Unlocking Imaginal Religion — Part 9b: Reconnecting with the Infinite

The Divine in the Human

“Many Mirrors, Many Moons”

We continue…

The Tapestry

Say you want to weave a glorious and richly decorated tapestry. This is only possible if you have a large number of individual threads. Each thread consists of many smaller threads twisted together into a stable structure. Each thread has its origin in the same organic plant that provided the original material for the fabric (such as a cotton plant).

In order to populate your tapestry with images — of persons, animals, plants and Gods assembled in any number of constellations, enacting any number of myths and stories – it is necessary that you have threads of different colours. If they were all the same colour, you would not have any contrast (any difference of shade, colour or hue) with which to build your imaginal scenes. With a large selection of coloured threads you can create unspeakably rich and complex images. And in the case of an infinite tapestry (since here we are exploring the context of the infinite imagination), we have a case of innumerable threads with which to weave an infinity of different images.

Just so, psyche has woven herself into countless individuals, each possessing all manner of different archetypal qualities. These qualities are the colours that, when woven together through the relations between individuals (their interactions, encounters, conversations and exchanges), allow an infinitude of imaginal stories to unfold. And yet all threads — all individuals — form part of the same universal fabric of perception. All are part of the unified “being” who is the whole tapestry. All derive from the same source: psyche’s boundless love.

Again, neither unity nor multiplicity is a truer perspective than the other. Individuality and collectivity are not contradictory but co-exist as mutually dependent, mutually empty ways of seeing, each generating a different experience.

“In the Fields, In the Forests, In the Fire”

“God is the human being’s secret.

The human being is God’s secret.”

— Chandi Das

Becoming God(‘(s))

At the secret heart of the world’s mystical traditions is the process of transfiguration: the unfolding realisation of the embodied human person as totally and utterly divine; totally and utterly inseparable from the boundless love and power of the divine creative intelligence! This immortal intelligence is imagining itself into bounded incarnation(s), thereby appearing as living, breathing, speaking human persons (and also as an infinite number of non-human beings, which kills our claims to divine superiority). But it’s the people we’re immediately interested in here. We have a vested interest, after all. If we really can experience ourselves as free, divine, and boundless, well… life might just be a little bit different! A bit clearer. A bit more open…

Let me share a profoundly beautiful anecdotal account of this realisation, from our dear friend Chris Bache. It is a profound affirmation of the divinity of our individuality:

“The universe is very intensely interested in birthing an individuality and in refining and maturing that individuality so that in the end, we die, but we die in order to grow up, and we die again in order to grow up..

Sooner or later we reach a point where all of our former lives, and all of the history, all of the experiences and wisdom and mistakes we’ve made, all of it comes together into an integrated singularity… and when I experienced that singularity I was catapulted into a state of awareness beyond anything I had experienced up to that point in time…

I was an individual, but an individual in pure shunyata, emptiness condition, transparent open to all existence… I was individual but within a boundless existence.. I had my full memory intact… and i think this is where the universe or the divine is taking all human beings…

Individuality is not the problem: separation or ego, boundedness is the problem… individuation is the great beauty, it’s one of the great gifts that the creator is giving us… the opportunity to be an individual”

— Chris Bache

The universe is intent on birthing, evolving and refining individuals. Take a moment to reflect on how different this worldview is from the materialist zeitgeist and the idea that we live in an inert and indifferent cosmos!

A remarkable process is unfolding in our evolution whereby each and every one of these individuals (including this “me”, right here and now) is gradually waking up to their seamless unity with the infinite. Since the beginning of the organic evolutionary chain, each generation has gained an increasing degree of self-awareness, and with it a dawning revelation of self-realisation (inseparable from the realisation of the true nature of all things as thoroughly empty, thoroughly imaginal). Slowly but surely!

Bache describes this process as a crystallisation towards“abiding presence in the transparent condition”… a state of seeing through the appearances – the images – that we have mistakenly taken to be opaque, solid, real and independently existing. Seeing their inseparability from the objectless openness of the natural mind.

The transparency and emptiness of all things is revealed, laid bare. It is naked, lucid, open and natural. And yet, these imaginal appearances are emphatically not “nothings”, and we may still behold and inhabit them as luminous emanations – mandalas – of pristine empty, awareness. To our heart’s content! Clearly, simply by being here, we have accepted this invitation.

Keeping Up Appearances

Put another way, the infinite divine is choosing to see, experience and enjoy itself as countless human individuals. In order to create these experiences and the living material cosmos that makes them possible, the infinite had to choose to forget – or cunningly conceal – its infiniteness. For a time. Because experience, selfhood and individuality are always, necessarily, bounded and finite appearances. But only apparently so! These appearances, these selves, are not ultimately finite. Nor are they ultimately infinite. They are not ultimately any way whatsoever! That’s the central liberating of emptiness – and of postmodernism, too. Again, this inconceivability and indefinability preserves (and actually expresses) the emptiness, the non-reality, the limitlessness of things. For if we conclude that something is infinite, we restrict the possibility of it appearing as finite! The middle way is to not conclude anything at all, thereby maintaining our openness to seeing things (and beings) as both finite and infinite, and neither. We can see through everything, unfabricating experience so thoroughly that everything disappears, including the sense of an observing or participating individuality. Transcendence. And we can fabricate these infinitesimal flashing vibrations of moments of perception, weaving and cohering them into into whole universes of experience and embodiment. Immanence. Non-real individuals perceiving non-real realms of otherness. And by creative re-imagination of the individual and the other, self and world, the fundamental patterning of the vibrational tapestry is iterated, updated, and recreated towards ever-greater beauty and harmony and multidimensionality. Evolution. Soulmaking. Imaginal living!

