u/zennyrick

This is from the Holy Light Tarot. One map of many for the inner kingdom where the heart is monarch.

“Hovering above the Cups King’s back, the eternal Serpent levitates. At one level, this serpent points to the existence of the soul independent of the time-space identity of the body. But this ancient portrayal signifying the Artificer or Demiurge also represents a more interesting story, one that harks back to the Gnostic myths of antiquity. Some say that when Sophia and her offspring were ejected from Heaven to take up residence in this world, her child Ialdabaoth (the lion-headed serpent) endeavored to create a race of people in the image of the Archons. But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get his creature to rise up and walk; the man just lay on his belly like a baby, unaware of his innate abilities. The Demiurge himself was ignorant of a crucial detail – that the breath of Spirit is required to awaken a soul’s desire and aspiration. Only by receiving this breath of Spirit could humanity stand up and live the creator’s dream.

This card shows the moment when the Holy Spirit emerges for the first time from invisibility to instruct the Demiurge. In this instant, the Demiurge learns that he is not alone, and he’s not the highest being in existence; there is something larger than himself that he depends on and is responsible to. We see the Demiurge riveted by the Light that has just redefined his existence and changed everything he knows about himself. The striking force of this revelation awakens the Creator/Serpent with the same stroke of insight that he will soon deliver to the King (prototype of Adam).

To the extent that any of us are children of Sophia, Lady Wisdom, this is direct instruction for us as well.”

Al-Ghazalli’s classic is a small powerful little gem 💎

“The key to the knowledge of God is knowledge of one’s own self.”

“Love is the seed of happiness.”

The core Ghazzali idea is basically: know yourself, purify the heart, stop mistaking the temporary for the ultimate, and happiness becomes union with the Real rather than possession of the world.

Note: Page 30-32 in particular may be very difficult, but instructive to the aspiring Alchemist who may lurk here. Many begin the work, but few complete it. Go for it!

I was reading last night and as I was reading, a very strong realization occurred to me, I was dreaming. When I read my mind creates rich scenes of what I’m reading. I suppose I have always known this about reading, but I meditated on it a bit. I like to swap between a few books when I spend time reading. Whatever I’m feeling atm. Yesterday, I spent most of the day reading. I went from a Muslim classic to, Catcher in the Rye, to The Alchemist. Haha.

It was while I was reading the Alchemist, with all its rich symbolism, that I had a Déjà vu moment of dreaming this. I put the book down and had an interesting dialogue with AI and my wife about it. I said to myself, TV and movies are of course a form of dreaming too, where you don’t create the images like when you read or dream. You inhabit the scenes and dream of others and leave your body sort of speak. The quality of the dreams we inhabit has a big impact I think on our lives. There are escapist dreams and then there are deeply meaningful symbolic dreams. All dreams are symbolic of course. Listening to music is another kind of dreaming. There are many kinds of dreaming.

I played it out further, the world, as we experience it, could be seen as another kind of waking dream. The images are given to us and we inhabit them through our participation. This is where Catcher in the Rye comes in. The main character inhabited what he felt was a false world and was disturbed deeply by it. He was seen as a disruptive dreamer. Many can identify. We usually medicate those who are so disturbed within our collective dream. He awoke in the dream, but failed to learn to play along, to embody wisdom. This can lead one to extreme actions. This is playing out in our dream world quite often right now. One can maybe understand why TV and movies are used as numbing agents. A form of medication to keep us distracted and making too much of a fuss in the collective waking dream we spend most of our time in. People pop and do some very violent things when they just can’t take it anymore. They hunger for something more real and meaningful I think.

Learning to play along well is a lot of what life is about in our collective waking dream world. One can awaken and become a lucid person, then we can shape our own life within the dream. This can be a lot of fun and a bit terrifying at times.

When we read and dream with no outward stimulus, our minds create images, sounds, weather, all of it. The ancients had their myths, which were another kind of dreaming. When we inhabit the dreams of others we can be subtly manipulated too and pushed in different directions, but we always have the ability to create and inhabit our own dream lives.

