Unlocking Imaginal Religion – Part 9a: Reconnecting with the Infinite

The Divine in the Human

“Many Mirrors, Many Moons”

Everything appears within a total boundlessness, and is an appearance of that boundlessness.

Every finite thing is an image of the infinite.

Everything without exception is a revelation of the boundless divine psyche, including every single part of me, my story, my struggle. And so on for you, and him and her and every living being.

We are invited to see and know ourselves as the infinite formless divine, imagining itself in and as the apparently-but-not-actually finite forms of our life, body and person.

We can learn to embody this paradox as an affirmation that this blazing impossibility, this collectively-conjured miracle, is what we are, and always will be.

“The beloved is in me,

the beloved is in you.”

— Kabir

Opening of the Closing

Well here we are, friends. The grand finale. Yes, it’s a big one! But its a big (boundless) topic, so what the hell.

Get a blanket, a cup of tea, and cosy up for a deep dive into the heart of what might really be going on, here on our precious little home-planet. Alternatively, read aloud from a mountaintop in the howling wind — whatever suits you best.

I’ve split this final section into two parts, a) and b), to save your eyeballs and attention spans from imploding.

Let’s roll.

I feel fear to write this piece and to open up the subject of the divine human. Firstly because of the simple fact that no shortage of people have been killed for talking about this!

It’s 922 AD in Baghdad, Persia.

The Sufi mystic and poet Mansur al-Hallaj runs into the marketplace in a state of utter ecstasy and proclaims for all to hear:

“Ana’l-Haqq!”

meaning “I am the Truth!”,

or equivalently “I am God!”.

Risky business to say the least, in medieval Islamic society. For this, and for other controversial statements which whipped up a popular fervour for moral and political reform, al-Hallaj was subsequently imprisoned and executed for heresy. He was punched, lashed, and then decapitated or hanged – it’s not clear exactly which.

An ugly end, on the face of it. But who knows what was moving during his heart during those final hours? We have reason to believe he was not as glum and despairing as we might initially expect. As Herbert Mason writes, “he died willingly, to our disbelief and further terror, even joyously, to the point of dancing in his chains as he was led from prison along the Baghdad esplanade to his shocking dismemberment and execution.”.

What inner realisation, what divine madness could so possess a man that he could die laughing? That he could be executed in a state of ecstasy?

This is one way to pose the question of our current enquiry.

Traditionalist supporters of al-Hallaj have interpreted his “I am God” statement as meaning, “God has emptied me of everything but Himself. “ According to them, al-Hallaj never denied God’s oneness and was a strict monotheist. His proclamation was an affirmation of his ego’s disappearance and annihilation into God. One interpretation. Another, far bolder and more dangerous one, is that al-Hallaj was emphatically affirming the identity of his personal self with God.

Equivalently put: God saw and realised Godself in and through this human man, Mansur al-Hallaj, and joyously set about sharing and celebrating that realisation!

Imagine that God imagined and crafted this unique individuality, part of which manifested the identity of Mansur al-Hallaj the Persian Muslim. And within that identity, within the mirror of al-Hallaj’s soul, God newly re-cognised His own infinite divine nature.

You see, Al-Hallaj is an image, as is every human identity. Nothing more, nothing less. This is NOT saying that he is real or unreal in any particular way. It is saying that he is not finally definable by concepts. That he has no true nature or fixed identity, no existence separate from the boundless divine wholeness, and is therefore an unfathomable, miraculous, magical appearance. As such, he possesses the same ontological status as the infinite transcendent divine… the God, Allah, of whom he spoke. Neither is more or less real. Both are image.

This ontological equality between the immanent and transcendent divine is precisely the equivalence which enables a new image: the embodied evolving divine who is a living imaginal synthesis of the two (transcendent and immanent). An image that is at once finite, as a mortal human, and infinite, as a boundless psychic expanse. Ultimately it is neither finite nor infinite. Not bad. Once again the divine escapes definition and limitation! Once again, psyche slips the net of conceptualisation and finds a way to appear limited in order to see, know, love and experience herself (and her children, friends and lovers) without becoming actuallly limited. Without actually becoming anything.

Both God and the person have now been thoroughly imaginalised. Does that make them the same? Yes and No. In other words: it depends! There’s no fixed truth, so it’s up to us, in collaboration with our Gods, to choose how we want to see this. How we want to experience this. And if we/God want to see and experience the divinity of the human, well, the imaginal door is wide open!

What opens is the possibility of seeing human persons as divine, and of seeing the divine as revealed and expressed in all human persons.

This is nothing new. What is perhaps a radical notion is the stripping of both human and God of their ontological reality, leaving both floating freely, naked, radiant: images in a boundless void, utterly non-real and utterly inseparable from that void. Only, they are apparently separable, imaginally separable, and that’s what creates the images – and imaginal persons – who can go about perceiving a world of separated things. It’s what creates the Gods and Goddesses who can imagine themselves into cosmic incarnations, assuming the body of entire universes. Without the imagination of separation, the separation disappears and the images (things, beings, people, Gods) fade. Into what, we cannot say; to do so would be to invoke another image and to limit the limitless.

Images reflect one another. The human is an image of God, just as all Gods and Goddesses are images of the human. All images are images of the infinite voidness (which again, is not ultimately void, just apparently so in comparison to the infinite worlds of form). Neither image is higher or greater, neither causes the other, neither is more fundamental or primary. And we’re just going to have to live with that. Soon enough we might cotton on to the boundless freedom this affords us as embodied incarnations of the infinite divine… as non-real images of an infinite non-real imaginality!

Seeing image as image is the doorway to seeing al-Hallaj, and every other human, as a revelation and expression of the divine psyche.

Again I want to note that I’m not shooting for “the truth” here, I’m just exploring different ways of seeing and understanding, knowing that none is more or less valid than any other. (Thanks postmodernism.) So really it’s a search for the most beautiful, enlivening and poetic ways of seeing, rather than the most “true”. Ways of seeing that unlock our sense of the sacred, and of the infinite, all the while knowing that neither the sacred or the infinite is ultimate reality (because there is no ultimately reality – leaving us free to imagine and re-imagine the entirety of reality as we please).

What can we create – without ever creating anything real? What can we conjure? What images have the power to unlock our latent senses of ecstasy, praise, divinity, infinity?

It’s worth noting that al-Hallaj didn’t say that he was more God than anyone else, or that anyone else wasn’t God. He simply proclaimed “I am God!”.

Why not take his statement at face value?

Why twist his words to mean “I am nothing, God is everything”?

I think it’s because saying that you yourself are God is such a radical and arrogant statement that it opens an infinitely big and controversial Pandora’s box, the contents of which are energetically powerful enough to blast away the foundational assumptions of any institutionalised religion that reveres one God-image (or prophet, or person, or teaching) above all others.

To affirm one’s divinity and therefore one’s identity with God, a boundless and divinely fragmented wholeness, is to remove all possibility of those institutions having power or authority over anyone or anything. It is to equalise everyone and everything to a status of pure, primordial, and perfect divinity – refracted into countless sacred individualities! Souls!

