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The Wonders of Our Sinful Nature

I have a question for you. How many times in your life have you been called a sinner with any real sense of seriousness? Whatever your answer is, from one to ten thousand and one, I can assure you that it hasn’t been anywhere near enough. Quite naturally, the modern mind will reel from such a proclamation, as it believes by right that it has been born upon the high ground, acting as if it has always held the superior position of power and vision. This subtle arrogance is a tremendous disaster for the soul, for the human experience, and for the cosmos as a whole.

Of course, I am not talking about sin as you might have heard it set within some religious or philosophical architecture. While the nature of that framework is certainly another matter altogether, I can assure you that the word sin as we have popularly defined it was as absurd thousands of years ago as it is to you now.

In other words what I am about to say to you now isn’t new. This is isn’t some hip and trendy insight from a weak soul caught up in the spin and tumbling of in the gravity of his epoch. No, from the very first time the word sin was used, it was never intended to signify that we are dirty and ugly and weak, or that we have somehow committed a crime against the divine by being at all. I know this because the word sin originally wasn’t a word that had anything to do with religion. It was an archery term.

To sin is a technical term that means to “miss the mark”. It was a way of referring to the missed shot, and a way of bringing into the light the process by which the wayward arrow that has not found the target. It doesn’t take much to see how this term could be misappropriated in service of the dogmatic and ideologically possessed mind. The distance between the word sin having originally meant the missing of a target, to the world sin now coming to imply the committing of a crime, is really quite small. As such, it doesn’t take much imagination (and even less personal experience) to see our tendency to leap quickly and with a great enthusiasm over such a chasm.

The real question is, what is the nature of this gap? Why do we, even when the originating reality of the term sin has been revealed to us, do we choose to go about actively ignoring the inherent and informing nuance around that reality and instead choose to enforce the error? The reason is actually quite simple: our spiritual teachers aren’t master archers, and regardless, we the masses, don’t have any interest in difficulty of something like archery. So, we line up, sit down, or hunch over a screen to be educated in the realities behind of the missing of a target by someone who has never knocked an arrow for themselves. You see, we have been repeatedly held hostage by those of us who are not, or will ever be, masters. And we willingly submit because we would rather submit to them, then to the process of anything resembling a path to a mastery for ourselves. This willing submission to our weaknesses takes off the pressure, granting us the bland alleviation that descends only to the dull and stagnant not-yet-a-soul. However, as stagnant as we may get, our hearts fight back, and rebel. We all know something is deeply wrong, but the pain of this awareness is too much, and so we are forced to leaping over the edge of one side of the gorge, to reaching desperately for the other. Once we have made that jump, and once our fingers have clung, then sin becomes something else entirely: a symbolic object of blame, very much having the nature of the (poisoned) arrow. This way, the suffering that we feel has both an easy diagnosis and cure: them. They. Him. Her. It. You hurt because “they” are sinners, full of grease and decay. Then, when you have yourself been caught unable or unwilling, then you can write yourself off in very much the same way. You say, “This is expected, for I am corrupted by nature. I haven’t the choice here. I am as I am”. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that when you have been offended or hurt by someone else, you must hold them to account, and take them to task for their error. You demand “they” be different.

We are this way because we haven’t been taught very well. Our systems of education within our religions, cultures, and sciences have been utterly blinded by the very software it has sought to inform. To put it another way, the theology of sin will always be corrupted because our own ontological experience must itself always arrive through sin. That is to say, our being, from our first day on this planet to our last, is something that must be negotiated out of a surrounding reality we don’t understand very well. All of us must learn because all of us are born ignorant. We are born with every kind of desire and urge and need, most of which we act blindly in service of, and we don’t see very clearly that these drives cannot find satiety or fulfillment without a profound form of submission. We want to eat, but we need to farm, hunt, or buy (sell our time). We want to have sex, so we need to compromise ourselves to find and maintain a suitable mate. We want to be happy, so we go to the movie theatre (money), take a hike (time and effort), or lose ourselves in the company of loved ones (compromise). Each of these things requires a process, which is itself not unlike the shooting of an arrow, and like the shooting of an arrow, they will miss. A lot. If you practice of archery, your arrows will miss thousands of times before you can begin to group them around your mark at will. It will then take many thousands more until you can split your arrows by instinct.

You see, by using a term from something simple, universal and incredibly difficult, you can speak directly to the soul whose main function is to grow and learn. Only the soul who has learned to submit themselves to the sinning process will ever find a mastery of that sin. It can never happen for someone who has exiled the reality of sin to something that is philosophical or theological. To do this is to commit a very dangerous sort of sin because it is the missing of the mark by the refusal to raise up your bow in the first place. In most religious circles, this has been paraded about as something virtuous, but there is no virtue in casting down the bow into the dirt and snapping the arrow over your knee.

