OPERATION BOOTSTRAP
We weave a rich fabric, Maya, the veil of illusion, enfolding the well of Being so that It unfolds and outflows.
Mm my maya let’s dream sweet Sweet irony, this dream can only be embraced
noing it’s reely projection, the World of Might mite be mere powerplay
body armor dead wait As protoplasma children rest in everlasting arms
Baron von Munchausen escaped from the snowdrift, pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. Operation Bootstrap: So do we all impossibly pull each other up, from No Thingness into everythingness, like the Appalachian wooden toy man ratcheting himself up a string. To us this is sequential; to God the potential is actual and eternally present, so there is no “before” God appears as the universe. God is manifesting and entering “this world” of human sense, in order to reveal and grow the spiritual universe of loving Relationship.
Dream: The Lamp Itself casts the shadow. All our seeming limitations spring from the Light, because they help in this growth process. The Simple Principle: Being-in-the-world means putting OneSelf into a trap one can’t get out of alone. Opposites balance out to zero, yet No Thingness gets to open out through this play of opposites, of I and Thou, requiring the warmest forgiveness and reconciliation unto love. This is the path of ever greater Love.
We bring out this world, we do the impossible if first we receive. Inhale, exhale. With enormous drive to receive, we needily take from our food, from the treasury of the Earth, from countless generations. We use such ruses as parents and teachers to create us and nurture and instruct us, our birth and then death to balance out and pay each other off, and other such disguises, our switcheroo tricks of the trade. With this monumental inflow, it seems we just have to grow, while really, miraculously, No Thingness is Being becoming.
Aleph, the first letter, is silent, the quiet of a flawless motor---Formless God as pinwheel, as Mexican/Hindu cross, as waterwheel, spinning with invisible energy, and each cup filling, lifted and lifting, each us saying “Save me! Save me!” and simultaneously dissolving solving salving saving the entire world.
That We Create Twoness Only in This World, Falling Asleep
“Brahma” derives from “expand, grow, evolve.” The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that when Brahma, unified Consciousness, created the world, It felt lonely, or I’d say: Bursting with love.
Principle: For Oneness to grow, It must feel Itself as two, receiving from ourself to ourself. To adore and be adored, we fall into an amnesiac sleep and forget the Holy One we always are, til expanded into reawakening. Adam and Eve founded a society so secret it knows not itself.
“I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.” (Muhammad, Hadith)
How can we see our own face? By gazing into the face of our Beloved. The baby, the lover, the mystic feels this.
In being loved, becoming known by the Other person, we become known more by ourself.
The Ocean looks back at us.
The perceptions of Consciousness, the realization of beauty, exist always in relationship, the two of us, I+I, a relationship of Oneness.
We design this universe of relations so each single being seems to live As a small part of it, as one gender, one species, surrounded by surprise.
I no longer fully knows Itself---as the mystic does not know what the fruitage of meditation will be or how it happens, so Omniscience, while flashing in and out of this level of awareness, seems subsumed by the realm of relationship. Being enlarges in its Becoming.
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In a visionary world, our human error leads to a priceless new concept: If it doesn’t cooperate and can bind me, and is just there even when I don’t want it, any Other must be real, objective, a Solid Reality external to me.
So we feel there is you and me, with an independently playing mysterious you, rather than two puppets on the hands of one puppeteer; so we feel there’s a lasting objective kind of creation rather than just a dream: To have birth, we need at least temporarily the as-if experience of seeming separated. So the journey begins.
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Body and Mind
Knowing and Seeing
are properties of Being
Chi: “Life force transforming” in Chinese; Chit: “Consciousness” in Sanskrit. I Am Pure Consciousness. And the One Life is outpicturing As this spiritual universe.
Our unified higher Consciousness acts As Body-and-Mind to form and perceive this universe. Form and mind are yin/yang aspects of this manifestation.
How inventive of us to separate out body and mind. We didn’t coin “mind” til about 500 BC, in Greece. We’ve cooked up the bait of two levels of awareness, physical and psychic, plus a nice impossible situation: No bodily form exists unperceived by mind, but only stimulation by objects can first initiate human thinking. Yet of course we have both, expressing as complementary opposites, pulling each other up, Operation Bootstrap. No Thingness is not at all that empty black box, as we feared. For at our spiritual level, our Body-and-Mind functions profoundly as one Living of perception, as the Conscious World.