What’s more, each individuality is a unique constellation of imaginal non-equalities (or dualities, like light and dark, high and low, good and bad, masculine and feminine) which allow the construction of experience and personality in the first place. As Jung showed us, having our identity unconsciously tied to one pole of a duality is the cause for psychic imbalance, for identification with an aspect of archetype of the unconscious). But consciously tying our identity is the imaginal act of saying “I am a man, a warrior, a servant of humanity, a painter, an explorer, a wild lover of God”.

Imaginal identification with a basis of emptiness and non-reality; this is the groundless ground of soulmaking and imaginal religion. Relating to God-images – Complexio Oppositoria, Part 7 of this series– allows us to see our inclusion and transcendence of all dualities. But this doesn’t prevent a future fragmentation of these God-images into newborn imaginal individualities, incarnated souls, dualistic constellations of perception enabling the unfoldment of myth, story, and creative evolution!

I think al-Hallaj’s proclamation is an utterly terrifying notion for almost every human, because it triggers the recognition that “If he is God, then I must be too! And I have been hiding from my own embodied divinity and my responsibility for all creation. It is intensely painful for me to look at this. To admit to myself and others that I have not been living in accordance with my total divinity, with my universal interconnectivity and boundless creative freedom. I have chosen to forget this and now you come waving it in my face. I must silence you at once. Guards!”

It’s far easier to denounce old al-Hallaj as a madman, a crackpot, a good-hearted but ultimately crazy person.

But what if al-Hallaj’s “divine madness” was an expression of divine self-realisation, and indeed self-love? What if the clarity of the divine, as it realises and expresses itself through human persons, appears to us as utterly mad?

What if his arrogance was the arrogance of God (who as God, has every right to be infinitely arrogant) expressing itself through a human voice?

What if our consensus reality (of sanity and normality and materiality) is an insanity because it denies our true nature – of having no true nature and therefore being infinite, imaginal and divine?

Either way, God is utterly mad. Look at this place!

This madness is our madness. And it is, on the face of it, far easier to “play sane” than to admit that I have not only a foot, a hand or an eye in this mess, but my whole being. To admit that I have been denying my divine power and playing victim, harming and suppressing myself and the countless souls who I live with. That I am complicit, consciously or unconsciously, in the untold depths of evil and suffering that currently blight the flowering earth we live on.

Yeah… even God has bad days.

They are our bad days.

However, the revelation of human godliness is available and accessible to anyone and everyone, anywhere, at anytime. We need only see ourselves anew and recognise our wholeness: our utter inseparability from the divine psyche.

A simple way to do this is to re-imagine ourselves as infinite and divine. As God-images! This is to recognise that, on inspection, no aspect of our self or world is fixed, real, or literally any way at all! So all immanent beings are images of the transcendent Godhead, and vice versa.

To recognise the imaginal nature of everything is to recognise the infinite nature of everything – and everyone.

The profundity of this infinitude may very well invoke us to use the epithet “divine”. It is utterly unnecessary to do so, but it may well be a doorway to entire new universes of soulcraft and beautymaking. The infinite psyche has no fixed nature, so imagining and relating to it as divinity – as deity – may open up vast new possibilities for this relationship.

Because I can talk to a deity! I can pray, give thanks, ask questions. I can collaborate. I can invoke that deity to live, work and create through me. In doing so, I live and create through the deity; our boundaries blur. Lover and beloved are both united and separated within this love, the heart of the infinite.

This re-imagining (of ourselves and one another as divine) is the very resurrection we are looking for, precluded by a death of what we believe we “literally” are, and also what the world is. It follows that by releasing our relationship to a literal God (bound by a fixed image and idea, just as is the self who serves Him) we become available for encounter and exchange with all manner of imaginal Gods. These relationships are open-ended, non-real and ultimately empty of inherent essence. Infinite!

The power and creativity and ecstasy that can burst through people who realise this is nothing short of superhuman. Infinite divine energy! Joy! Ecstasy! Try suppressing that. No wonder it was punishable by death! Al-Hallaj’s executors clearly sensed that he had broken through into an experience of divine madness and unconditional love, contacting a power which threatened the false religious authority – and identities – that they clung to (due to their unconscious and self-serving survival strategies).

Now I don’t think that I will meet a fate that quite grisly, not in this lifetime, for exploring this topic. But I do know that I am opening myself to quite some judgement, rejection and accusations of becoming totally egomaniacal! I accept this as one of the challenges of this work.

I also feel fear of misinterpreting the “I am God” doctrine in a way that really does feed my ego’s inclination towards superiority (an old survival mechanism that protects me from the fear and sadness and intensity of being connected with everyone around me, with all the immensity of our struggles inextricably interwoven). Basically this could easily become a way of convincing myself that “I am more God than you!”. I will address this later in this section. (Spoiler: realising our identity with God is going to break us, not build us up.)

Another fear asks: who the hell am I to write about the divine human?

And the unbelievably arrogant answer comes: well… how about God Himself, in embodied human form?

I do not feel comfortable with this. And I can almost feel the hairs prick up on your skin. Oh dear, Will has lost his mind and he thinks he’s God. I hear you. Definitely that would be a cause for concern… I think that if I really believed that I am God exclusively, I would be fit for an asylum. There’s no lack of people behind bars who hold a sincere belief that they are indeed the second coming of Jesus! How sad — probably they have an incredibly beautiful experience until someone thinks they’re nuts and they get thrown into a locked room and given mind-numbing meds for the rest of their life. What happens then, who knows? It’s a good test of one’s capacity for universal unconditional love, no doubt. Maybe there really are prophets and saints in the asylums of the world. And maybe the devil walks the streets, sits in offices, and files papers condemning realised souls to lifelong imprisonment. Read the novel “The Master And Margarita” if you want to explore such ideas.

If we, as the divine, get to decide who is divine, and we choose to see everyone as divine, then it is indeed the case: that Jesus lives with us in a padded cell, and we have to squarely face up to what we — God — have done to God. What we continue to do. Hopefully, God is soon to really face up to the mess he’s been making — and do the soul-cleansing work of tidying up: forgiving, reconnecting, healing, and resurrecting.

Are we ready for this?

Do you see what I’m getting at?

Seeing everyone as God is absolutely heartbreaking and horrifying. To begin with, at least. We have to go through the horror in order to fully embrace and open to God — ourselves — in our infinite wholeness. And we can. And we do. And we will. And we emerge utterly transformed, reconnected – and uniquely individuated.

So yeah, I am “doing an al-Hallaj”, albeit not quite so emphatically – more hesitantly, tentatively, neurotically, in perhaps the way that only a privileged and English male millennial could. Arrogant and apologetic.

I am declaring that I’m God, perfect divinity, but only on the condition that you are too, and so is everyone we know and also every non-human entity in this fathomless universe and beyond. It’s like a pact or covenant between all souls: that seeing ourselves as God can only work, can only be authentic if we see every other soul as equally divine. Then the unity of the infinite is honoured and can proceed to express itself through the multiplicity. And this is part of the beauty of the whole show, that we get to witness as unique many self-as-God realisations as there are embodied incarnated souls! Pop! And there goes another one: another wild and wonderful human awakening to the ecstasy of being utterly and unvanquishably imaginal, infinite, divine!