To see finite appearances in the context of the infinite (or with a simultaneous seeing and knowing of the infinite, and indeed of these finite appearances as appearances of that infinitude)… this changes everything! It is to know that the finite and infinite are mutually dependent and mutually empty. That there is a transcendent non-duality that encompasses even the infinite and the finite! That the immanent human person (body, breath, bones and all) and the transcendent Godhead are seamlessly inseparable, co-appearing as collaborative creators of our endless evolutionary adventures. The finite and the infinite, working together to make (in)finite beauty…

So we don’t really “become God”. And God doesn’t really become us.

It just appears that way.

But…. what an appearance!

What a sublime tapestry of imaginative and artistic genius, is this universe we inhabit. These bodies. These minds! These selves!

Just look at this glistening, billion-coloured, primordially enchanted cosmos in whom we grow, drink, breathe and imagine. In whom we create and evolve and transform. In whom we take life as infinite imaginal persons!

In one view, the Godhead is simply realising that (s)he has already become a human being, and was so engrossed in the creative process that, for a time, forgot her infinitude and freedom of this process. It’s nice to do that, sometimes, isn’t it? To get lost in something we love. To abandon ourselves to wholly to communion and creation that we forget ourselves — only to remember ourselves again, and to discover that we have been utterly changed by the encounter!

I say that the infinite imagination “concealed” her infinitude in order to focus the creative process of generating this explosion of apparently finite forms, beings, beauties. And encoded in that tapestry, encoded in the symbology, images and mythic patterns of our “ordinary human lives”, lies the concealed treasure: the revelation and the perception of the infiniteness and boundlessness – the imaginality and non-reality – of all appearances. The apparent infinity of all things is the doorway to a transformed conception of, and relationship with, all things. Including ourselves. Decoding the tapestry of perception is the quest of the Godhead who has embedded herself within this preposterously detailed and complex mental-material labyrinth. She has hidden herself within countless incarnated souls, and laid a tapestry of symbolic clues into the world they inhabit, and that she inhabits as the cosmic goddess. (Followed to their end, these clues reveal the dreamlike nature of reality, the inseparability of mind and matter, soul and cosmos, and the inseparability of all these (apparently finite) appearances from (apparently infinite) transcendence. Both soul and cosmos are completely transformed by this process: evolved, recreated, reborn as imaginal Gods.) Psyche has set herself countless evolutionary challenges in order to find her way back to the light of the open sky (of perfect emptiness). These challenges are the challenges of our lives as we learn to evolve towards ever-deeper embodied realisation of our boundless divine individuality.

I imagine a sculptor, sweating profusely, face wrinkled in concentration at the intensity of his work, his masterpiece, his fanatical obsession. In his devotion he has forgotten the world, forgotten his body, forgotten himself, and the selfless love of the creative process unfolds spontaneously through him. For a time, he dies to his work. This death makes possible the rebirth moment when he suddenly becomes once more aware of the slanting afternoon sun, the sweat on his brow, the warmth of his hands, the person that he is, and the radiant beauty of what he has created. He takes a breath, his being opens to the space inside and outside, and that space embraces and blesses him and thanks him for his artistry, for his unique and unprecedented gift to the world. He knows that, to create this bounded beauty, he had to surrender his identity to the boundless, and from that infinity to channel the necessary elements for the evolution of his work — and indeed the evolution of his self, soul and reality!

Is this a metaphor for the Godhead creating the universe, or a human creating a sculpture?

Or could it be that each is a metaphor for — and an image of — the other?

What if these processes are precisely the same thing?

Just imagine the difference between a person who lives as a finite bounded self in a finite bounded world and one whose context, origin and space of possibilities is infinite in scope! That is the transition, we are each invited to make. That is the transition that the infinite dimension of our individuality, our soul, is longing for us to make! For this homecoming. For the understanding of “all this” as the miraculous effervescence of an infinite love, intelligence and creative imagination. Ephemeral and eternal. And it’s ours.

We really can come to embody these realisations. To live them in our character, our charisma, our creative passion for beautiful human living. This process may also be referred to as divinisation, deification, or theosis. And it occurs in tandem with the divinisation and deification of the entire material cosmos we live within, a revelation of the universe as an imaginal body of the divine creative intelligence. The sacramental cosmic incarnation of the Goddess produced the necessary creative cauldron — or womb — to birth the human species. As Bache writes, “The density of the physical universe is the only thing strong enough to shatter the oneness of the absolute into pieces that can then become individually awakened to what it is in the body of the divine… so that those pieces can become operational as divine within the body of the divine… and within that context individuality is one of the great gifts of the physical universe”.

This could not be more relevant to the challenges we are facing, both as individuals and as a species. For as we all know, the personal challenges are precisely the creative evolutionary challenges of the species (and the planet, and divine intelligence)! And if we can meet these challenges within a context of infinite love, power and possibility, the attitude we bring to them is so totally different that, lo and behold, we are already embodying the evolution we needed to meet the challenges!

Andrew Harvey asks:

“What is the vision that is divinely potent in us to galvanise the sacred depths of the human race to rise to this challenge, and to rise to the evolutionary will of the divine to birth a new embodied divine humanity?”

The whole planet is going through a global crucifixion and what that means is not a mega-death but a mega-birth. Terrible contractions but unbelievable transfiguring possibilities.

We are God’s secret, [and] this is the really outrageous part, because God is doing something through us of unimaginable divine magnificence.

We are waking up to being the embodied beloved of the divine beloved. The beloved of the beloved. The beloved in the depths of the illumined mind, in the intimate recesses of a heart that has been shattered to embrace divine love on every level, in the irradiation of the soul’s full consciousness of its beauty and grandeur, and in the transfiguration of the actual structure, texture, cellular formation the body.

This dance between utter adoration of the embodied Godhead and utter surrender to the mystery of infinite transcendence.