And also, when we’re clarified, we take no suggestions of external powers into our
Body-and-Mind, we roam free.
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Humans are doing the best we can, and divine Consciousness is doing the best It can---no blame. Some things developed in this world: metaphors, reality, relationship, “free choice.” Again, this isn’t “co-creating”---we follow not the ego’s desires, but surrender to God, a universal Directionality appearing as us, paths we have not known.
A grand paradox: It is only through this period (“period”: circling round) of our dazed human vision that we gain the virtues, each paradoxical, which we ladle out from the rich soup of Beyond-form: the ability to love another although there is only one life; courage, although there is nothing that can possibly cause harm; the belief that things are really hard and fast out there although they are not; infinite variety within Oneness.
Love, awe, joy, satisfaction, ecstasy, determination, competence, value, the sense of reality, peace, release, forgiveness, compassion, reconciliation, helpfulness, honesty, trust, empathy, bonding, loyalty, faithfulness, cherishing, freedom, amazement, surprise, adventure, courage, strength, fruitfulness, playfulness, laughter, harmony, spontaneity, receptivity, longing, poetry, beauty, transmutation, revelation, redemption: some of the great emotions we’ve unfolded and possibilities we’ve opened in this world of relationship.
Another function of this world: so we appreciate the perfect level. Beyond form, being perfect forever, we can’t savor it. With this world’s sour, bitter and salty, we accent sweetness.
We each embody archetypes, among the things we do, one modus operandi as we wear the masks of the Beyond Appearing As multitudinous complements; each reappearance is timelessly symbolic while radically personal. “Allah’s light is like a lamp within, seen through a colored niche....light upon light.” (The Qur’an) We’re transparencies and also translucencies, sections of a stained-glass window. Without the inevitable coloring of the Light, all would be a blinding whiteness. We reveal the spherically even Infinity from a certain vantage point. Otherwise we’d have no outside, no possibility, and the greater love would be stifled, and that could never Be.
The One God is an indeterminate number, closer than two, more than a mundane one because never alone. A finger on the hand, a column on ground, a self-parenting loop, that pinwheel who balances only in motion.
Throngs of beings fill the world, the One relating to Itself from so many viewpoints. As we evolve, spiraling outwards together, we crystallize from the waves those solid rocks we all see, we develop and agree upon our entire menu of perceptions.
The formation of our human realm takes great spadework by our mass psyche. The images we now sense are never to be believed in or relied on, are not to be worshiped as idols that have any power or stability, but they’re not dismissed as we see through to God, they’re honored and loved, with compassion, with understanding clarity and charity, for they’re God Itself, exiled only to be enthroned.
No blame, no credit, also no cause or dependent effects. The meditation, the rising Consciousness, accompanies the miraculous fruitage but doesn’t cause it, doesn’t always precede it. The spiritual and human levels of awareness freely cooperate, a process within one Being. But one of the qualities the womb of omnifertile No Thingness brings forth is the sense of divine cause, creation, doing, birth.
So we humbly covenant with the Presence we find multiplying in everyone, in each bite of bread, in each mistake. If we do nothing else, we receive and give forgiveness, reconciliation, and graceful ever greater Love.
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Some Lessons of Humanhood, When We Awake:
Sense of separation: When we remember Oneness, we still sense relationship and love, not just sameness.
Sense of limitation: Wondrous definition and particularity for our every expression.
Sense of material objects, separate from Consciousness: When we remember their dream nature, we still remain warm and secure in having a Solid Reality of divine expression flowing.
Sense of external powers: A great world opening plentifully around me.
Sense of struggle: Omni-activity. We’re always growing, developing and playing.
Sense of determinism: When we find we’re all free, we still make things happen, not individually with resultant effects, but pulled as a cooperative whole, dancing to the music.
Sense of dependency: We rediscover our self-sufficiency in surrender to the Self that is greater than I.
Sense of need: We have it all in loving to receive God’s Love, Appearing As all the added things eternally issuing forth, and we complete the circuit by giving.
As Yogi Berra quipped, “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
They ask, how can anything come into existence? Well, Nothing Exists so far, so that everything now exists. Fording this flourishing crossingplace, we’re entering the revelation of renewal, of Really Being with You.