How do I feel doing this? Well, pretty good actually. Pretty cheeky, in a way. Like I’ve just claimed something that was waiting for me to grab it all along. My divinity. The divinity of my soul. Like I stepped through a portal into an infinite imaginal play that looks and feels exactly like material reality – but it isn’t, not at all! It’s totally constructed – and reconstructable! Groundless! Miraculous!

I am on guard for smugness (escaping shared suffering into superiority) and for ideational relapses back into reification, literalism and materialism. Into believing myself not free, not divine, not infinite.

I think that God just likes being human.

Sometimes hates it, but always comes around and finds some value in the suffering of the hatred. Some learning. Some new skill or capacity that can be used to make this cosmos even more beautiful and sublime.

Now can I open to the possibility that God likes being me, is actually quite ecstatic about the outrageously complex imaginal occurrence that is me, hanging out here in a cafe in Mexico City writing about – erm, Himself – looking at the window at all the other bits of God going to work and drinking coffee and sleeping on the street, loving them all unconditionally, and thinking hey, it’s almost time for some God-given chocolate and maybe a stroll in the God-praising park…

Nothing prevents me from claiming my Godhood except my ideas about myself and about divinity. And nothing prevents God becoming human except God’s ideas about humanity!

I share about this in order that the people around me see this is possible (to claim and enjoy one’s divine identity and use it for the harmonisation of this soul-filled world), and to do the same, should they want to. I’m not coercing anyone, just exploring the possibilities for re-imagining ourselves. The initial discovery is that the possibilities are infinite!

And as I claim my divinity, I see that it comes part-and-parcel with the ability to see all other souls as divine. And that entails that I am tied to your journey, your struggle, your quest – and you to mine. It’s all one story, infinitely refracted into countless subplots. (Note to self: keep writing).

Only if I love others as God, can I love myself as God.

And vice versa.

Our suffering is shared, and so is our infinite evolutionary unfoldment. What a blessing! What a transformative, reality-shifting act of the imagination! To reimagine herself, in and through the human, as infinite!

Then comes the honing and refining of the skills, the inner arts, of soulmaking: learning to see, love and creatively relate to oneself and others in ever-more sublime and beautiful ways.

What if I believe that I am utterly not special or unique in anyway, and that every single person on earth is God, embodied and personified? What would you think of me, if I told you that I am indeed playing with choosing to see the world — and myself — in this way? As an experiment? That I am choosing to see every single being as a living embodiment of the infinite divine, an imaginal appearance of psyche, manifesting exactly as psyche wants to experience herself? Choosing to see that nobody is more or less divine than anyone else?

The preliminary results of this experiment indicate the possibility of arriving at a quite an unexpected place indeed: a place of great unity and equality, a vision of a “divine humanity”. A homecoming like no other. And simultaneously, a reckless jettison into an infinite vision of communal freedom. I have also discovered that this must be balanced with a vision of “divine inhumanity”, a recognition of all non-human beings as equally divine and imaginal, such that we do not stray into anthropocentrism and the violent belief that we are more important or sacred than any other form of life. We are not! And choosing to see the cosmic equality of beings brings us home to far greater experience of divine community than the view of a bunch of lonely but divine humans stranded inside the corpse of a dead material cosmos.

However, the “universal unconditional divinity” of every human being is the primary topic of this final piece. It’s the final step in this opening chapter of the imaginal religious journey. After that, our research continues. We proceed in the terrifying uncharted territory of being the fundamental creator of this life, society, and cosmos, continually interfacing with the infinite unknown to conjure the next moment of consciousness into imaginal non-real appearance…

I am increasingly grateful for my fears, because they are helping me to navigate this space. And something in me longs to navigate it, to weave through these halls of ideas and images to arrive at my soul’s sensing of the total and utter divinity of this body, this person, this human life that I am living on earth right NOW.

Maybe you already love and appreciate yourself as God. If so, I’m glad! Only, I don’t see very many people loving themselves this thoroughly and unconditionally. Let alone the people around them. And I guess that’s why I’m writing this. Kind of like a love-letter from one part of God to another, reaching out to say “Hey, look! We are really doing this! We made it to Earth! We are really here! We really are going for this cosmically-embodied soul-incarnation thing! I am struggling and you are struggling but let us take a moment to appreciate how preposterously incredible and beautiful this world is, to behold these human people we have conjured from pure infinite voidness! How unspeakably noble and elegant and refined and lovely we are becoming! I see you, friend. I see myself in you. I see you on this journey of becoming an incarnated soul and I thank you for your devotion to this world and to your ongoing refinement as a divine creative citizen of the sacred living earth! There are no problems in this entire world, not really, for every challenge without execration presents an evolutionary opportunity, a chance for psyche, us, to reimagine ourselves as embracing and creating beauty from all of it, especially the horror and the ugliness. Transform it all! And we can. And we will.”

Something like that. Do you get my gist? I mean what I say. I see you and I love you. I’m deeply grateful that you’re reading this and are coming on this journey with me!

Before diving deeper, I want to be upfront about my lack of certainty in all of this. It’s easy to write about being a divine human, it’s quite another thing to live and embody it. I’m a beginner in that department. An apprentice to the saints and master-soulmakers of the world. Working on my inner arts. From another view, I (and you, and everyone else) are always already embodying divinity. So we also can’t escape our role as experts in the matter (of matter).

Basically, I want to know what opens up – what becomes possible for beautiful, ethical, soulful living – when we entertain these utterly groundless views. Not because they’re true. Because we can!

I want to know what happens when we choose to see and sense our own divinity and the boundless nature of our soul. Of all souls. Because then, crucially, nothing special has to change about our human lives. Our bodies don’t need to be filled with bliss and light, the bushes we walk past don’t need to burst into flames, and the dull morning trip through the grey streets to grab a coffee and a newspaper becomes an utterly perfect expression of the infinite divine imagination. All because we choose to see it that way! All because the divine imagination is choosing, right now, to imagine exactly this, and not an inch different. And because at one level of our being (our soul), which is the level of transcendent universal divine love, we are always and already seeing — and are being seen — in this way.

So the task is to live from that place. Or to live informed by this perspective; a perspective which overturns and reveals as groundless our most fundamental assumptions about who and what we are – to the point where we can no longer make assumptions or say anything definitive at all. But we can entertain and enjoy a limitless expanse of imaginal reality-building ideas, identities and experiences. So we do!

As the saying goes, “we’re not human beings learning to be spiritual, we’re spiritual beings learning how to be human”. So when I do go for my coffee and paper, not that I ever actually buy either of those things, I don’t need to do or be or experience anything special. Because the very appearance of any experience, any soul, is the most special and precious and infinitely profound thing. And if everything in the universe is that profound, then this profundity becomes utterly ordinary… hence the background serenity of (our awareness of) the “everyday reality” that we clearly love to experience! I like this, because it brings the divine down from its exalted pedestals, and loses the idea that it is something different to and external from the world we live. And the people we are.

Nothing is different, and everything is different. Back to paradox — from the viewpoint of the mind. Back to perfection — from the viewpoint of the heart and soul. Which perspective to take? The choice is ours.

I am also realising that I need to thoroughly integrate this “divine identity” into my embodied human consciousness, because it is clearly not the default operating mode of my current personality. It’s an idea (as are all identities), and it is currently competing with my habitual idea-identity as a real, limited, male, human person. Usually the limited human identity wins, and I stumble around in a dreamlike stupor (forgetting it’s a dream and that I’m a dream-character, of course). Can these idea-identities come to co-exist and find harmony within the soul, within psyche’s expanse?