It’s this dance in the being, that prepares the being for the divinisation process””

What a revelation! I invite you to read that passage again and to let it sink in.

The entire infinite world comes from the love in YOUR heart, your beating striving yearning perfect human heart. And this love is THE primordial creative force of infinite power and boundless, boundless, boundless possibility. Beyond human! Beyond belief! Beyond conception!

Harvey is speaking of the experience of the transfigured body. The imaginalised body. Electric, divine, symphonic. As Kabir cried, “How could I ever express how blessed I feel to live such vast ecstasy IN MY OWN BODY?”. A master of expressing the inexpressible, he went on to say, “My father is the transcendent godhead, my mother is the embodied godhead, and I am their divine child, dancing for them both on their burning dance floor”.

Dancing. The original human technology for breaking open the mind and dissolving the self into the infinite divine dance – without effacing or neglecting the divine individuality of the participant in that dance.

The drop in the ocean, the ocean in the drop. The divine in the human, the human in the divine. Mirrors reflecting mirrors, images reflecting images. And empty space, infinite empty space, beaming and glistening and smiling. Pristine, serene, love like a sunbeam.

Seeing everything possible in the infinite imagination, and simultaneously seeing through that everything as perfectly non-real, transparent, empty of essence – empty even of the quality of emptiness that might cause one to neglect its utterly miraculous and divine imaginal appearance. An infinite void overflowing with love.

With beauty.

With soul.

I think that we can only really embrace and experience the divinity of our humanity when we stop trying to definitely know ourselves and the divine. What’s that even about, if not the attempt to arrive at a final, fixed idea or explanation of who and what we are? These attempts will always fail. Accepting this catalyses a surrender – and opening – to the infinite. A surrender that we may come to embody in a constant experience of intimacy and exchange with the unknown (and unknowable). The transcendent and the immanent colluding to conjure a boundless evolutionary explosion of imaginal beings. Not bad, friends. Not bad at all.

Unknowing is a gateway to freedom from the reified view of “knower and known”; the prerequisite for resurrecting that view — that is, for knowing and sensing the world — as an imaginal way of seeing, thoroughly empty and non-real.

“What Is This?” (A Korean Zen Koan, upon which some monks meditate for many years).

I don’t know what God is.

I don’t know what Eternity is.

I don’t know what the world is.

I don’t even know what I am.

Except that God, Eternity and I are

Ultimately Unknowable

Unlimited by concepts

Ungraspable by the finite mind!

Amazingly this does not prevent us from being imaginally, provisionally, apparently knowable!

From sensing and beholding without grasping or knowing. Perceiving empty appearances. Sensing with soul!

It seems that the “gnosis” of the previous sections just got upgraded. We may proceed to know countless things and beings, but not as a knowing of a “reality”. All we really know is the ultimate unknowability of things, their non-reality and imaginality. And this preserves our experience of them as a boundless, groundless and endlessly recreatable. Inseparable from perfect emptiness.

Nothing is knowable, not really. Not truly or finally. And I don’t want to know!

To know is to limit and define. And yet, limits and definitions are essential to the process of creating and relating to finite appearances — or beings, or images.

So perhaps, to be more precise: I don’t want to know anything finally or ultimately (and I couldn’t if I tried).

Rather, I want to know imaginally, provisionally, soulfully, for then the openness to infinite ongoing evolution and transformation is maintained. To know in this way is to love. To sense with soul. It is to perceive other, self, god and world with full respect, appreciation and reverence for their miraculous, unfathomable, divine imaginal nature. It is to reject the conceptual duality between transcendence and immanence and to fall into the embrace of the inconceivable divine. It is to step out into the infinite expanse and declare your soul’s love for THIS life, THIS person, THIS moment, THIS place, THIS tree, THIS world! And in that declaration life, person, moment, place, tree and world are affirmed as holy and sacred imaginal appearances who you are choosing to give life to, to support, to sustain, to commune with. To imagine into materiality, conjuring unspeakably complex embodied experiences from the archetypal vastness.

It doesn’t make any sense, and you don’t care! It wouldn’t add anything if it did. It doesn’t subtract anything if it doesn’t.

Nothing needs to fit inside a conceptual box anymore — although you can always use conceptual boxes to focus my creative process if you need to! Pick ’em up, put ’em down.

Play and experiment with an infinite array of possible views, conceptions and ways of seeing. You don’t know anything, not finally, and yet you create everything. Creating everything, you know everything, and everyone. But NOT FINALLY! In this way, created things are never truly created, finite things are infinite, limited world we inhabit is totally unlimited.

You even don’t know what you are, because your self-knowing is so innate and fundamental to your nature and the nature of everything that it cannot really be called “knowing” at all, since it is free from the dualistic conception of “knower and known”.

You dwell in and as the boundless transcendent non-duality that enjoys and appreciates — and appears as — all dualistic forms (beings, souls, things and Gods).

You abide as the imaginal infinite that dances and runs, weeps and laughs as the imaginal finite!

It is only by such humble — and sometimes ecstatic — unknowing that we can be open to our connection and identification with the infinite unknowable whole. God, Psyche, Love. This humility crushes — and frees us from — our illusions of knowing and understanding; it challenges us to “live in an eternal consciousness without knowing what we are living in. Without trying to conceptualise it because to do so is to block the rays of irradiation” (Harvey again).

Few have communicated the unknowability of the divine (and of the self) more precisely than the medieval Christian mystic Angelus Silesius. Harvey has dedicated years to translating these obscure German poems into English. And what a gift it is to receive these direct declarations of a transfigured, divinised human. One who knows his Godliness — and knows that his Godliness is unknowable!

“What God is, no-one knows.

God is neither light nor spirit.

God is not bliss, not unity, not what we call deity.