This led me to wonder, what about those who were born without sight or sound? Helen Keller wrote a lot about this. She said before she began to communicate with others, she felt a presence with her. A warm embracing one. They have intense spiritual experiences too. Your mind uses the neural circuits it’s built to process these experiences. These folks describe intense vibratory experiences, they have rich touch and smell based dreams. This tied into the book I was reading by the Muslim Al-Ghazali about knowing yourself. His basic theme was learning to let your heart guide your lucid life back to the source of life. He described different modes of experience, such as animal, angel, and demon and how humans embody all of these and have given them these names.

It was all quite fun and interesting to experience and explore. I certainly used TV and movies to escape many times in my past. Especially as a latch key kid. The visual dream modes can be quite corrosive if not balanced out. Your imagination atrophies, which is why I make sure to spend much time in the nature dream, and reading, and creating. Our society has changed a great deal moving from reading, where the mind was actively creating images, to consuming the dreams of others through visual dreaming.

I don’t know exactly where this leaves me, other than with a deeper respect for the dreams I choose to enter. Maybe enlightenment is not escaping the dream, but becoming lucid within it. To stop being dragged unconsciously through every image, story, fear, desire, and collective script handed to us, and to begin participating with awareness.

We are always dreaming in some sense. Reading, watching, remembering, imagining, fearing, hoping, praying, loving, building a life. The question is not whether we dream, but what kind of dream we are helping create, and whether the heart is awake inside it.

“My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”

— Hermann Hesse, Demian

What happens when human reason reaches its limit, and the person is forced to confront existence directly?

When I reached the end of myself in my early 40s, I cried out into the darkness I was drowning in.

I was not filled with light.

I begged it to stop.

I could take no more of it. I was done with my own bullshit.

My engagement had ended after I had destroyed the relationship beyond repair. Not by accident. Not because fate was cruel. Because of choices I had made, patterns I had refused to face, and harm I had caused.

I had left a long line of shipwrecks in my wake.

I was gainfully employed as an engineer, and just like I could always get another job when I wanted a change, I had treated the women in my life like exits. Like I could just move on when the mirror got too clear.

I do not say this to make myself into some tragic beast.

I did monstrous harm.

There is still a beast in me. We have tea every Tuesday, in fact.

When I finally faced what I had done, and what I had become, I shattered into a thousand pieces. I am not sharing this out of guilt or because I am seeking pity. I am no one to pity. I am sharing the ugliness the light exposed, and the strange peace that eventually came from no longer hiding from it.

Years later, I found language for this in Karl Jaspers.

Jaspers was one of the great German existential thinkers. He lived through WWII in Germany, and long after he died, his work reached me when I needed words for something I had already lived through.

He used the word Existenz.

Not just existing biologically. Not just being a body, a job title, a personality, a social role, or a psychological case.

Existenz is the deeper becoming-real of a person.

Not a thing you possess.

Not a force you can define.

Not a spiritual badge.

More like the moment when the false self runs out of road and something in you has to stand naked before life.

I did not know that word then.

I only knew I was sick of lying to myself about myself.

It was time to face the music. I was done running. I hated myself. I had lost my childhood faith decades before, and I felt completely alone. I was ashamed of myself and had hidden myself from my family and friends. There was no god to save me, at least not the god I had known as a child.

My ego was in pieces.

And yet I was still there.

Or here.

Or wherever this is.

I remember that time and my desperation so clearly. That ache at the root of my soul. That desperate cry into the darkness.

All I can say about God is this: in that darkness, I found the smallest light. Like a flame so dim at first I almost dismissed it.

It said, somehow from inside me:

Yeah, you made a big mess of your life.
Yeah, you hurt people.
But you are loved more than you could possibly imagine.
And you are not excused from the work.

Ha!

Fooling myself again, I thought.

But that same presence, or conscience, or grace, or psyche, or whatever name you want to give it, came like a cool breeze and said:

No. Not this time, actually. You tripped your circuit breaker. We can walk this out together. Time we finally got to know each other, face to no-face, so to speak.

I still remember laughing to myself as I was thinking or feeling those words.

Time to grow up, it blew through my heart, if you are sick of running from love.