The idea of divine imaginal individuality is the seed crystal around which a new embodied identity can coalesce, and which can come to hold and embrace all previous ideas about who I am (and what the world is) in a new light, a new vision, a new view. If you have this idea, this seed, which you certainly now do after reading this piece, you can and nurture it until it is big and strong enough to transcend (and embrace) your previous limited-and-literal personal identity. Tend it with the life-giving waters of your imagination. The sensitivity of your energy body. The power of your visions.

For the most part, my divinity (my freedom, my boundlessness, my unfathomability) is still unconscious. I’m still somewhere in the realm of naïve realism and the self-centered child ego-state (survival mode consciousness), with occasional tantalising glimpses of transpersonal and archetypal consciousness (coming through images, intense feelings, dreams, meditation, prayer, movement, music, ceremony and particularly transparent and intimate being-to-being encounters). It seems to me that this is how it is for the vast majority of people alive today, at least here in Western society.

We’re sleeping Gods.

Ready to dream ourselves awake…

Our life is a mostly unconscious and non-lucid dream. But it could be totally lucid, totally conscious, with each and every human ecstatically, blissfully and painfully aware of their total freedom, power and responsibility for all of creation. That’s why I’m writing this. If I can help to stir in YOU, dear God, a recognition of your own face in the misted mirror of YOUR life, then I will be a happy man. A happy God! Maybe you will thank me for it. Or maybe you’ll write me angry letters because you wanted to play the victim-of-life game a little longer. I’m sorry if this has been a rude awakening, O boundless one. I’m sorry if I have come across as superior, or acting like I know it all. I don’t. I’m winging it and I’m not any better than you are. But I am just as gloriously and infinite divine as you are. I am just as God as you are. So let’s celebrate our differences and our oneness, and maybe — get some lunch? Go dancing? Get steaming drunk and serenade the moon with desperate love-poems?

Humans just got upgraded to the status of infinite divine creators. Simply because we are cultivating the audacity and arrogance to see ourselves as such. And it works! If that isn’t a cause for celebration, I don’t know what is!

We are God, refracted and embodied as countless human souls, working out together how to be human. Improvising and winging it, eternally. Wing it long enough and you realise that you are FLYING!

I invite you to do some experiments in seeing and sensing yourself as divine, to feel into this inquiry more deeply. Let me know what you discover!

Personally, I can say that learning to creatively see and sense my own divine nature is making me happy in an awesome and expansive new ways. It is also utterly terrifying, heartbreaking and enraging. It is making life intensely and unavoidably ecstatic and electric.

Increasingly, I cannot deny my participation in every single event, even those that seem distant in time and space to the conventional mind. Even the dark and fucked-up vortices of suffering that rage through human society. Only if I admit that I participate in them, can I work for their evolution, healing and transformation.

It’s a strange synthesis between being totally carefree and totally caring about everything and everyone. It is creativity, unity, individuality, and emptiness, all rolled into one (two, three, four…)!

Suffering, Love, and Evolution

I once had a dream about dear old al-Hallaj. Here is my journal note:

“I am in a huge burning building with a group of people trying to escape the fire. We find a window where we can hop across to another building and start climbing through. As I am going through the window I look back and there is al-Hallaj… sitting, not moving, looking at me. I can feel the intense heat of the inferno and see the orange light dancing on his face. He looks serene, not at all flustered or terrified. He might be smiling, ever so slightly, I cannot quite tell. But there is also something grave and serious in his expression.

“Al-Hallaj!” I shout. At that moment I realise that he has chosen not to flee, to stay right where he is, alone, and to be consumed by the flames.”

What do you think? Why did he stay? Why did he choose to die? To send a message? To transform? To disappear?

I am still pondering the possible meanings of this dream-sequence, and the reason for al-Hallaj’s choice to be killed. One interpretation is that he made a conscious choice to be unrecognisably transformed by the power of the collective unconscious, the alchemical flames of the transpersonal psyche, God. To be reborn as a divine human – because the divine wanted to experience it that way. To me, the burning building is also be a metaphor for unfolding global collapse (as Greta Thunberg says, our house is on fire) and the possibility — or necessity — of submitting to facing the crisis. Even if it kills us, whether in a spiritual or physical sense, or both.

As I am learning — and perhaps we all are in our own gradual or not-so-gradual way — the realisation that “I am God” is an utterly shattering experience.

As Jung wrote, “Encounter with the Self is always a defeat for the ego”.

Kinda makes me want to back out. Go back to chugging beer and pretending none of this ever happened. I’d still be God, so why the need to see and feel my oneness with and responsibility for everything? Why create more pain? Isn’t there enough already?

The encounter with the Self – one’s God – is the experience of seeing oneself as one is, in one’s wholeness, not as one would like oneself to be. Newly conscious of our automatic, unconscious patterning, of everything that we have been trying not to see or feel. We encounter “the terror of the situation”, as Gurdjieff described it. Thus begins the underworld journey.

Contrary to what we expected to find, God is suffering unspeakably.

Why?

Because God is evolving.

God is learning how to create from within material spacetime by imaginally manifesting as soul-individualities incarnating as human persons.

So our suffering is God’s suffering, because we — as God, the psyche, the unfathomable whole — have chosen to fragment and suffer the trials of separation, in order to evolve and to further the creative experiment of incarnating and living in this material cosmos.

Which hints at the possibility that, just maybe, there is a logic to all of this and that all the unspeakable suffering entangled in embodied human living is necessary for the birth of something outrageously and unreasonably beautiful and sublime: an awakened humanity in an awakened cosmos. By this view, all suffering is noble beyond words.

“Suffering is the price of love.

Suffering is the price of expansion of being into non-being”

— Andrew Harvey

And if God is a “world of endless expansion” (Shams of Tabriz), then the evolutionary project is a project of endless suffering. Oh dear. Only, this suffering is not inflicted from outside. It is willingly chosen, consciously and intentionally, in order to create, to love, to know and behold beauty.

In this infinite creative process, there are no victims. And it is quite a shift in worldview, to realise that I have chosen all of my suffering in order to evolve, learn and grow. In order to expand my consciousness. In order to fully embody my boundless freedom, divinity, and creative power, in and through the sublimely bounded form of a human person. And likewise, to see that every suffering soul here on earth has chosen their path, even if they have also chosen to temporarily forget that choice (apparently we do this before birth, in order to deepen and intensity the learning experience).

Eventually, all suffering is embraced, and this is the revolutionary act of love that heals the wound, transforms the energy into yet more soul. More beauty. It is the resolution and the recreation of life.

Without paying the necessary price, evolution — and the miracle of this imaginal adventure as eternally-transforming embodied lovers — cannot occur. Without suffering separation, Love cannot take shape! Cannot manifest as beauty, or be adored. Let alone met with, kissed, and merged with.

This is the degree of devotion we have to one another and to our beloved, and to the task of creating and embodying endless beauties.