God is Not wisdom, nor reason, nor love, nor goodness, nor will.

God is not a thing, nor nothing. Nor is God essence.

God is what neither I, nor you,

nor any creature can understand

without becoming

what God is.”

— Angelus Silesius

Breaking Open

It’s important to say that the divinisation of the human is not about building ourselves up. It is about allowing ourselves to be broken, not down but open, such that we embrace and encompass everything in our human, planetary and cosmic consciousness. And beyond! The quality of the human that can do this is the heart and our capacity for universal unconditional love. Connecting to this love, we recall that it is this very love that brought everything into being in the first place! It is as if love “carries” our consciousness to the furthest (and inmost) reaches of creation, right up to the edge where creation blurs with the groundless void, the infinite openness of the natural mind, and from this edge summons new beauty, new life, new breath.

Being whole, God is broken in countless ways; it is these ways that are the latent openings (doorways, portals, possibilities) for new ways of bringing hitherto-disconnected parts (be they people, vibrations, ideas, bodies) together… experimentally combining and disjoining and recombining in an endless evolutionary flow of experimentation in search of more beauty, more harmony, more ecstatic aliveness and richness of embodied soulful being!

Allowing ourselves to be broken down allows the whole structure of the living universe to evolve; it invites the collective psyche to move into the open space of our heart-awareness and in that space to see itself, know itself, and know that it could be even more beautiful, more sublime, more harmonised, more conscious within this space. More aware of its emptiness, non-reality and imaginality!

Allowing ourselves to be devastated by love serves the whole transpersonal expanse of the cosmic community by allowing this human person to consciously recreate their connection to this expanse in vitally new and vibrant creative expressions. To re-tune our vibration to resonate at the universal vibration of love, or cosmic consciousness.

Being shattered, broken down and reconfigured at the deepest, deepest structures of our self/ego-consciousness: this is what is necessary for successful transfiguration. For the divinisation of the human being. And this is what is necessary, right now, if we are to uproot, alchemise and leave behind the unconscious survival-mode consciousness of modern culture — and enter a new age of conscious sacred embodiment, here on the original flowering earth.

We’ve all heard this before. Reading this back during editing, I felt a pang of fear — and embarrassment — that I’d actually written the words “new age”. Have I fallen into a trap of romantic magical thinking, disconnected from the hard realities of life, money, work, society?

YES.

Unapologetically yes.

I know I’m full of shit. But who isn’t?

Even God is full of shit. And shit is full of God!

I’m making peace with this, day by day. The very chance to make that peace, to me, is undeniable evidence of something stupendously glorious. So I can’t just sit on the sidelines and pretend that this doesn’t matter to me – that my soul isn’t longing for this. And just so, I can’t pretend that I have found – or shared – anything of substance, anything real or reliable to deify, dance with or depend upon. All I have found is emptiness. Although, by her account, she found me. Gazing at my navel and grumbling about the world. She smiles, winks, and hands me a pen and paper: a silent invitation to join and meet with her on a radiantly empty page…

I jump into this trap willingly, though not without hesitation and trepidation. Not without the postmodern “outsider’s view” of the totally fabricated, culturally relative and necessarily limited scope of such visions. For if I think we are actually being divinised, I’m climbing into another modernist ultimate-truth reality tunnel. But if I only take the outsider’s view, criticising and heckling from the outside, I see that the sacred work of weaving a more beautiful world is neglected and not even attempted. The sense of cringe and embarrassment that can accompany religious idealism (and it has certainly accompanied me, in writing this series), is not to be discounted: it is the postmodern intelligence indicating the risk – or presence – of ego-inflation, oppressive truth-claims, or narrow-minded reification. Thank God we have such a sense! Only, if we let the postmodern cycnicism to silence the poet’s romantic vision, an equally large tragedy has occurred. For then no soul has been made. No beauty has been conjured.

The poet’s trick is to humour herself, to see through her constructions and creations, not least the fabricated poetic nature of her own being and individuality. To honour her emptiness and the emptiness of all things: both as a doorway to total deconstruction and disappearance, and to the re-imagination and re-creation of all that has come before. She is not attached to any aspect of self or world because she knows the thoroughgoing emptiness of all of it, as such she does not reify any image, idea or view, allowing her to maintain total imaginal-mental-identical flexibility. This flexibility manifests and expresses itself as a serene and unvanquishable sense of humour. She listens to the stirrings of her empty imaginal soul, and allow these currents to flow into the ongoing fabrication of ever-more complex and sublime experience personhood, ever-richer and more refined relationships. Her finite nature holds her infinitude in a smiling recognition of the cosmic joke, and her infinite nature holds her finitude in an unconditional stream of blessings and kindnesses.

The metamodern task is to entertain these views with sensitivity to how they effect and potentially transform our experience of ourselves and one another. To synthesise modernist romanticism and enthusiasm with a postmodern respect for the emptiness — and consequences — of all idealistically- and imaginally-sourced creativity. Including the creation of embodied selves, persons, and identities! It is a pragmatic approach, hyper-mindful of results, hyper-devoted to the quest for beauty and soul, hyper-sensitive to the results of all creative actions.

“Every perception is a weaver of worlds”, said Rob Burbea.

Onwards!

Archetypal Aliveness

Where does all this lead us?

It takes us, I believe, to the most impossibly ecstatic and unspeakably beautiful aliveness that we can imagine — that is, before we reimagine ourselves and our world to be even more beautiful and alive than ever before! This process continues ad infinitum. And the ecstasy is balanced and contexted in a perfect serenity, tranquility and holy peace, a natural (un)knowing of the emptiness of all phenomena.

It is my working hypothesis that the Earth is designed for having adventures, for living myth and magic.

