11 - Enlightenment + Embodiment = Initiation?

I will return to the chronological narrative of my life in subsequent posts. For right now, I want to step back and take a little (or maybe not-so-little after all, now that I've finished this post!) look at the trajectory of my life and my thoughts after that experience with the tree, from the perspective I have now, 15 years after it happened. It has felt like a welcome cascade of remembering things I already knew, but paradoxically, I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually integrate this 9th dimensional experience into my 3-dimensional life. It is definitely a very unfinished adventure, and I'm continually reminded of how unfinished I am!

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I had never in my life felt drawn to the concept of "enlightenment." This word has more than one meaning, of course, but in the religious or philosophical realm, it always seemed to be an abstraction that I couldn't grasp enough to want.

I got a double major when I was in college, in both biology and philosophy. The desire for the philosophy major came along my sophomore year, after I had rejected the Christian dogma that I had been trying to believe for three years, and I was curious about other ways that humans had tried to make sense of their world. One of the courses that I took was titled Oriental Philosophy, which was a dry academic overview of the major Eastern religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and the like. I remember hearing about the Buddhist idea of enlightenment as the highest stage of human experience.

For some reason, I couldn't feel any connection to, or affinity with, or yearning for, this state of being. It seemed to be completely dissociated from actually being here on earth, and I didn't feel any relationship between the idea of enlightenment the way it was being described, and the sort of yearnings I had, which was to be more connected to Love, and to feel at home in my body and with my species, and to understand why people didn't care about Nature.

In spite of my lack of interest in becoming "enlightened," I think it's safe to say that the opening of my awareness to myself and the tree as brilliant streaming pillars of Love and Light could be considered an experience of "enlightenment." (I can't actually imagine anything being more "enlightening" than that, frankly, but what do I know!)

One might expect, (I certainly did,) that having an experience like that, of being Pure Love at such an intense level, would somehow translate in some immediate way into feeling very differently inside and acting very differently towards others. However, just like the previous experiences of the veils parting and revealing what I feel are the divine dimensions, or the brief glimpse of feeling myself as Love when I was a child, (which I had not remembered yet at the time of the Tree and I,) this glimpse of myself as a column of intense Love-Light was another seed that got planted and then covered back over by the normal ways I experienced myself.

Part of the difficulty of actually living differently was that the experience made me want to do things that I didn't feel other people were ready for, like go have some sort of ritual for the tree my friend and I had cut down. I felt very afraid to bring it up with him. I realize now that this fear wasn't because I knew how he would react, because I didn't, but it came from some conditioned off-switch of fear of being shut down or dismissed or ridiculed, or worse, that I had in my own body. I'm still very much exploring the off-switches that I carry in my body. I had to spend time being with and transmuting a lot of them in order to begin writing this blog, in fact.

One of my subsequent teachers, Thomas Hübl, points out that there is a distinction to be made between enlightenment and embodiment. I've been frustrated, confused, enraged at God for the amnesia, grief-stricken for how I've impacted the people I love because of the amnesia, ashamed at myself, and embarrassed to tell the story, because of the huge gulf between this Knowing-I-am-Love-Light, and who I feel like and act like day-to-day.

At the same time, this undeniable core of me has been the constant companion to my normal self, no matter how distant it felt, during the past 15 years. It has magnetized an unending succession of teachers and friends and techniques and ideas and books and lovers and adventures and challenges to myself, that have taught me little by little that what matters is NOT how much I can shine this Love to the people around me, or whether I can convince them that they should feel this Love, but rather, how much I can open my own internal landscape to this Love.

It is like a virus that wants to infect more and more of me. My challenge has been to recognize that every time I feel pain or emotional discomfort, seemingly because of something or someone "out there," it's because a hitherto unloved part of me is coming to the surface to be in this Love. Trying to quarantine these painful parts of myself away from my consciousness by trying to change the external circumstances that triggered it, only serves to keep that part from being loved.

And like a biological virus, if it IS going to spread to other people, I have to allow it to reach a certain level of infectiousness in my own body. I can't give it to other people if there's hardly any of it in my own bodily awareness, because my immune system is keeping it under control. In the case of the Love virus, the biggest "immune system" factor keeping it from growing in me, is thinking that I need to change or help other people, instead of letting the Love infect all of ME. If I have let it infect me well enough, infecting other people with it will happen of it's own accord. And it's not up to me how the infection spreads in their body, but the resonance of my own infected nervous system may en-train their own nervous system to be open to it.

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And there is a whole other aspect to this experience, in addition to how it impacts my relationship with other people:

Because this showed me that it's not just me and other humans that are this Love-Light, but also that the tree, and every other tree, is this Love, and is conscious of themselves as this Love all the time, this experience spawned agonizing questions about how to relate with the beings that have to die every day in order for me to be alive here. For instance, I had built a log cabin out of trees that I had cut. I cut trees to burn as firewood to stay warm in order to live in this cold place. How do I relate to trees with this new understanding of who they really are, which are beings who truly unconditionally Love me and see ME for who I really am?! How do I go about killing a precious friend like that??!!??!