As we earthly humans are realising, we have already paid. And if we want to stay alive — to keep transforming and evolving — then we have to keep paying. Keep dying. Keep suffering. It’s no wonder the old-school Buddhists (and other traditions) recognised this and concluded “Embodied living is simply not worth it! Far too painful! I’m going back to the transcendent unity!” This is a valid path, no doubt. It is the “awakening” path, and it informs all creation as groundless and imaginal. An essential insight. But it is not the evolutionary path. This is an important distinction, for which I thank Anne-Chloé Destremau.

Andrew Harvey further writes that the divine has three aspects (he calls it “the Real” but as you may have cottoned onto, I don’t take too warmly to this concept).

These aspects are:

1. Transcendent
2. Immanent
3. Evolutionary

Yet another tripartite God-image! And yet, I think there is something useful here, something that really does transcend and include the God-images of old and emerges as a radiant self-reflective image of the boundless wholeness of the psyche.

Indeed, these distinctions have helped me to understand the “evolutionary” aspect of the divine psyche as a synthesis of the first two. Infinite transcendence provides the infinitely abundant creative field in which the perceptual experiments of spacetime, embodiment, individuation occur. In which the raw presence of immanence, individuated awareness, can appear (both to itself and to the infinitude of other individuals). And the boundlessness of the field enables limitless creation and recreation of these forms (or bodies, persons, beings, souls, spirits, whatever you want to call them). That’s evolution: ongoing transformation of the content of individuated awareness. This transformation is infinite in scope and possibility, precisely because that awareness is seamlessly united with the infinite “objectless openness” of the transcendent divine.

Evolution cannot occur without something dying. This is a law! It applies to you and me, to humanity and the earth and indeed the whole living-dying-resurrecting cosmos. Without death, forms and bodies and energies cannot be recycled and fed back into the field. This is not to say that something (something inconceivable and indescribable, not really a thing at all) is undying and unchanging — only that this thing or being, this transcendence, is without form. Being without form, it can interact with all forms as a source of abundant novelty, allowing these forms (or beings) to interface with a groundless void: to give back what is not working, what wants upgrading or replacing or iterating, and to draw from that transcendent voidness an infinite variety of new forms. Boundless creative possibility and boundless evolutionary unfoldment are made possible by the interface of the immanent and transcendent.

Something and nothing are apparently so completely inseparable as to form a seamless non-duality. Because “something” could never actually come from “nothing”; that doesn’t make any sense, it’s completely impossible. The only alternative is an inconceivable “not-thing” (psyche, the divine creative intelligence) which is neither something nor nothing.

We are this not-thing.

This image!

Completely escaping definition or description, it can thus assume the guise of any definition or description — including an infinite array of somethings and an unfindable invisible nothingness. The constant interfacing of these somethings with the nothing, makes possible the infinite evolution of those somethings. Only neither the somethings nor the nothing(s) are truly things, nor are they no-things. They just appear to be so. Really they are not-things (and not-nothings), totally limitless. Thus unfolds the infinite imaginal adventure.

In this way, the transcendent and the immanent divine are utterly mutually dependent (and you guessed it, mutually empty and non-real). This mutual dependence, this inseparability, is undeniably evidenced (and gloriously embodied) by the countless eternally-evolving souls of the infinite divine psyche. You and me, baby!

This endless and eternal recycling of life-energy is itself transcendent and immanent, working as one inseparable non-dual intelligence to generate an infinitely vast and expansive evolutionary tapestry of living beings.

Radical Responsibility

As I explored in “On Free and Natural Adulthood”, genuinely responsible and creative humans are extremely threatening to societies that are built upon avoiding responsibility and suppressing creativity. But if a person realises their divinity, responsibility and creativity are unavoidable, part of the contract (or covenant) of taking a human incarnation, these qualities begin to arise naturally and spontaneously from the soul (that is, from the level of individuality that knows its inseparability from the boundless whole).

The history of religion has been largely characterised by an effacement of the individual (the human person) in deference to a higher or greater transpersonal being (often called God(s)).

This deference is what postmodernism rebelled against so ferociously: the giving away of one’s centre — one’s inner authority and clarity — to an external creator-authority, in order to avoid the responsibility of being a creator oneself. Only, the postmoderns never really got (re)creating; they sought only to deconstruct. Couldn’t see a way forward. Lost in the groundless void.

Broadly speaking, the metamodern cultural and metaphysicproject that follows postmodernism is a great recreation, reconstruction, and resurrection. It constructs itself at the same rate as it self-deconstructs, -reflects and -evaluates. In just the same way, the people and their identities who are driving this project are continually being dissolved, liquidised, reborn and recreated anew. They know they are groundless, and they know that groundlessness is the doorway to infinite imaginal non-real creation. Free from the bile and spitefulness of postmodern rhetoric, they critique and deconstruct themselves and one another (through feedback) as an act of profound love, one which is necessary for the ongoing evolution of individual and the collective. As such, the constructions of metamodernism — the idea, the image, the identity, the experience — are never taken to be true, real or final. And yet, undeniably, they appear to the senses, as vivid as daylight. And at the same time, they are as ungraspable and weightless as that light! Luminous yet empty. Miraculous emanations of primordial wisdom-awareness. The bliss-void indivisible. Everything is revealed in and as this “clear light”, or diamond luminosity. Everything — and everyone — can be perceived as completely open and boundless, possessing limitless depth and dimensionality. Always ready to be dissolved back into the infinite, such that something utterly new may emerge. Seeing and living, as an embodied human being, this continual and eternal recycling of the entire world, we enter a vision and experience of the “sacramental nature of everything” (Tibetan saying).

In order that we better digest this idea, I want to share a description of radical responsibility from its original source, Clinton Callahan:

“Radical Responsibility is not a choice. The only choice is whether to be conscious or unconscious of your radical responsibility. You cannot avoid being Radically Responsible. Conscious Radical Responsibility is you recognizing your Radical Responsibility for the Choices you make…both your Conscious Choices AND Your Unconscious Choices.

Radical Responsibility is being inescapably responsible for the level of responsibility being taken in any gameworld and any space, even when it looks like there is no gameworld and no space. Awareness of the level of responsibility being taken mostly causes pain. This is the pain of the awareness that the potential that is possible is not being actualized in the current circumstances. It is the pain of holding both an accurate assessment of current reality, and a solid estimation of true potential, in the same place (your awareness) at the same time. The more of this pain you can endure, the more interesting your projects and coincidences become.

Consciously Choosing and standing in Radical Responsibility puts you in alignment with archetypal forces in the Universe (such as the Earth Coincidence Control Office, and your Archetypal Lineage) because this is a Radically Responsible Universe. (e.g. A stone placed on the table will stay there on the table until you or someone else moves the stone or the table. The stone will not magically disappear or move somewhere else. In other words, every action or inaction has unavoidable consequences.) The human nervous system is sophisticated enough to directly interact with these archetypal forces, meaning they become your resources. The playing field field of Radical Responsibility is the Archetypal Domains, which are accessed through the Doorway of the Decontaminated Adult Ego State. The Archetypal Domains are where human beings can creatively collaborate in, and enjoy the ecstasies of, Archetypal Five Body Intimacy Journeys.”

(Note that everything underlined is a webpage with a wealth of psycho-active, possibility-unlocking thoughtware. Get stuck in!).