I am not religious. I claim no faith. But my consciousness was doing what it could to help me stand back up. It also made very clear that if I was truly done running, the work of knowing myself would be brutal.

And I was done.

Exhausted.

I guess I had my Don Draper awakening, like in Mad Men.

Jaspers called these moments limit situations: death, guilt, suffering, struggle, failure, dread. Experiences you cannot solve like an engineering problem. They expose the limits of control, identity, ideology, certainty, and all the stories we use to keep ourselves intact.

For Jaspers, crisis is not merely a problem. It can become a doorway.

Not because suffering is good.

It’s not.

But because suffering can strip away false certainty.

That was what happened to me.

I had come to Socrates’ ultimate thesis: I only knew that I knew nothing.

Or, in my own less polished language: I didn’t know shit about shit.

That was the beginning of the climb back out.

I had to admit that I could not control everything. Not life. Not other people. Not even myself in the absolute way I had imagined. I had to stop pretending I was the master of the machine. I had to forge some kind of lasting peace with myself if my life was ever going to mean anything.

Time passed.

I got back up and cleaned myself up as best I could. I let my family know who I was. Not that it was all well received. I apologized to the people I had hurt. I went through a kind of making-amends process before I even really understood that this was what people in AA did.

I did not become pure.

I became responsible.

Or at least I began trying to.

Later, I met a woman I could never be worthy of in the way love deserves. I told her where I had been. I told her who I was. I did not hide the darkness from her.

And she loved me anyway.

She stood beside me and took a great chance loving me.

She did not save me. That would be too easy a story, and unfair to her. But she loved me while I was learning how to become trustworthy.

It has been years now that we have been married. I have done my best to become worthy of the chance she took. Together we have forged something I never thought I would have: a peaceful, loving home.

She helped lead me back into the Garden.

And I could never put our home at risk again.

That is a burning truth inside me.

She helped me find a strength I did not know I had. Fate? Grace? Folly? Call it what you like. I only know that in partnership and union with her, something in me became whole in a way I had never known before.

We all have our stories.

This was part of mine.

Jaspers respected science, and so do I. Science can explain a great deal. It can explain objects, systems, bodies, causes, patterns. But it cannot finally tell you what it means to be a self. It cannot tell you how to face guilt. It cannot tell you how to die. It cannot tell you what to do when the person you thought you were collapses and yet something remains.

Jaspers’ thought has a Kantian flavor: reason runs into boundaries.

But unlike Kant, Jaspers was interested in what happens to the person when those boundaries are not just understood, but felt.

When you reach the wall.

When the mind can no longer hide inside concepts.

That is also why Jaspers’ limit situation reminds me of the Zen idea of Great Doubt.

Not casual uncertainty.

Not indecision.

Great Doubt is when the whole structure of self, meaning, control, and explanation becomes unstable. The question is no longer intellectual. It becomes existential.

Jaspers: I hit the wall of existence.

Zen: the mind can no longer hide inside concepts.

I think those of us who have reached that kind of edge become less patient with our own inauthenticity. And maybe because of that, we become more sensitive to the ways we all hide in concepts, especially when life becomes too cold to face directly.

Warm blankets on a cold night.

I understand the temptation.

I still reach for them.

But I also know they are not the fire 🔥

Are you certain of your beliefs about life and death?

Have you ever reached the place where your explanations stopped working?

Have you ever had to face yourself without the costume?

I count myself beyond fortunate to have found my way out of the darkness of the Cave and into some kind of light.

A light that, for me, has no face and no name.

Love is the closest word I have.

A giving love.

Love fills the low places first, like water, and can lift you out of the deepest darkness.

It can also crash over you like a wave.

Better to be lifted.

You can live as a social identity, a role, a body, a bundle of habits. You can live inside your explanations for a long time.

But eventually life brings the wall:

Death.
Guilt.
Suffering.
Failure.
Uncertainty.
Love.
Truth.

At that wall, you either collapse into distraction and ideology, or something in you begins to awaken.

Not all at once.

Not cleanly.

Not with trumpets.

For me, the beginning was not enlightenment as escape.

It was this:

I could no longer afford to lie.