This is what the divine wants to experience. Because this is what we want experience…. the incommunicable epicness and intensity and beauty of embarking on an infinite infinite infinite adventure involving infinite infinite infinite characters with infinite infinite infinite beauties and plotlines and challenges and complexities and liberations and openings and discoveries and landscapes and gatherings and ceremonies and challenges and and dead-ends and masterpieces and crescendoes and jokes and crises and friendships and celebrations and mysteries and beginning and endings and vistas upon vistas of eternal holy peace and freedom…

Amen!

But why, I hear you ask, are our current adventures so filled with torture and misery? Why are they so bleak, so empty of meaning and aliveness?

I venture that it is because we have chosen to forget that we are consciously creating our lives each moment, that we are participating in this divine theatre of souls willingly. A significant number of consciousness explorers have discovered, in their forays to the bardo, the realm between births, that before our human birth (or conception) we undergo a “voluntary amnesia”. This forgetting of all-that-came-before enables us to focus very intensely on the incarnation and embodied learning process, the possibilities for ever-more refined individuality, that are available in this particular lifetime. As we continue our experiments in human incarnation we are, at a personal and species-wide level, are remembering our choices to take human bodies, and to live out archetypal stories, myths and motifs in unprecedented new configurations. To create soul, beauty, art, love, and music. With enough experimentation and character refinement, we become the embodied, self-aware archetype of OURSELF. Of our own glorious shining radiant and infinitely creative and boundless individuality!

That’s another working hypothesis: spend enough time with the forces of nature and you become one yourself.

If we do this, we begin consciously fulfilling the infinite potential of our soul: the empty unformed archetype which is begging to be BORN into the blazing never-before-seen fullness, form and body of our human person, across many many incarnations. This is what the universal creator wants for us, because this is what the creator wants for herself: to become individual, to become individuals plural, living and creating together, and from this “new ground” to know and interface and create from the groundless void in a radically new way. As a soul. As a person. As an individual. As an infinite community of co-creators!

In Dividuality

The individual is itself an image, an archetype, which takes form through us either consciously or unconsciously. To make this formation conscious is to make ego into soul: to see its non-real and non-literal nature, and yet to still allow and serve its unfolding and refinement and evolution as an imaginal appearance, a creation of the confluence of many archetypal forces, of the Gods.

The ego is just one of the many persons of the psyche: the one who organises, gathers and coalesces. If this person is unconsciously serving a survivalist or shadow principle, the ego acts like a tyrant, controlling and haranguing and repressing the flourishing of the psychic community. But if the ego is placed in conscious service to this community, to the soul in her countless manifestations as psychic (inner) and human (other) persons, the ego manifests as a king or queen; an expression of the archetype of the responsible, generative, and nurturing adult.

The individual who enters into deep collaboration, intimacy and connectivity with other individuals discovers something incredible. A “shared being”, a presence and intelligence that cannot be divided into individual parts.

A dividual is what happens when a human grouping sees itself as a unified self.

In another sense, it is not the individuals who discover this being, but the dividual who discovers herself through the unique coherence of the two individuals (who aren’t really two at all).

As individuals, we have the ground or “building blocks” to form endless constellations of “dividuals”, those beings who are composite beings. Probably the most common way this happens is between intimate romantic partners, but it is possible for ANY meeting of human beings, because for any grouping of persons there exists a being that is the collective being or intelligence or consciousness of that grouping. Amazing no? This is a frontier field!

The simplest dividual is the dyad, the being who is you and me together, and is not reducible to the “parts” that comprise the whole. These beings can speak, act and live through us, if we allow them to — or if they choose to!

The dividuals of a human dyad, trio, quartet, quintet, group, community, tribe, and species, even of a planet and cosmos… all of these are collective consciousnesses, individualities in their own right — and we use the term dividual to indicate an individuality that is spread or shared or cohered across more than one body.

And are we human persons not this already, both in a biological sense, being composed of trillions of cells, bacteria, mites, and funghi? And in an imaginal sense, are we not each composed of a vast “inner psychic community” of imaginal (sub)persons, each derived from archetypes and mediated by images?

There are way more dividuals on the planet that there are individuals. In the human sphere alone there are 7 billion-factorial dividuals, a number so big I could not get a read-out from Google. (If you can figure out how many digits this number has, please let me know.)

Most dividuals are completely unconscious and exist only as potentialities. Much like most individuals! And yet, just like individuals, all dividuals can grow into increasing self-awareness and self-realisation, culminating in the birth of a “collective soul”. Indeed, we are participating in the soul-birth of the being that is entire human species, and even the entire cosmic community.

This article, Death to the Individual, will take you deeper. Only hold in mind that this death is the preclusion to an unprecedented Rebirth of the Individual: an individual who is increasingly, painfully, ecstatically aware of their participation in countless numbers of dividual beings, each with their own unique journey into self-realisation and creative experimentation.

“Joys of Duality”

Beyonds

It is a little-known fact, one of profound import for humanity’s ongoing evolution, that a small number of brave and noble consciousness explorers have ventured so deeply into the transpersonal psyche that they ended up leaving the collective unconscious of humanity altogether, entering non-human realms of consciousness and venturing beyond even the archetypal domains so as to enter infinite, expansive, “primordial” realms of consciousness, realms of unspeakable clarity that exist outside of, beyond, and encompassing the whole of our four-dimensional spacetime, our living cosmos. These beyonds are known variously as the dharmakaya, the absolute, diamond luminosity, the transcendent Godhead…

And the astounding discovery that is dawning upon humanity, as increasing numbers of us foray into these highly rarified and clarified realms of pure-light consciousness, is this: that the infinite transcendent psyche, the infinite intelligence that permeates these realms of pure luminosity, is in the process of incarnating into this spacetime, through human hearts, minds and bodies.