In the context of radical responsibility, the God-image now becomes congruent with, and indistinguishable from, one’s self-as-image. We assume conscious responsibility for being the creator of reality, embodied in human form. It is a mistake to believe to think this will lead to ego-inflation. We are not more (or less) responsible than anyone else. If it does lead to ego-inflation, this is due to a misconception that “the separate ego is the one and only creator”, and is not rather one of infinite emanations of the primordial unified creator, or psyche. The separate ego is created by the creator. The creator created itself as the ego. And the creator is the inconceivable synthesis of a) the selfless self, (the adult ego, the divine person, the apparently-but-not-actually separate individuality), b) the unification of all egos/selves/beings (the universal being, transpersonal causal oneness) and the c) uncreated transcendent (or voidness). And, for good measure, we can throw in d) the infinite unknowable beyond, or diamond luminosity.

The adult ego is a refinement and evolution of the original “seed crystal” of the selfish child-ego who does not recognise their own radical responsibility, creativity and boundlessness, and therefore does not see, sense or respect their own divinity or the divinity of others. The child-ego sees a reality and plays victim to that reality, in order to protect and preserve itself long enough to birth an ego-structure that can then set about reconnecting with the infinite, both within and without. This is when initiation and religion (and the imaginal and archetypal encounters they make possible) become necessary, to both the individual person and the village they inhabit. These processes force the evolving ego to recognise, remember and acknowledge its universal interconnectedness and its transparency (its non-reality, its dependence on and inseparability from the infinite and empty-yet-overflowing divine heart-mind).

The adult ego sees not a reality but an imaginality and recognises their fundamental participation in every aspect of it. To consciously assume responsibility for everything in existence will undoubtedly break the self-serving ego-identity open and birth a radically responsible and universally compassionate individuality.

The ongoing refinement of this individuality, both by integrating it into universal oneness and by exploring and expressing its total boundlessness through creative bounded embodiment, in ever more subtle and sublime ways… this is the essence of the ongoing evolutionary project!

Yes, you can read that sentence again!

The responsible adult-ego that emerges holds a liquid identity (or set of identities, as if it possesses an infinite wardrobe of characters, archetypes and mythical roles to assume). The self-image is no longer fixed but eternally transforming along with the limitless array of imaginal identities that a soul is able to assume, play with and recreate at will. And it appears that over many incarnations, our souls are engaging in the work of crafting our individuality such that we may inhabit ever-more unique and beautiful and creative identities, live in ever-richer and more complex relationships, and together create ever-more glorious harmonisations of all our disparate-yet-connected parts.

Again, With Feeling

Throughout this series I have talked a lot about images and imaginal encounters. Bringing our conscious feelings to bear in these encounters is really the missing puzzle piece that I have not yet mentioned. It is the key that makes our encounters as fully embodied as possible, that transforms them into doorways to whole new realms.

As Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett writes,“The degree of affect indicates the degree of embodiment of the archetype, since affect is felt in the body”. A clear and simple recipe for embodying archetypal forces! The challenge is getting clarity about our affects (the feeling or emotion). “What am I feeling right now?” becomes a key question. And to answer it we need the skill of discerning pure feelings, and of allowing them to intensify. If we can do this, we can increasing the “degree of affect” of which Corbett speaks: and we have thus unlocked a necessary skill for expressing and embodying archetypal energies!

This recipe concurs with the experimental discoveries of the worldwide “Possibility Management” movement. Through hundreds of high-intensity interpersonal laboratories, these consciousness explorers have ventured deep into the world of conscious feelings and emotions. Powerful discoveries have emerged from this work, one of them being the “new map of four feelings” which brings great clarity to the previously murky area of human feelings. It states that we have four basic feelings, which are:

1. Anger
2. Fear
3. Sadness
4. Joy

Feelings are neither bad or good. They are just feelings; each offering neutral source of energy and intelligence for authentically creating and navigating our lives. Take a moment to reflect on how this might simplify your world.

Some further comments about the new map of feelings:

• Each feeling has specific qualities of energy and intelligence. They are not malfunctions or problems, as many religions and cultures believe. We simply have not had useful maps or distinctions that allow us to work with them effectively and with clarity. This has now changed. Increasingly, I see and experience each feeling as a manifestation of love. And it broadens my view of love as not only a force to create joy. We are invited to experience a vastly richer conception of what love is and how it can be embodied by a human being. As sadness, Love also wants to grieve, to praise what has been lost, to express deep longing for beauty, connection, and healing. As anger, it wants to make clear boundaries, to protect and serve the beautiful, to take a fierce and unapologetic stand for life and evolution. As fear, it wants to thrive, to come as fully alive as possible, to skilfully and artfully navigate the possibility-space of embodied human life. Conscious fear is an expression of the self-love held by any being that wants to survive in order to create, discover and connect. Without this fear, love cannot reach its full potential for human aliveness!
• In order to navigate to the adult-ego state, and from there to fully own and enjoy our conscious participation in the cosmos as a radically responsible creator, we need our feelings online, activated, and accessible. Without awareness of our emotional body, this simply isn’t possible. But stabilised in the adult-ego state, we have clear and constant access to our conscious feelings. As such, we can navigate the world with the immense and unreasonable intelligence (not to mention the authenticity, the honesty, the basic humanity) of our feelings. We no longer need to rely on the constricted and constricting stories of the intellectual body exclusively. The intellect becomes more like a sidekick to the powerful, fully-feeling adult, dropping in ingenious ideas at just the right time. Quite a different situation from allowing the tyrannical intellect to run the whole show, with feelings censored and silenced to little more than a whimper in the corner. We go forth with open hearts and the willingness to feel the full intensity, beauty, richness and poignancy of our precious human lives. With this openness, we are also increasingly open to receive and respond to the many messages and invitations of our imaginal, archetypal and transcendent relations. Additionally, without feelings we run the risk that our imaginal world becomes a self-serving imaginary fantasy-world that takes us out of relationship (or rather, protects us from consciousness of our relationships and our responsibilities).
• A prerequisite to feeling our feelings is lowering our “numbness bar”. In modern culture, the numbness bar is set very high, to the point where we are literally not aware when we are feeling something, even if it is of a relatively high intensity. It is only when a feeling reaches higher than the numbness bar do we actually become conscious of it. Below this level we are unconscious; meaning that we are walking around — and interacting with one another — totally unaware of what we are feeling. This can be addressed by the simple exercise of choosing to feel feelings of increasingly low and subtle intensity, thereby gaining access to an ever-present flow of authentic, healing, creative intelligence. This is no other than the boundless intelligence of the human body and indeed of the entire Gaian system: to stay alive, to stay connected, to protect, create, evolve and enjoy!
• There is a distinction between feelings and emotions. Feelings happen in the present-moment, stay for around 30 seconds to 3 minutes, and then pass away. Emotions are incompleted or unexpressed feelings from past moments, and they can hang around much longer than a few minutes: for hours, days, even weeks, months and years. Subtly present in our body-mind system, these unconscious feelings influence how we see, relate and create. For example, if during school I once felt anger towards my teacher, but did not allow myself to fully feel or express this anger (because of fear of punishment, say), then this anger becomes stored and unconsciously held in my body-system until the time when I consciously choose to feel it again. I might be talking to a dear friend, and subtly punishing him/her with an unconscious anger which is totally irrelevant to our current interaction. If I realise this is happening, I then gain the choice to not feed this pattern, and to create a space to feel my unfelt anger. This can be done alone, but more effectively in an “emotional healing process” where one person holds space for another to go into their emotions, feel them, discover the old decisions they made, and use their conscious feelings to make new, more responsible and more authentic decisions.
• All other feelings and emotions (such as depression, jealousy, melancholy, etc.) can be identified as mixtures of the four basic feelings. Depression, for example, is a mixture of anger and sadness, originally created a survival strategy to not fully feel the intensity of the anger or the sadness, and to wallow in a murky in-between where nothing moves. People can spend their entire lives in mixed emotions without knowing this has happened. Mixed emotions can be consciously unmixed so that the energy of each “pure” feeling is allowed to flow and do its work.
• Our unconscious feelings (and emotions from the past) keep us locked in the character roles of the “low drama triangle”. This is a significant discovery: we use unconscious fear to stay in a “rescuer” role, unconscious sadness to stay in a “victim” role, and unconscious anger to stay in a “persecutor” role. Additionally, the “Gremlin”, the personified ruler of our underworld, derives an unconscious joy or “false ecstasy” from the low drama that unfolds when we unconsciously inhabit any of these roles. These roles keep us in service of underworld or shadow principles. The full scope of the underworld journey is beyond that of this essay; for now I’ll simply say that there are so many jewels to be uncovered here, so many transformations of hidden psychic persons and energies that can ultimately come to live in service our imaginal eros (our creative loving desire for soulfulness, sacredness and meaning).
• Feelings can be switched on and off at will, for no reason. With practice, they can be intensified to archetypal levels of intensity. That’s High Drama: responsibly using conscious feelings to source ongoing evolution, creation, connection. For authentic human living, and for relating to life itself as divine theatre, art and magic. More on this in a moment.