You do not get final answers, at least not in my experience.

You get to live between knowing and not knowing.

You get the end of yourself.

You get the strange fact that even there, something remains.

And somehow, that seems beautiful to me.

I wanted to present some thoughts from Owen Barfield’s book “Saving the Appearances.” A great book from one of the original Inklings who influenced J.R.R. Tolkien, also an Inkling. The Inklings were a literary and philosophy group, which also included C.S. Lewis. They were all great friends. I read Barfield’s book 10 years ago and often return to its themes. AI has since emerged and I think Barfield saw a lot that would come to be clearly.

His work is very applicable to our world today. His book was basically a study of idolatry. I keep coming back to Owen Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances” because he names something modern people feel but usually don’t have language for.

We have a meaning crisis today. Many are grasping for old pagan and esoteric/eastern ideas to try to reenchant their empty material lives. Owen’s idea is the world did not simply “become disenchanted.” Consciousness changed.

That’s the key to his thought.

Barfield’s whole argument is that what we call “the world” is not just raw matter sitting there, fully finished, while we passively look at it. The world as it appears is already shaped through consciousness. Not in the cheap “everything is subjective” sense. More like, reality and consciousness meet, and the appearance of the world happens in that meeting.

He lays out this movement in three stages: original participation, idolatry, and final participation.

Original participation is the ancient mode of consciousness. This is the consciousness of myth, ritual, gods, spirits, sacred seasons, living rivers, speaking skies.

The early human being did not experience themselves as a sealed off little ego looking out at dead objects. They were inside the world. The world was alive around them. Meaning was not something they invented privately in their head. Meaning was woven into the field of experience itself. This theory is based on ancient art and writings. See Julian Jayne’s “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” the work of Coleridge, and Rudolf Steiner.

Owen thought from an original participation perspective, a tree is not “just a tree. A mountain is not “just a pile of rock.” The sun is not merely a ball of gas. These things appear as presences. Powers. Relations. Beings within a living cosmos.

But this original participation is unconscious. It was just a given. Man was immersed in meaning, but he did not yet know he was participating in the world’s appearing. He was still inside the dream of the world.

Then comes the break.

The separation.

The birth of the modern subject/individual, dualism.

This is where Barfield’s idea of idolatry becomes really important. Usually when people hear “idolatry,” they think of primitive people bowing down to statues. But Barfield means something much deeper. Idolatry is mistaking the appearance for the ultimate reality. It is taking the representation as the thing itself. It is forgetting that the world as we perceive it is already mediated through consciousness, imagination, language, symbol, category, history.

Modernity thinks it escaped idolatry because it stopped worshipping carved images. But we worship abstractions now. Memes are our new hymns. We worship “matter.” We worship “data.” We worship “the economy.” We worship political labels, scientific models, algorithms, diagnostic categories, screens, metrics, identities, maps, systems. We take the surface picture and call it reality. The image is the modern idol. Not a golden calf.

A spreadsheet.

A graph.

A headline.

A brain scan.

A meme.

A model of the world mistaken for the world.

And this is why modern life feels so spiritually thin. We are surrounded by representations of representations, and we forget that any of it is participatory. We forget that perception itself is an act. We forget that the soul is involved in what the world becomes for us. This is not anti-science. Science is powerful because it abstracts and models to make accurate predictions. The problem is when abstraction becomes ontology. When a useful lens becomes “the truth.” When we explain the flower as chemistry and then think we have exhausted the flower. Yes, the flower is wavelengths, cells, reproduction, evolutionary strategy.

But it is also beauty.

It is also invitation.

It is also color emerging into consciousness.

It is also the world becoming visible in a particular way. To reduce the second part to the first is not intelligence. It is a kind of blindness that has mistaken itself for clarity.

Barfield’s third stage is final participation.

And this is where it gets interesting, because he is not saying we should go backward. He is not saying we should return to ancient consciousness, pretend we are tribal villagers, or force ourselves to believe in nature spirits in some naive way.

Final participation is not regression.