The transcendent and the immanent Godhead are utterly inseparable and interdependent. In the Buddhist tradition this blazing miracle of a non-duality is referred to as the “Bliss-Void Indivisible”. It is the inconceivable appearance of an infinite array of empty forms that do not truly exist or appear at all! Our selves and our universe are but one tapestry within this infinite vista. This is closely related to the discovery that our cosmos is but one appearance, one possible “realm of perception” within an infinite imaginal ecology of universes (that we may call the Meta-universe, or the mind of God, or psyche). There is nothing real or true about this world, nor about its “fundamental” laws or principles or dynamics. It exists as just one possibility within an infinite space of possibilities for perception which our souls are navigating on infinitely vast imaginal adventures.

As emptiness has taught us, the basic reality is that there is no basic reality, and so we are called to expand the scope of our imagination — our humanity — beyond even the furthest reaches of our cosmos, and out into the infinite beyonds. And yet, these beyonds are not “outside”, nor are they within us (contained within the individual).

The soul encompasses an infinite within and an infinite beyond, without any ultimate distinction between the two. The soul does, however, entertain a non-real distinction between the two: it is this imaginal distinction (between within and beyond, or inside and outside), that enables the perception of individuality and of everything that is outside that individuality. In other words, to imagine that there is self and other is all that is needed for a psyche to experience itself as a soul, interacting with other souls.

Our conceptions of psyche have so often been parochial, anthropocentric, ecocentric, and indeed cosmocentric (revolving around this four-dimensional spacetime). But now, seeing beyond even this humble homeworld, the cradle of our individuated self-consciousness is newly contexted within the infinite vastness of the boundless Meta-universe. We learn that psyche is infinitely vaster than we had previously imagined, and always will be. Or, put another way, psyche is learning to imagine herself as infinitely vaster than she previously imagined possible!

Now we learn that the even that the vastest reaches of psyche — infinitely expansive realms of diamond luminosity — are interacting with, and taking imaginal-material birth, through humanity. Through us, friends! Note that these realms are not “real” but are also imaginal, totally empty, totally overflowing, totally unfathomable and indescribable and thus totally open to infinite possibilities for non-real creation.

If psyche extends into infinite realms of diamond light, then the evolutionary process (of souls, of universes, of all imaginal creations) is also infinite in scope, and also extends into these realms, without end. The word “diamond” here refers to the immense clarity, intelligence and transparency of the “luminosity” that permeates these realms, as if it has a crystalline “structure” or “patterning” of the most unbelievably sublime and subtle nature. This metaphor helps us not to slip into conceiving of these realms as empty nothingness. As explorers report, they are permeated with the most profound love, power and intentionality. Intentionality which has birthed this universe and which holds ongoing human and Gaian evolution within its heart of hearts.

The incarnation of this luminosity into human bodies is what Chris Bache describes as the “Birth of the Future Human” or of the “Diamond Soul”. This idea flies in the face of the transcendent thrust of the world’s major spiritual traditions, where the express aim of the path is realise, merge with and dissolve in the transcendent Godhead — to escape this world (and self) altogether, usually because it’s too damn painful sticking around in the gooey evolutionary mess of an embodied Godhead refracted into countless beings seemingly intent on eating one another! Because the pain of relationship and interdependence is just too much, and is indeed so intense that we end up forgetting the soul-and-beauty making project that we originally signed up for. “No thanks! Get me out of here and back into the pure power and love of infinite light!”… which is totally missing the point, because the seething evolutionary soup we are immersed in is the infinite light, incarnated in tangible and sensible form, and it is seeking a harmonisation of this cosmos of the most unimaginable subtlety, all in service of that the unspeakable sacred beauty that might pour forth from this symphony of souls, songs that may resonate throughout the entirety the spacetime and even to spill over into other realms and universes… this soup will be cooked to divine perfection, just you wait!

Creative collaboration between universes is perhaps the next step in the process. It’s quite possible that many indigenous peoples, through their ongoing exchange with “spirit worlds”, have been already deeply engaged in this work for millenia. It’s even possible that multidimensional wars are raging between universes, and that these vast intercosmic dynamics are affecting the evolution of humanity and Gaia in a profound way. And why not? The universe is an open system, after all. How else could it even be here? It is helping me to conceive of the cosmos as less like a room, box or bucket with walls (i.e. a finite space), and more like a spring of water drawing forth from an infinite source… a four-dimensional energetic melody of melodies woven from an infinite diamond light of unimaginable intelligence, an intelligence that is continually drawing itself together — and apart — as an infinite infinite infinite number of creative embodied souls, each one “plugged in” constantly to this infinite source, gifted with an infinite playground in which to experiment, an infinite community with which to share and create beauty, and apparently endless possibilities for adventure, creation and individuation.

We are waking up inside spacetime, just as spacetime is waking up inside us.

We are waking up inside a divine creative intelligence of infinite love, power and luminosity, just as this intelligence is waking up, seeing and discovering a recreating herself, inside us. Every one of us!

Like the literalist religiosos of old, I am not saying that “this is really happening”. I am a renegade imaginal troubadour who is simply saying that it is possible to view and experience life — ourselves, each other and our living cosmos — in this way. It is this change of view that opens the possibility for the infinite diamond luminosity to enter into us, to sense itself as a human, to become not only an rarified open expanse but a diamond soul, a higher-dimensional vibrational entity, with all the endless detail, density and intensity that this entails. To incarnate. As person. As me. As you!

It’s really too beautiful for words… I invite you just look around for a moment and to consider what is being communicated here.

The entire flowering earth is an image — an imaginal incarnation, or expression, or manifestation of — the flowering void, and the flowering void is expressing itself in every face and facet of the flowering earth.

