The Ecstasy of the Deep Unconscious
The lover we have within
One time I fell into a hole,
down down down into
the absolute underbelly of the whole
Existence:
Dark,
like a mother’s mark,
just birthing us all.
Where do you come from?
Do you know?
And where, oh, where
do all of us go?
Far away,
so far,
across the wide Missouri,
to be lost in the vast West of what’s within,
And heading South,
heading deep,
never ever sleep.
The Earth simply melts,
and then we weep,
but in happiness,
Where such immensity,
so totally dark,
sexual intensity,
no object, no end.
The Earth has absorbed me.
I live in her secrets.
Held by her magic,
I soar
On tangerine fields
and waves of pure light.
Squeeze me that tight.
Convince me.
We’re flight.
**********
Meditation is a strange thing. In a tantric or shamanistic sense, it is surely 50,000 years old, walking with the Aborigines to Australia,
and then onto the Pacific in boats.
It goes within us to Khajuraho and in secret schools that only Gurdjieff would know so much later.
In America now, the largest religion is unfocussed spirituality. The sense of the divine is stronger than ever, but not attached to any -ism, not confined to a being, who, if he or she were there, would certainly have been seen by people in airplanes, or by astronauts in orbit. But who’s to say? Perhaps all the deities have moved to the Far Side of the Moon. Just to get away from snoops like us.
Years ago, I heard a talk by Osho that affected me deeply. He said that the conscious mind is just in the middle, and that there are three layers above and three below.
Three layers of the Superconscious above, and, of course, everyone wants to go there — That’s me talking, not Osho. Everyone wants to, whatever the religion or spirituality meditation practice may be — or drugs, if we’re honest… Everyone wants to be high, light, and free. Who wouldn’t?
But then there’s the unconscious, the Earth, the caves no one wants to go near. And, yet, we are drawn. Why? Deep places are part of us, too.
Osho said below the Conscious Mind is the Unconscious, which Freud discovered in the West. And below that is the Collective Unconscious, which, again, in the West, was rediscovered by Jung. But there’s a third and deeper layer, the Cosmic Unconscious, and Osho said a quite amazing thing, that if you penetrate to that deep level, the real Cosmic Unconscious, you’ll feel as if you’re dead, but if you just relax, you’ll find yourself soaring up like a rocket (the rocket simile is me talking, not Osho, just to be clear,) moving with the energy of that depth to reach the highest levels of Superconsciousness.
Okay, that’s pretty cool. Must be why it stuck with me!
And here’s another thing I find so amazing: If we want to go UP, we have to practice with whatever that spiritual practice may be, but all of us know that unconscious levels don’t need effort, only relaxation. The gravity is already there!
And then, to be poetic, it sends you like a rocket to that rarified space where you had mistakenly tried (so hard) to go.
There are such nifty things in this glorious opportunity we get to be alive. Evolution has worked for at least 3 1/2 billion years on this one little planet, and who knows how long on how many other zillion worlds across the night sky…?
You and I, far from being paupers or unhappy frustrated beings, slaves to a job, to money, to all the other unhappy people in our families and organizations … we really are the royalty of so much beneficence, 3 1/2 billion years of development of such exquisite and complex sensory apparatus, accomplished tool-making hands, and, of course, as I like to put it, the Rodney Dangerfield Path to Enlightenment … meaning that laughter is free, never needs effort, and does always cause trouble, which is good.
A priest walks into a bar. “What’ll you have?” the bartender asks.
“Hell on the rocks!”
“I thought you wanted to avoid that.”
“That’s what we tell people.”
A hippie floats into a bar. (He doesn’t walk. He’s so high, he doesn’t need to.)
The bartender just stares at him, then makes him a margarita with salt and lime.
“Thanks,” the hippie says. “Now I’ve got it all.”
**********************
I’m going to make an odd conjecture: The Unconscious is really the feelings inside your own body (and mind.) Mindfulness meditation can start to connect you with that aspect of yourself, but I would add one thing to it — rather than just watching, also speak, laugh, and cry. Dance. Shake if you need to. Perhaps I’ll call it “Tantric Watching.” I like that. I’m actually just an old rebbe, though. This is what the Baal Shem Tov called Hassidic Prayer, the real Hassidic Prayer, a really royal and ecstatic joy, a dancing on table tops, that (of course) was almost completely forgotten when the serious people took over after the Baal Shem was gone. Wow! That was close to 300 years ago (1760,) but … you know I love to laugh … to me, it’s just yesterday.
If we learn how to be sensitive to our own insides, then that sets us up for another nifty experiment, which shamans have known for millennia, but which only makes sense now that we have a bit of scientific understanding: The world that we see is what I like to call the “electron surface of things.” Look around you, or even imagine the atoms and bio-molecules which make you up, your skin, which you can see and touch… The apparent world of our senses is really just the electrically excited, responsive surface of the electron shells or clouds, on the outsides of atoms.
Hidden away are the nuclei, thousands of times more dense and heavy than the skimpy little electrons.
What if you could feel them? Who knows? Give it a try.
Oh, dear, I’ve gone astray! That’s what happens when reality interferes with one’s pre-planned logical exposition. But what to do? One can feel the Earth itself, deep to its core, its bubbling, constrained, hot, mighty, magnetic, electrically swirling heart.
And we do have a strength, generally unappreciated or even known, which is the boost of this Planet Earth, which flows up through us, because we are not apart from her, at all.
There is a Cosmic Unconscious, as well, and that exists when you have the strength, fortitude, and silliness to become this whole Universe itself. Contrary to popular opinion, the Universe is also as alive and responsive as you or I.
And then, there’s the Emptiness, the place where little living Universes bubble up from, and, which, inhabiting these Universes from within, creates the magic that, though disdained, does actually make all the rest of these oddball sensations
Real.
OK! Enough for one day! I only intended to write a short poem. I think I’ll get back to the juicy crime drama I was watching on Netflix — which has just had to wait! Because, so often, I really do just waste time.
Thank you for reading! Really.
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© “John” Lesly Levin 2021
