Is this the End of Mystery? Impossible
Real life is lurking behind the visible but takes all our courage to see
‘As a culture and civilization, we may think we are progressing. But in spite of our love for creative and destructive toys, we are going nowhere.’ Peter Kingsley
We strip life of mystery at our peril. We do so because we cannot control or comprehend the sacred and are, frankly, terrified.
Human beings — you may have noticed — have a nasty habit of killing, dismissing or ignoring what we are not ready to hear, that which cannot be placed in air-tight compartments and out of sight.
Like all those disowned aspects of the psyche languishing in the shadows, we want nothing that could disturb either our comfort or our world view.
Worse still, we have hidden reality beneath a counterfeit world and either cannot find our way out or are simply not interested.
Like those in Plato’s cave, the prison door may be ajar, even wide open, but we are going nowhere.
Safety appears to lie on the surface of life when in fact the opposite is true. In attending only to the fruit and blossom, we ignore our roots. One strong wind and we are down.
Many have noticed the attacks on civil liberties and free speech, now rampant these past two years, the destruction of faith and the centuries-long murder of the indigenous world.
New words have landed in the lexicon to explain this shift, causing all manner of division at the level of concept and belief, which we take to be reality.
We have yet to understand we live in a mind-made self, built brick by brick with concepts we take to be real. Under the spell of words, we cannot see clearly, unaware concepts are being used to manipulate us.
Even worse, we do not know we are blind; that is the very definition of being unconscious and why therapeutic work can be so challenging — for it aims to make the unconscious conscious.
To see the light, we have, like it or not, to become willing to look inside that shadow bag we long stuffed down the side of the sofa. In it, we will find not only what we could not bear, but that studiously avoided by both ancestors and society as a whole.
The other way to start glimpsing truth of course is to look to those ridiculed and scapegoated, those who dared throw the whole shadow bag on the table.
Julian Assange might come to mind, Jesus Christ certainly.
Why is the collective unconscious and the mysterious so threatening to the agendas of global power?
Could it be because unlike our foray into the visible, it is the move into our own depths that reveals our sacred birth right, the hidden doorway to our own god-like powers?
The discovery that all we truly need for a fulfilling and happy life is inside us puts an end to the tyranny of time, the need of perpetual growth, the lordship of economics and the machinery of war.
In short, it puts us outside of time and space and on a par with the gods, God or consciousness if you prefer.
It would devastate the sort of profits giving rise to terrible inequalities, the widening gulf between rich and poor and the unchecked psychopathy of egos that even empires will never satisfy.
The portal — the way out of all of this — is the difficult but simple practice of awareness watching awareness in every moment of our lives, and it can only take place at an individual level.
No-one can do it for us, the consequences of not doing so are dire in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Already, the bifurcation of the world is in full swing; two paths or timelines emerging.
One continues the theme of perpetual growth, instant gratification, unfettered centralized power for the few, a kind of techno-serfdom; in short, a dystopian nightmare sold as salvation from whatever ‘environmental’ catastrophe or medical emergency comes next.
The media is already prepping us with warnings and possibilities, of course, but you will only understand their deeper meaning if you have at least begun to understand reality is not what you think.
The second timeline uses technology as servant rather than master, understands ego or mind is meant to be a simple functionary — not seated royally on the throne of consciousness — values the feminine and the indigenous as well as elders (who have been thrown on the scrapheap by our current overlords as economically unviable).
You won’t see much of the second pathway on mainstream media of course and therefore may not know it even exists.
What separates the two timelines is very simple. The former is denuded of heart and soul, the mind in full ascendancy, avoidance of the hidden world paramount.
The latter connects human beings through the heart, the creative impulse and the divine life, emphasizing presence over time, community, sharing, and a return to meaningful ritual, including the use of alternative medicines now vehemently under attack.
Often our most important work is done in the night side of our lives, in sleep and way below the level of our day world.
Ask most serious meditators and you will see they are farmers, quietly sowing seeds which only later sprout in faraway fields, noticed by the sitter way down the road.
To attempt to strip human life of its seasons and rhythms puts us on track for calamity, but in our foolishness, we don’t understand what we have done to ourselves or what is being proposed in our name.
In the world of silence, in the life of the soul, which is utterly opposed to our neon culture, there is no immediate pay-off or quick fix. Often others will notice any changes first.
But one day, you notice an old pattern has fallen away; or a habit dropped like ripe fruit, no longer attached to your particular vine.
‘In spite of the silence, the quietness,’ writes the mystic scholar Peter Kingsley in his book Reality, ‘nothing could be more dramatic.’
A great secret is that all we have to do is pay attention, do the next right thing, then life looks after us, even cares for us, intimately.
Our great sadness is we elbow the unknown out of the way instead, not realizing how it can quench and satisfy, finally ending the quest for more.
If only we understood how the gods long to greet us, watching the very details of our lives; we might only then understand its parallel in the manifest world of CCTV, begin to see how everything good is being corrupted in a diabolical symmetry.
To bite down hard on the world is to fall asleep. Ask Snow White, symbol of purity, or Sleeping Beauty whose very name screams what’s wrong. In silencing beauty, we murder what we most need. Yet hope survives in a divine kiss from spirit.
The buried treasure lies beneath the skin of appearances and runs counter to the prevailing, now pressing, norms of society.
Do not be deceived, while the bloom mesmerises, the rhizome is often twisted and rotten; we have simply been lured by what we want rather than what we need.
Perhaps parables from nature are needed more than ever.
In two weeks, some dear friends will demonstrate in Krakow against a move to force Polish farmers to use only seeds from big corporations, permitted to use only ten per cent of their own.
They will be unable to share seeds with their neighbours. The sort of coercion being used in Africa and India has come to Europe.
That should tell you everything you need to know.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
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