The Sufis even have a name for the fully transfigured, fully divinised, Imaginal Earth:

Hurqalya.

Seeing the non-duality of soul and spirit, we discover that consciousness and matter once separated in order that a “pure knowing consciousness” might know and behold a “known” — and beloved — object. This separation was never, ever, real: it was imaginal. And so was the unity that preceded it and that all apparently separated elements “return to” and merge within. Love, lover and beloved: beyond, self and other. All empty, all imaginal, all sacred.

At the cosmic scale, the “known” object is the universe itself which has been unconsciously evolving and finessing and refining itself for billions of years, culminating in — amongst other miracles — the climactic explosion of colour that is the flowering earth. The “knower” of this phenomenon is the unitive cosmic consciousness, or world-soul, or divine creative intelligence. And now that the evolution of the universe has progressed to a certain point, namely the birth of self-reflective, self-observing, self-aware human beings, the organic-material cosmos is able to reconnect with the pure consciousness that it has been so long disconnected from, in an ecstatic and indescribable revelation that consciousness and matter (knower and known, spirit and soul, lover and beloved) are utterly non-dual, non-separable, non-differentiable! Not ultimately! But imaginally? Oh yes!

The infinite transcendent beloved, beyond all possible description or concepton, yawns and rubs her eyes, gazes at the red-flowered trees, takes a sip of brilliant yellow fruit juice.. smiles at her reflection, radiant in the bathroom mirror… brushes her cloud-white teeth, steps into the morning sun and hops on a bus to town… it’s market day, and the nectarines are ripe and fresh…

I refer you to Bache’s remarkable book “Diamonds from Heaven” and to my essay “Beyond Transcendental Buddhism” for two direct investigations of this topic.

“Through the Door”

Conclusion: Unlocking Imaginal Religion

(A fittingly bombastic crescendo. Sorry, not sorry.)

So: did we do it?

Did we unlock imaginal religion?

What do you think?

Is anything still missing? Blocked? Unclear?

Do you see what is necessary to sense your own divinity?

To re-imagine yourself and your entire world as divine?

How else could it possibly become divinised, but by your creative reconception of it?

Do you see the total emptiness, non-reality, and relative nature of the concept of divinity – and how this enables us to “entertain the view “of anything and anyone as unutterably, untouchably sacred?

Do you see your personal responsibility for seeing and sourcing your own visions of divinity, dignity, beauty, perfection, purity, meaning, soulfulness? Do you see that these qualities are all necessarily imaginal, empty, and non-real — and that this is the doorway which allows you to source and re-create them without limit?

Are you ready to unlock the inner doors, beyond which awaits your own (trans)personal imaginal religion, infinite in scope and ambition?

Are you ready to direct this religiosity into creative service of human society, global civilisation, life on earth?

Are you ready to take full responsibility for the infinite consequences of your outrageously bold and decisive act of incarnating as an embodied human?

If so, you must reach deep into the waters of the psyche, so deep that you find your image of God, your unconscious and totally unique symbol for the wholeness that you are a part of, inseparable from, and continuous with. This image is precisely psyche’s self-reflective self-image: psyche as she see herself — and thus, how she lives and creates — in you.

And yes: being a magical image it simultaneously reflects, absorbs, emanates the transcendent diamond luminosity— and is totally transparent to it! It can be perceived as self, other, as a union of the two, or as a perfect emptiness. And it is ultimately none of these. It is not ultimately any thing or any way whatsoever!

That’s you, limitless and inconceivable.

Free, divine and boundless.

This metaphor of the “magical image” communicates to us that anything and anyone can be seen as real, unreal, as a nothingness, as magical image, and as utterly beyond any conceptual category. Ultimately no thing is any none of these (conceptual categories), not really. Rather, each is a valid and always-available way of seeing that generates a different perception, and, crucially, a different conception of what that perception “is”.

Your entire life can become such a magical image! (Is it not already? Please tell me what else it could possibly be, without a regression to truth-claims about an absolute, ultimate reality:)

You can experience the divine imaginal psyche seeing-and-knowing, creating-and-discovering herself in every moment, every perception, every part of you. In a way — from psyche’s perspective of perspectives — she is already doing this, in and through you. The key question then becomes: are you open for collaboration?

Are you available?

That which you want to create is calling you, and you are in touch with an infinite intelligence who comes not only to assist but to take new life in and through your creation! Your life is an image in her infinite tapestry. Nothing more, nothing less. And, of course, not really.

Your life comes to you — and from you — disguised as God. For now it is apparent that God was just an image all along, and you may release yourself from the grip of a limited and limiting God-image and embrace an image of wholeness (as an image of YOUR deepest and most expansive identity). It is likely that this image has been bound by the conceptual prison-walls of literalism and realism; an image of boundless wholeness that could be even more boundless and even more whole. You may thus allow your dominant God-image to dissolve back into psyche’s infinite waters (or space of possibility). OR, you may release your (mental) grip on this image by peeling away your literalist and realist conceptions of what it is. This is lifting the conceptual veil on your life to reveal it as it is: without any pre-determined or permanent intrinsic way it is!

Imaginal! Inconceivable! Boundless! Whole! The infinite unknowable divine imaginal explosion of LOVE that may or may not be called God! Also known as psyche. Also known as Nina Simone, Betty Caceres, Benito Juarez, Kropotkin, Kukulkan, Groucho Marx, Maria Pinkola Estes, Margot Fontaine, Frank Zappa… Famously, the list goes on…

This re-imagining of God, the boundless psychic wholeness on which we depend and are inseparable from, is precisely God’s (or psyche’s) re-imagining of the human person as boundless and whole and possessing of infinite psychic (or imaginal) possibilities.