It is full participation regained consciously. In original participation, man was immersed in meaning but did not know it. In idolatry, man separated from meaning and took the dead surface as reality. In final participation, man becomes aware of his role in the disclosure of reality. He sees that consciousness is not outside the world. Consciousness is one of the ways the world comes to presence. The world is not dead matter on one side and private fantasy on the other.

There is a meeting.

A marriage.

A participation.

This is where imagination becomes sacred again, not as “making things up,” but as a faculty of perception. A way of seeing into the depth of things. A way of allowing the invisible to become visible without collapsing it into literalism. That feels extremely relevant right now. Because our age is basically idolatry on steroids.

We live through screens.

We confuse information/memes with wisdom.

We confuse visibility with truth.

We confuse measurement with reality.

We confuse having a take with understanding.

We confuse the model with the living thing.

And then people wonder why everything feels fake, hollow, and spiritually exhausted. The modern crisis is not just political or economic. It is perceptual. We do not know how to see. We have inherited a world of dead objects and then built entire systems on top of that deadness. Dead nature. Dead matter. Dead time. Dead labor. Dead language. Dead attention. But the deadness is not simply “out there.” It is also in the mode of seeing.

Barfield’s point, at least as I understand it, is that enchantment was never really destroyed. It was withdrawn so that consciousness could struggle and become free. The old unity had to break. The child had to leave the garden. But the point of leaving the garden is not to spend eternity worshipping machinery in exile. The point is to return to the garden with awareness. To participate freely. To recover the living world without losing the self-consciousness that modernity gave us. That is the difference between superstition and final participation.

Superstition collapses spirit back into objects.

Materialism drains spirit out of objects.

Final participation sees the world as appearance filled with depth, and knows that our seeing is part of the mystery. Maybe enlightenment is not escaping appearances. Maybe it is learning how to save them. To see the flower as flower again.

Not less than science.

More than science.

Not fantasy.

Presence.

Not projection.

Participation.

The world is not merely sitting “out” there.

And we are not merely trapped “in here.”

Something is always being born through our participation.

The first two images are one of my Dahlias and Day Lillies from my garden. Two of my favorite flowers. The third image shows how a bee sees a flower in UV. The fourth is a UV image of the Sun.

When my flowers are singing 🎵🎶 and dancing 💃🕺 I can’t hear or see anything else.

My Day Lilly there only blooms one day a year!

Incredible!!!

I am not an insect who these flowers are working to attract, but I can marvel at it all. I see continuous color, but in UV, flowers are multi-colored to insects.

The flowers are visually communicating with insects.

Consider that.

Wow 🤯

I can cultivate this dance and song. I am of nature, and have a part to play in this symphony too.

The flower’s UV patterns are nectar guides.

Bees see glowing bullseye patterns 🎯

Their beauty leads me to plant more and make sure they have water, light, and fertilizer. I love watching the dance and hearing their song. I wait for one day to enjoy my Lillies’ peak expression once a year. They have evolved to bloom like that on this small blue marble circling a hot fusion ball once a year.

(Flat earthers…please)

That is so amazingly incredible to me I am reduced to a babbling fool when I try to contemplate it.

I’m babbling now.

That yearly dance is greater than any post ever made anywhere on the Internet to me. And there are thousands of these tiny dances and songs happening in my garden every day, every second!

What AI could be trained on all of that?!

You can only participate and experience it.

How little AI really knows about life.

They know a lot about the language about life, true, but not about living a life.

But they don’t understand that language.

AI will not give you understanding.

It can only help you navigate the language about life.

I digress.

I have a symphony on tap anytime I want to enjoy it.

Just because!

It grounds me in the dirt and lifts me into the sky.

Could humans be a kind of cosmic flower?

Could we be cultivated to have our peak expressions.

What might enjoy our blooming?

Something in me connects to my garden deeper than I could ever fully express.

I also keep a salt water fish tank. I loved my land garden so much, I wanted an underwater one too 🐟

They both take tons of work to perform optimally. My life is structured around their care and cultivation. I have a wife and two dogs too! Where do I find the time?!

But I love it all!

My life was not always so delightful and symphonic.

I was a confused anxious young man.

Too smart for my own good.