And if trees and humans have this 9th dimension, then it was clear to me that, even if I haven't seen it the same way that I did with the tree, the rest of the natural world does also, including deer and ants and mushrooms and cows and salmon and broccoli and potatoes and stones and spiders and ticks and rivers.

How do I understand and bridge this seeming gulf between my 9th dimensional self, which feels eternal and indestructible, and my 3-dimensional self who is alive here because other beings have died? How do I live my life in a way that honors that knowledge, and those beings? None of us, no matter how vegan or "green" or "sustainable" our lifestyle is, gets away with being alive without other conscious beings dying for us.

I found that all of the spiritual teachers and religious traditions commonly thought to be civilized, both "ancient" and modern, from both East and West, whether Christian, New Age, Buddhist, Hindu, etc... pretty thoroughly ignored this question of how we should relate to these other conscious beings on whose death our lives here depend.

And it became obvious that our present civilized industrial so-called advanced society is entirely based on the fraudulent premise that the rest of the material world is devoid of consciousness and divinity. And that the scientific materialism that dominates academia insists on trying to explain everything from the point of view that there are only 4 dimensions.

In other words, neither our commonly held traditions of religion, nor of science, have anything at all to say about this question of how to relate to the beings that die for us, if we are actually in Love with them.

I put the word "ancient" in quotes three paragraphs ago, referring to religions, because one of the things I also became acutely aware of in my learning journey is that none of the recognized religions of the world, which have all arisen in societies that are considered civilized, are as ancient as the indigenous cultures that preceded all of them. And these truly ancient cultures actually do address the question of how to relate to these beings on whose death our lives depend, precisely because they do recognize the consciousness and divinity of all of these other beings.

(It turns out that one part of the answer to how to relate to these other beings who die for us, if we actually are in love with them, involves being able to do our grief, like the way I felt my body wanting to wail when confronted with the death of my friend Mr. Cheong...)

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I've mentioned in a previous post (number 8,) how Martin Prechtel describes the year-long initiation of young people of his village in his book, "Long Life, Honey in the Heart." In this book, he also says that his Mayan villagers had four more initiatory levels after the initial one that came at adolescence. If a person was blessed, they would live long enough to become a real adult, known as a big tree or big vine or a bark person, with four layers of telescoping understanding beyond the two of childhood and adolescence. They understood that all humans, whether indigenous or civilized, are born amnesiac, having forgotten the divine dimensions from which we came, but a true culture is one that has kept in place the memory of the divine dimensions in ourselves and the world, embodied in the initiated old people, who are responsible for passing on the knowledge of the ways of participating with the divine to keep the world alive, to the coming generations through these initiations.

The way I see it, we live in a society where this memory has all but disappeared, and most of the individuals in our family lineages have not gotten initiated into even the first level past adolescence for a whole lot of generations.

Furthermore, it seems to me that our concepts of "enlightenment" as gleaned from ancient Eastern texts, and as understood by most New Age teachers, are only equivalent to the initial stage of indigenous initiatory experiences, and lack the subsequent embodiment provided by further initiations that are required to make us fully alive and at home and able to participate with the rest of the community of life on earth, that I felt the teeniest introductory glimpse of when I was sitting in the stone ring in the Arctic, or that Martin describes in magnificent eloquent detail in his many books.

I may be way off base with this analysis, because I really don't know much about enlightenment as understood by those who actually wrote the ancient texts about it, but right now it feels like a somewhat accurate view of things because I don't see the answers there to my questions about being in love with the beings who die for us, and I haven't read that they are concerned with the vitality of the community of life on earth. They have mostly felt to me like ways of removing ourselves from this physical plane, and bypassing the grief inherent in being here, rather than integrating our spiritual dimensions into our precious physical bodies, like the trees and all other beings are doing all the time, whilst and at the same time participating in the cycle of life and death.

I've taken a tangent into "comparative religion," to clarify a bit in my own head about why nothing but real indigenosity feels right to me. This part of my "theory of everything" is certainly open to revision if I get drawn into a deeper understanding of "enlightenment." But taking out and re-reading sentences of Martin's in my copy of "Long Life, Honey in the Heart" just now, to find Martin's term for a real adult, reminds me how mind-blowingly different his village understanding of being human is from anything else I have ever encountered. I can feel both an astonished expansion within my body reading his words, as well as an acute awareness of just how rudimentary and small my ability to relate to the world around me still is! Yikes..

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As my embodiment got underway, I also became fascinated with the biology of how our emotions are supposed to flow, and what happens to us when they don't. It turns out there has been a whole lot of science happening around this subject, and it had been going on for years before I encountered it about 10 years ago. At this point the science hasn't gotten into all the corners of our society's established institutions, but it's growing exponentially, and this is very promising and exciting to me.

None of these ideas were present in my mind in any coherent way when I got "enlightened." My challenge at this point in this blog is to sift through the 15 years of experience since then to find the stories that are most relevant to my initiation, or to put it a different way, how I learned a little bit about embodying that enlightenment, and how the pieces of my worldview began to fall into place, such as they are.

Alrighty, I think I've wandered on enough tangents for now. It's time for another intermission.