Why go into all of this?

Well, because this newfound clarity about feelings and emotions is of vital importance for having the most rich, intimate, and informative encounters with our images as possible. With our inner imaginal subpersonas, with our angels, with our demons, with our spirit guides, with archetypal and elemental forces, with our Gods.

If we’re not “feeling it”, so to speak, we’re probably just thinking about it! And as a result, we’re not going to be fully embodying the encounter, fully in relationship, and opening ourselves to the energies (and the love) that long to infuse our physical bodies with newfound aliveness, possibility and movement.

These energies are evolutionary. But we have to choose to receive and channel them, and to undergo the pain of having our existing ego-structures and conceptual worldviews liquidised in the process. We are free to evolve, nobody is forcing us. Only this means we have to decide to break open, release our old identities and step into the unknown – carried by wave after wave of evolutionary feelings, imaginal currents and archetypal forces. This is the only way to arrive at new imaginal identities and expanded senses of consciousness — which as we have seen, comes in tandem with ever-vaster senses of responsibility, compassion, and creative participation.

Choosing to feel our feelings with increasing intensity, we can begin to relate to them as ever-accessible archetypal energies, each with its own characteristic qualities that can be brought into our relational exchanges and encounters, whether with parts of ourselves, with other humans, with non-humans, and with imaginal beings, Gods or forces. This is fundamental to fully-online human living, because outside of the materialist thoughtmap in which there is only dead matter, we are now navigating the infinite ecology of the meta-universe (or divine psyche) in which there are only living beings!

The four feelings have the corresponding archetypal mappings:

1. Conscious anger embodies the archetype of the Warrior
2. Conscious fear embodies the archetype of the Magician
3. Conscious sadness embodies the archetype of the Lover, or Communicator
4. Conscious joy embodies the archetype of the King or Queen

With our feelings online, we get our superpowers back! Yes! With each of our conscious feelings activated and accessible, a whole new range of possibilities opens up.

• The Warrior energy is the “doer, the maker, the protector, the earth guardian”. You can use this energy to consciously choose to feel your other feelings and to walk your path with a newfound authenticity, fierceness, and clarity. As the “Stellating Feelings” website recounts, only then do you have the “stamina, determination, focus, and clarity to hold space for yourself for activating the fear, sadness, and finally the joy feelings Archetypes.” Go!
• The Magician energy is that of the “evolutionary sorceress, wizard or witch”. This the energy of the archetypal creator who can go outside of all constructs to interface with the groundless void. From there, the mage can create novelty, source new possibilities, and radically recreate, evolve or destroy existing structures, stories and identities. The mage navigates the infinite life-and-death space (of infinite possibilities) with the electric intelligence of her fear coursing through her nervous system. Now you are really switched on.
• The Lover energy empowers us to connect and communicate. First of all, it connects us with our longing to connect! We begin to feel the grief of disconnection, of lost beauties, friends and family members, and of unrealised potentials for nourishing relationships. “This is when deep, non-enmeshed connection is established as a collaboration for making, for example, 5 Body Intimacy Journeys into Archetypal Domains to bring back treasures that change the status quo. If you cannot grieve and let go of your current identity, you won’t have much chance of evolving and expanding into the initiated interactions of adulthood.”
• The Loving King or Queen energy is conscious archetypal joy, and is reported to become accessible “spontaneously, almost without effort”. It is an ever-available source of conditional and unconditional ecstasy. That is, we may feel joy either at the appearance of a particular being, experience or form, or for no reason at all. We can derive boundless joy from simply being a being, living and creating and relating here on earth as a divine embodied soul!

It is important to note that our unconscious and irresponsible habits of going numb and denying our feelings serve only to block our access to these life-affirming evolutionary energies, energies that are naturally woven into our imaginal body-mind system and the persons/identities that this system is capable of conjuring. These habits lead us to stay in child and gremlin-ego states where the doorways to archetypal domains provided to us by our conscious feelings are simply not accessible. So, we’ve got some cleaning up to do first. For now, I want to turn towards the source of these feelings.

As I have already alluded to, each archetypal feeling (and its particular flavour of energetic human embodiment) is an expression of archetypal divine love.

Energetically channeling and welcoming archetypal feelings is essential for the ongoing evolution and refinement of our soul’s individuality. The source of our feelings in the formless and non-specific archetypal realms means that each conscious expression of feeling is an expression of transcendent and archetypal love, mediated through an image (or an imaginal person or deity)… this love now surfacing and crystallising in the words, actions and intentions of an immanently embodied human being. As Corbett writes:

“It is important to recognize the transpersonal origin of affect. This is not only Jung’s insight; we see the same idea expressed in Tibetan Buddhism, where raw emotions and thoughts are understood to represent the spontaneous radiance of primordial Mind. And affect is essential for communication, both between self and Self and between selves. In this way affect forges links between the individual and the larger consciousness of which we are a part.

Speaking psychologically, when spirit or archetype embodies, it takes on a personally meaningful quality which we call soul, so that soul is synonymous with that level of spirit which is experienced as ‘something happening to me’. Soul is also the link with, or organ of receptivity to, spirit; because their natures are the same, soul is able to receive the transpersonal and allow consciousness to grasp it within the realm of the personal, for example, as an intrapsychic image or as an embodied affect.

