steps as had Shankara in his search for the Ultimate. Somehow I had passed through the “gateless gate”. Once through the gate, if you look behind you, there is no gate at all. All is seamlessly One.

It is the same as when you “see God”. How can you see God? God cannot be seen. True, but He can be apprehended, intuited, imagined. He can be “seen” with the eye of contemplation, if not the eye of flesh. So to “see God” is to arrive at a convincing enough approximation of what “God” might be. Convincing enough to be transported to a higher plane. Invariably, when we feel that we “see God”, we instinctively look up at the heavens. We may remain like this for some time, rapt in awe and wonder. At some point, we tire, and our gaze turns back to Earth. What do we see? Not the same Earth we were standing on a few moments ago. We see the Earth transfigured. Why? Because we are seeing it not with our eyes, but through the eyes of God.

Meister Eckhart said, “the eye with which you see God is the same eye with which He sees you.”

It is the same eye, but looked through in the opposite direction. It is a reversible eye. It is the “gateless gate”. From the perspective of the higher Being we call God, All is One. There is no separation anywhere. There is no separation between the world and God because God is the world. Brahman is the world. And more than that, the world, this planet we call Earth, is God. When we look at the world from God’s eye view, we are looking at the world from the World’s point of view. We are lending eyes to the world to look at itself. And it sees itself as One. The world is the world, which is the same as to say, as the Cabbalists are so fond of saying, God is God.

What happens when you look at yourself through the “eye with which [God] sees you”? You see that you are also part and parcel of the One God. You are a child of God, so to speak, a son or daughter of God. You feel that your soul, your mind, the very cells in your body, are part of the One God. You may feel a rush of energy, of being filled with the Holy Spirit. This is communion. In this moment of communion, your body is the body of Christ.

Seen through the eye with which you see God, the world is the Kingdom of God, and you are the body of Christ. Or, as the Buddhists would have it, “this body is the body of Buddha; this very land is the Pure Land.”

 

Waking Up

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One summer twenty years ago, by the river Isis in Oxford, I had a profound experience of “waking up” from my ordinary, habitual “me” consciousness into an extraordinary “non-dual” consciousness, where I felt completely at one with my surroundings and with the whole world. It felt as though I had stepped into a timeless realm, where one instant and ten thousand years were somehow the same and where one glance at a flower was more real and meaningful than my whole life up to that point. The experience only lasted for a few hours of clock time, but once back in the “ordinary” state, I knew that I would have no choice but to dedicate the rest of my life to finding my way back again. Thomas Traherne went there hundreds of years ago:

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world; the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. … Eternity was manifest in the light of day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. 

Many others have been there too. For other first hand accounts of spiritual awakening, check out Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, W.T. Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy or Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology by F.C. Happold. Here is an account taken from The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience by Masters and Houston:

The subject, S-1 (LSD), a housewife in her early thirties, was taken by the guide for a walk in the little forest that lay just beyond her house. The following is her account of this occasion:

I felt I was there with God on the day of the Creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness. As I walked along the ground the smells of nature rose to greet me – sweeter and more sacred than any incense. Around me bees hummed and birds sang and crickets chirped a ravishing hymn to Creation. Between the trees I could see the sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon this Eden, this forest paradise. I continued to wander through this wood in a state of puzzled rapture, wondering how it could have been that I lived only a few steps from this place, walked in it several times a week, and yet had never really seen it before. I remembered having read in college Frazer’s Golden Bough in which one read of the sacred forests of the ancients. Here, just outside my door, was such a forest and I swore I would never be blind to its enchantment again.

 

The God of the Living

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Whether or not we profess a particular faith, most of us, deep down, assume that matter is inanimate. If we are religious, we are probably dualists, which means that we believe that there is a spiritual as well as a material reality, a soul as well as a body. But even so, the material side of our dual nature is still just material. So actually dualists are still materialists (although they are not monists).

Imagine you have access to an electron microscope. You train it on the tip of your little finger. As you increase the magnification, you see the skin cells, the cell membrane, the mitochondria, the nucleus, the proteins and peptides, perhaps actual atoms. You zoom in through the realms of biology, chemistry and physics, apparently passing from the living to the dead.

Now imagine that next to the electron microscope is a telescope. You look through the aperture and zoom out past the few straggling clouds on this beautiful clear night into the immensity of space, past the moon, past Mars and the gas giants, to the Milky Way and beyond. Awesome though it is, what you are looking at is an immense wasteland of cold rocks and burning stars, all pointlessly spinning through the infinite void.

Between the microscope and the telescope, you find yourself precariously balanced between two infinities, a sliver of conscious life between two immensities of unconscious, inanimate, dead matter. As Prospero put it, “we are the stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded  by a sleep”. Bounded by inanimate matter on all sides, we are like a tiny bubble of life floating on an infinite sea of death.

But what if we look through a panpsychist lens? Then we see not endless graveyards of inanimate matter as far as the eye can see, but infinite consciousness. Then we are no longer an anomaly, a weird aberration, a strange exception to the rule of universal death. We are an integral part of a living universe. And our God is “the God of the living, not of the dead.”