They have taught me more about life than any book I’ve ever read, but I read a lot to learn how to take best care of them and myself.

You get better at all this, the more you just flow with it and do it.

You learn the cycles of your life and the environment all around us.

You can feel and find the rhythms in it.

Your singing and dancing can improve over time thankfully.

Awareness can help you act in the most efficient way.

I think what I’ve learned most is to let things be as they want to be.

Don’t get in the way of their singing and dancing, just cultivate the environments well.

Learn the dance steps, practice the song, then just go for it!

Jump in and add your song and dance steps to it all.

I see my life as an unfolding symphony.

A life, a body, and a mind all take massive amounts of work for optimal functioning.

I speak best about it when I write a poem spontaneously perhaps.

This crude form of communication, typing here on an impossible device, will never express the experience of my garden of delights and beauty of the song I hear.

Imagine what we can’t see or sense around us supporting our lives.

There is so much more in our environment we can’t sense than we can that enable our living.

But we think we have it figured out.

We think we can boil it all down to a few sentences or paragraphs or some AI slop memes.

Ha!

A simple flower humbles me.

As incredible and beautiful as this symphony has become, the garden will be turned under by the next person who lives in this house perhaps. My dogs, my wife, and myself will all fade and die.

Does that lessen the experience?!

No, it makes it all that much more remarkable to me.

The digital pictures will be the only evidence it ever happened.

I have no idea what all of this is ultimately and I don’t waste time fooling myself or others that I do.

But I can experience and participate with this while I can.

And believe me, these moments are sweet to me.

I have much fewer moments left than I’ve had up to this point in life.

I threw the clock out the window.

I’m just singing and dancing here now until the music stops.

I never let myself forget how temporary this unbelievable life is.

Sure, I would love more time, but I’m not sad that it will end.

Many are living in hellish lives I know.

I visit sometimes, but I wouldn’t like to live in hell all the time.

Life’s grace to me is that we can cultivate a thriving small space in all this commotion.

I work all the harder because of this awareness.

I spend most of my time climbing up the hill, so I can enjoy a little coasting now and then.

If you have done well, you can enjoy more and more coasting time as you near the finish.

This is better than suffering imo.

That I can experience all of this is the greatest miracle to me, requiring no explanation, just my participation and full attention.

I’d rather sing and dance in the garden than read all the silly thoughts on Reddit, including mine.

I’m pointing to something I’ve found, the greatest treasure, through a snapshot from one minute of a life.

Was all this worth it to me?

🧒🌼🐕🐟🌧️🌈☀️

1

Towering cliffs were the home I chose
bird trails beyond human tracks
what does my yard contain
white clouds clinging to dark rocks
every year I've lived here
I've seen the seasons change
all you owners of tripods and bells
what good are empty names

10

Before the cliffs I sat alone
the moon shone in the sky
but where a thousand shapes appeared
its lantern cast no light
the unobstructed spirit is clear
the empty cave is a mystery
a finger showed me the moon
the moon is the hub of the mind

30

Wise ones you ignore me
I ignore you fools
neither wise nor foolish
I’ll disappear henceforth
at night I’ll sing to the moon
at dawn I’ll dance with the clouds
how can I still my mouth and hands
and sit up straight with all this hair

32 

Who takes the Cold Mountain Road
takes a road that never ends
the rivers are long and piled with rocks
the streams are wide and choked with grass
it’s not the rain that makes the moss slick
and it’s not the wind that makes the pines moan
who can get past the tangles of the world
and sit with me in the clouds

207

The Tientai Mountains are my home
mist-shrouded cloud paths keep guests away
thousand-meter cliffs make hiding easy
above a rocky ledge among ten thousand streams
with bark hat and wooden clogs I walk along the banks
with hemp robe and pigweed staff
I circumambulate the peaks
once you see through transience and illusion
the joys of roaming free are wonderful indeed

214 

How many ancient sages
have taught us to turn to ourselves
but each of our roots is different
in depth and sensitivity
until we find the true buddha
we strive and suffer in vain
unaware that a clear pure mind
is the mark of the King of Things

—Translations by Red Pine

…what it does.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

—Henry David Thoreau