When we release our literalist conceptions of God and self, there opens a space, a void, a vacuum in which new images can arise. A space in which psyche can know and imagine herself anew: a space in which YOU can create and discover yourself anew. This creative rebirth is only possible with the prior death and release of identification with the previous (God-)image, the previously structured way that psyche was committed to experiencing herself through and as you. Psyche delights in this total transformation and birth of totally novel identities, personalities, people. Here I propose an iteration of the famous quote “Nature abhors a vaccum” to “Nature adores a vacuum”. For vacuums are not empty but pregnant with endless possibility and latent imaginal appearances! (That’s a quantum vacuum – look it up.)

When you release your old God-images (probably inherited from patriarchal world religions and thus concealed by layers of unconscious conceptualisations (again: literalism, materialism, realism, exclusivism, low drama, etc.) then you make a space in your imaginal soul for fresh, vibrant, living images of the divine as it lives in you.

A space for living Gods: living revelations of the infinite divine psyche which manifest as other (as forces of nature, as the intelligence of the universe, as our beloved friends and family) or as self (as new and vital and archetypal divine human identities: father, mother, warrior, child, artist, poet, musician, lover, gardener, pirate…).

Yes, God in me. Yes, God in all. But how I long to know and see and love God in YOU, in your unspeakable uniqueness, my dear friends and animals and plants and skies… my mountains and rivers and forests…

The bird in the park, the cloud on the hill, the hand on the counter, the wasp on the sun-kissed neck, the hedge by the road, the breath in the belly, the water in the running deeps of the earth, the starfield holding it all in pristine roaring silence… the smile on your lips as you allow the imaginal cascade of divine creative imagination to flow through you and as you, as image after image, revelation after revelation, miracle after miracle, allowing God-image after God-image to speak…

Word after word, “making soul on the spot” (Hillman).

Now your whole life is a God-image — and it has to be, because every human life contains, or at least reflects, every aspect and quality of the infinite divine psyche…

It’s all here, isn’t it? It’s all in you, when you look inside at the unspeakably vast tapestry of your life, memory, psychology and imagination.

We never hit a wall that doesn’t eventually yield to a new expanse, we never find a doorway that doesn’t finally open, we do not create any experience that doesn’t eventually dissolve back into the bliss-void indivisible and re-emerge as something — and someone — totally new… a never-before-seen blazing -blossoming creation in shimmering heart and body.

Once you have consciously connected the dense, tightly-formed, and intensely intricate image of “my life” to the nebulous, numinous, unfathomable God-image that dwells in the oceanic depths of your soul, once you go through your inner doorway to the oceanic imaginal realm and venture so deep as to be touching and merging with the unformed archetypal realms and even the infinite expanses of the Great Beyonds, the Diamond Luminosity… once you have looked into yourself as a human being and seen this connectivity and co-dependence (of the formed and the formless, of everythingness and nothingness and beyond)… then can occur the two-way exchange of energy (of love, of prayers, of messages, of songs, of ideas, of questions) between the divine human and the divine non-human… between the immanent and transcendent… then collaboration may occur between all realms simultaneously: the material, imaginal, archetypal and the indescribable pristine luminosities… a collaboration so seamless that one may well sense the whole infinitude (at once embracing and encompassing transcendent, immanent and evolutionary infinities) as a cohesive and coherent intelligence, a living organism, or soul, or entity who has created EVERYTHING and who will create infinitely more, who is holding all creation within her body, her love, her mind, her imagination… her outer reaches extending beyond even the farthest limits of creation and nothingness and into yet another boundless bounded boundlessness without limit…

Oh yes, friends.

This is our home!

This is who we are!

Andrew Harvey sums it up perfectly when he says:

“The possibilities for human transformation are infinite because the LOVE is infinite”

This also entails that the love apportioned and directed to — and manifesting as — each human being is also infinite. Infinity contains infinite infinities! So the infinite imaginal soul of each embodied human lover exists in infinite relationship with an infinite transcendent beloved, and with infinite “other” infinite souls, who may proceed to live, create, dance and experiment together for endless eternities.

Can I really continue in the petty arguments and complaints of my human existence, when this Infinite Love is the origin and context of my very being, and of all beings around me, within me, beside me, beyond me?

Will I put my be-littling excuses aside and allow myself to be loved by my very own beloved? Will I forgive her and love her in her indescribable suffering as the being who lives as all beings – myself included? Will I open myself to eternal collaboration? To co-creation? Will I offer my being as a necessary element in her sublime and preposterously audacious designs?

Will I open to my own infinitude and let it inform, caress and inspire the unspeakably precious and poignant endeavour of my fleeting human life? Can I hold these two extremes within my transcendent-immanent vastness, my tight and aching little body, my ever-unfolding person?

If I can do this, what possibilities will open up for my ongoing evolution as a responsible citizen of the collapsing-blossoming earth, caught as she is in the excruciating birth-pangs of a globally integrated and collectively-conscious civilisation?

If you can sense and love your life as psyche, as Goddess, as an infinite divine creative explosion of love… then you can also love yourself as that Goddess, AND you allow that Goddess as Other to love herself through you, AND to love YOU as her beloved and THAT is the opening of an infinite adventure…

And with that florid explosion of enthusiasm (all bullshit, all sacred), I will let you return to your lives and love affairs. Thank you for journeying with me to the heart of the universe. Thank you for deconstructing all that need to be dissolved, to make space for the new and unknown, for the ecstasy waiting in the wings (once our self-serving egos run out of clever things to say). Thank you for co-creating this strange and eccentric tapestry of words, images and ideas. Thank you for staying with a writer who shamelessly uses “triple-infinite” three times in one sentence.

I would not have written this without you (yes, you!) and your soul’s desire for an even more sublime, authentic and beautiful human life, here on earth at this crazy vortex moment in history.

Thank you for showing up. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being you.

Love,

Will