The entirety of the religious traditions (including that of science), and thus the resulting cultures, have been corrupted by this one terrible mistake. A misreading of that one word and the resulting ideas that follow it as they occur throughout the ancient literature will blind the reader not only to the narrative itself, and the teachings within, but what is far more tragic, you will miss the very reason for it being there at all: you. That is, the realization of a human soul that has come here, now, despite the apparent impossibility of that reality.

Archery, and any complex participatory endeavor for that matter, is the exploration of the reality of being held to account against the substrate in which it must exist. Here you are: you want the bullseye, but you will always find yourself unable. Even as a child, you come to understand that reality doesn’t serve you. Your wanting isn’t enough, not now, not ever, but it will direct you. If you are wise, that wisdom will have you pointing your arrows at the archery range, and therefore ultimately at yourself. If you are arrogant, that arrogance will have you pointing your finger instead, at this, at that, at whatever takes you away from the real. In other words, you have no choice but to take aim at something. Therefore, you cannot miss a target intentionally, you can only choose another target.

So what now?

Find your mark, and then, with all of your courage, pick up and knock the arrow. With the entire strength of your heart, draw the fletching to the skin of your face. Aim with love, attention, and care. Breathe out, and while holding gently to that stillness, simply let go. Be completely aware. Make intimate the flight and strike of the arrow with the state of your inner being. Watch how they are one. Make adjustments. Repeat. This time, do it better. Repeat. This time, even better. Repeat.

This time, be better. Repeat.

You are a sinner, so sin beautifully.

[danofcrowsnest-blog]

What is Alchemy?

Alchemy is a very special word, not only because the collection of delightfully absurd definitions that it tends to invoke, but because the word itself has been pulled up from the very bottom of our collective barrel. That is to say, while it has a tendency to bear with it the faint and dreamlike connotation of some great and unknown depth, that depth is something that for most of us is admittedly obscured. It is by this gate of a curious and forced admission of ignorance, that we can understand that whatever it is we happen to think alchemy is, it isn’t that. This is a significant step, as in order to define alchemy, it is first required that we clear ourselves of any conception of it having a definition at all. Though alchemy is a pregnant word, ripe with new possibility, it has been purposely and cleverly weighted with the heavy difficulties of the archaic and the archetypical and then been cast overboard into the ocean of our own being. The knowledge, and for good reason, has been hidden from the pathological mind by the very nature of the pathological mind. Thus, it can be said that discovery of alchemy requires the use of alchemy itself.

How can this be?

Alchemy is the knowledge of how consciousness relates to matter (unconsciousness).

The central operation of alchemy is the application of this knowledge to induce transmutation, of which there are two forms. The first, which could be referred to an alchemy of light, is the transformation of matter into consciousness, while the second, which could be called an alchemy of darkness, is the transformation of the potential for consciousness into the realization of matter.

The alchemical process of the light, must itself take place within the light. That is, only the consciousness within the invocation against the darkness can bring about more consciousness. In much the same way, the alchemical process of the darkness can only take place by the darkness. However, as the darkness cannot directly contend with light without itself being transformed by the light, the transmutation of the potential for consciousness into matter can only take place indirectly via the concealment of the process by which the light itself must arrive.

Therefore, the first alchemically framed question is not whether or not you are an alchemist, but rather, what kind of alchemist are you?

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Dream? Or Just Reality?

Another dream last night. I sat at a table as the people in my life sat down before me. I had something important to say, but the more I spoke, the less it seemed that I even existed. None of them responded. Deeply disinterested in what I had to say, they glanced around and checked their phones. I tried harder to speak clearly, but as I did, the more nonsensical I became.

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Spiritual Advertising

The trick of marketing anything in regard to the spiritual is to do it in a way that it can be misappropriated to imply to the matters of the ego as the pinnacle of all human endeavor.

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The question you are answering has never been whether or not death is coming for you.

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The mind will tell you that you are but a drop of water in an endless ocean, whereas the soul will say that you are the endless ocean in the drop of water. 

The question is, who is correct? 

Well, that depends on how seriously you have decided to take the present game of hide and seek. It goes something like this: There I am! There I am! There I am!

You go about trying and find yourself in everything you do, in all of your addictions: in your job, in your fashion, in your movie preferences, in your family, your culture, and your religion. In everything you think and do, you are asking “am I here?” 

No?

“How about here?”

No.

Life then, tends to play out this way as a endless series of adventures in missing the point. That is to say, the art of searching for yourself precisely in the only place in the universe where you are not: over there.

In an age where it seems that we cannot keep up, the sanest thing we can do will be to just stop. And maybe that is the point, because in this game of hide and seek for your own soul where you stop just so happens to also be right where you are.

[danofcrowsnest-blog]

Enlightenment and The Empty Can

Last night I had a dream, and in this dream, I was taught the inner workings of the enlightenment process. I cannot recall the majority of it, even though I tried to memorize the images upon my waking as best as I could manage. I was told something along the lines of, “don’t worry, you understand enough, let it go.” As the dream faded away, I was only able to hold on to a single moment, that of a discarded cat food can being held out to me. It was empty and polished, and brass in color. A voice explained to me that what you put into any space, even that of a piece of useless refuse, will then have been granted life. At that, a thistle and a rose suddenly grew out of the can.