Thus, numinous [and religious] experience results from the interaction of soul and spirit, and, if successful, allows more of the Self to embody as soul. The experience of spirit surprises us because it does not originate from personal levels of the psyche, and it behaves objectively, or independently of our control.”

“Eternal Creation”

Reconnecting with the Infinite

Infinity contains an infinite number of infinities.

Within the infinite expanse of the divine creative imagination, there are an infinite number of infinitely vast individualities.

Each individuality is an infinite expanse of possibilities for perception, experience and creation.

The work and play of each soul-individuality is that of exploring, discovering and refining these possibilities, in service of that soul’s particular “bright principles” and “archetypal lineage”.

An individual may undertake thousands of human and non-human incarnations in service of principles such as Love, Creation, Connection, Evolution, Transformation, and Possibility…

The number and diversity of possible incarnations is infinite in scope and extent, and therefore so are the possibilities for learning, discovery and experimentation. For making love, beauty, art and soul.

Imaginal Religion begins when we remember that our current human incarnation is but one moment of this infinite and eternal adventure. An essential moment. A moment upon which the entire infinite future depends!

When we consciously reconnect to the infinite from within our finite human person, and discover that this person is seamlessly integrated with and constantly expressing this infinity in the way that only we can.

Each individual is an expression of the infinite expressed as a finitude. As such, the appearance of each individual being is an infinitely profound.

From a space of infinite possibilities, each being makes a choice — actually an infinite number of choices — which together make up the unique character (and creative quest) of that being.

Each being is a YES.

Can you feel this quality, within yourself?

Can you sense the YES of your being, that simply by being here, by being you, you are a YES to so so much… that your simple embodied presence is a radiant affirmation of so many archetypal and elemental qualities, of so many imaginal and mythical threads woven together into a living breathing body and person?

To see, appreciate and give thanks for the YES-nature of every being is to recognise and commune with the infinite aliveness and intelligence of every perception, every moment, every thing in our infinite imaginal existence.

You can choose to see this, any moment, any place.

You can choose to feel it with the full force of your heart and soul.

YES!

I AM!

THIS IS!

WE ARE!

Everyone a God-image

We are learning that within the limitless infinity of possible God-images, lie the subset that is the infinity of different possibles selves (individualities, or beings, or souls).

Each of these souls can be seen and sensed a God-image: a finite and sensible expression (or image, or symbol) of psyche’s infinite and boundless nature. This concurs with the Sufi saying “wherever you turn, there is the face of God”. Everything and everyone is a tangible and sensible manifestation of psyche’s universally-expressive appearance (that is, the infinite space of all possible appearance).

(The difficulty we apparently have is in seeing psyche exactly as she is, not as we would like her to be. This is the precise struggle of seeing ourselves as we are, not as we would like ourselves to be. This necessitates radical self-honesty to the point of seeing and meeting psyche (God) within and as one’s own soul, inclusive of all the intensity and suffering of human and earthly life.)

The fact that this notion — that being human and being indistinguishable from primordial divine creator are one and the same — seems so absurd, heretical, and egotistical to our modern ears is living proof that our entire civilisation is built upon denying and hiding this fact, upon playing victim and giving our centre away to authorities, religious or not, so thoroughly that we are almost wholly unconscious of our radical responsibility and fundamental participation in the ongoing appearance and evolution of the cosmos. Almost… because we do retain an inch of free will, even in the most oppressive of circumstances. This will is immovable, eternal and untouchable by others. It is the embodied YES of our being, and it is evidence and revelation of our original and eternal identity with the creator (with psyche, with God, with the heart and mind of the divine creative intelligence).

This universal identity of all souls with the infinite primordial deity I will call the “Inclusivity Principle”. No soul (or being) is any more or less divine than any other soul. No prophet, saint, messiah or messenger can ever take a higher or holier status than any other being. Sorry gurus, you’re out all of luck. You haven’t got anything that the kids — or dogs — on the street don’t have! I think a genuine guru knows this, and as a result isn’t at all interested in the status or identity of being a guru: they just sincerely want to help other souls see both their own divinity and the divinity of all. If others see them as a guru, that’s their choice… but it is likely playing into the exclusivity principle and a decision to see the guru as “more divine than I am”. An authentic guru (or spiritual teacher) would point this out and guide the student back to seeing their own divinity and open-hearted ability to embody the vision of the inclusivity principle.

This vision of a great and unconditional equality, of universal inclusivity in the life and body and love of the divine, liberates one from the separation (or should I say, the reified view of separation) that imprisons so many people in believing that they are not divine, infinite and boundless, or that some people are and some people aren’t. Neither story is true, and we are free to choose whichever one we like. My personal choice to (learn to) see myself as living within an infinite community of divine souls! Again: no final truths, just ways of seeing.

What do you choose?

I am inspired by the story of a friend who, soon to be a father, became anxious that caring for his new child would mean he would miss the chance to meet a spiritual teacher and to receive transformative guidance on his path. After some time, he released this desire and chose to see his (then-unborn) son as the teacher he had been waiting for. Beautiful, no?

This story brings me joy because reminds me that it’s less about what we receive from others, so much as how we choose to see and relate to them. That determined what we can can receive – and what we can give! If you choose to see someone as your teacher, to soulfully sense them as a giver of wisdom, you will receive that very wisdom you are looking for (although it may well come in unexpected ways). If you choose to see someone’s pure, awake, divine nature, then you can relate to them on this level and help them to recognise it themselves.

This made me ask myself: what could a learned man teach my friend that a young boy couldn’t? And indeed, what could either of these “others” teach him that he didn’t already know, simply because every nanometre of his body and being are no other than the infinite energy of the divine, manifested in human form? If there is teaching or guidance, it is always “reflective”. A teacher doesn’t give or impart anything solid or substantial to the student. They simply show up as a clear mirror to the free, boundless and divine nature of the student. This allows the student to see themselves in the mirror of the teacher. And note that you certainly don’t have to go hunting round the world for such a teacher, because your imaginal teachers can very well provide such reflection — any time, any place!

The Inclusivity Principle is the view that we are both many and one, and ultimately neither; that as the original creator(s) we have chosen to refract ourselves into countless incarnated souls, each possessed of the same creative powers as the original creative forces. This equality of all souls as fundamental divine creators is another prime tenet of spiritual anarchism.

I have an image here of concentric circles, souls within souls. Each circle can be infinitely big. And there can be infinite numbers of circles within circles. I’ll spare you the Russian doll analogy.

This has implications for how we relate to God-images, especially if we are conceiving of them as “external” deities. If I am seamlessly unified with the full extent of the infinite divine, and indeed am a natural and spontaneous expression of that divine, then I have no need to rely on God. I simply radically rely on myself. And my reliance on myself is precisely God’s reliance on Godself!

If everybody relies on themselves as totally unified with psyche, the infinite and boundless whole, then God relies on Godself fully, and has no need for the idea or image of an external God. This does not, however, lead to solipsism and the fallacy that I am the one and only God. It does not deny the appearance of the Other. It leads rather to the ecstasy and adventure of entering into an infinite divine creative community. A God amongst Gods. A soul amongst souls, all of whom appear dependent on one another. What a bloody great feat of the imagination. “The triumphant bliss of natural mind”, a Zen saying goes.

Next half incoming imminently, folks. Stay tuned — archetypal aliveness awaits you!

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