The meaning was immediately obvious to me, and so I replied, “What I put in, is what is the borne into the world.”

Consciousness sets itself to borders so that it can be discovered, not by its own inherent expansiveness, but by its new limitation carved out against this expansive nature. This “knowing” is not a build up to something greater than itself, like how bricks are set upon one another to form a structure, but rather it is the like how space allows itself to give itself over to form. And so, when we behold the nature of the conscious mind, we become aware that it is somehow a reduction of something vast to fill something small. It is because of this, that we are able to know anything. The real fundamental of the universe is the largest possible thing that is so grandiose that is present in even the smallest things. The nature of this space is no different from consciousness itself, as it becomes what it has allowed to exist. This act of conscious becoming is the truth that is present in both the sin and grace of the human experience.

As I woke, I understood the process, and the process was this: we can study and cultivate consciousness the same way that a gardener understands that the limitation of a seed is the method by which trees and flowers are delivered into the world. In this way, the gardener is no someone who interferes with the seed, they are someone who sets the conditions of the process.

You are a handful of seeds in the palm of the infinite. Thus, enlightenment is the care of the small places that cradle the entirely of the cosmos.

[danofcrowsnest-blog]

The Awakening of Fire and Light Over Water

We have come to a world which exists not only as a set of conditions in and itself but as a set of conditions that operate in flux with the ever-shifting set of conditions, which is the self. This border between “self” and the “world” is not entirely obvious, other than to say that we are in possession of consciousness that remains in a constant state of arrival upon the unconscious realms.

What is this unconciousness that we have called the world? Where does it begin and where does it end? Where have the borders been set down? This is not an easy question to ask, and the easier that is seems to answer, the less you may be certain that you understand it. To start somewhere, it can be said that the unconscious world is everything that is not conscious. While the majority of us are capable, at least at some level of cognition, of understanding that the majority of our desires, our instincts, our emotions, our drives, our body, and our thoughts do not originate from within our conscious free agency, we very seldom feel, think or act this way. 

What is more, the unconscious world does not stop there at the edges that crown the dark recesses of our inner clockwork. In the same way that you have found that your nervous system is strung up and through your flesh and that this has given you an existence and a place of operation, the same can be said of the entirety of the universe around you. The inner operation of the traditional unconscious is not separate from the overall operation of the universe itself. It is to your own consciousness, a total sum of unconscious events spanning time and space, leading up to and away from you. In this way, the proper consideration of the unconscious process that is our body does not start and stop at the surface our own skin: yes, it is that, but it is also the rocks at our feet, and the stars in the sky. It is the people we share our lives with and the people that we don’t. It is the sound of birds or the babble of a mountain brook. The unconscious world is everything that is not yet known directly and intimately by that light of the conscious awareness.

I say yet because that is the journey of consciousness. To know. To explore. To spread itself. From the time you came to this existence, you have been moving from the darkness of the unconscious world to the light of your own conscious experience. At first, this expansion, this little-big-bang, began as you rapidly awoke to the realities of your own inner environment, which came to you as a four-billion-year-old progression of biological life. From here, your social, cultural and ideological context informed you of what and who you are. 

For most of us, we simply stop here, accepting this territory of being as a given.

There is another stage awaiting us, however, and that is the moving of the progression of consciousness from as something developed through the unconscious mechanisms of chance and accident, to something that is being developed by consciousness itself. The calling out of the deep to the deep, as it has been beautifully said.

This is the process that Christ referred to when he said that we live in a world of two births, the first being that is forced upon us as the flesh and the second being that of the spirit, which when it is called upon descends from “above”.

Up until now, this calling down of consciousness from above has been reserved for the saints and the sages among us, but as the unconscious world is itself growing in power and influence through the amplification of society and technology, the conscious will for consciousness itself is also building in a rapid response.

It is coming to pass that many in this age are beginning to feel the call for a new kind of life, even if they cannot yet articulate it. The world, despite offering an untold amount of wealth and comfort, is growing more and more confusing to our own programming. It is as if the more vivid the promises of the world and flesh have become, the more obvious it is that they are lacking something essential. It is when we have eaten our fill, satisfied our every urge, traveled to every land, and experienced the fruit of our greatest and most honest of our primordial ambitions, that we have been left with our hearts vacant and hollow. From this space, comes the rising of a new desire; the consciousness in the world stirs, and as it begins to wake up from its own dream of the world, opens new eyes to a new light.

The apt metaphor for this process, at least in the classical sense, would be the flame (consciousness) has it comes to burn upon the torch (unconsciousness). However, for the sake of a purposeful, if not even a playful concealment of the overt obviousness in that, I think a more poignant metaphor is that of the sailboat moving over an endless ocean. It is more inviting to that very consciousness to explore itself, to reveal itself, to itself.

So here it is:

You have arrived here, to this world as if you have awoken to find yourself on a sailboat adrift upon a violent and cruel ocean of potentials. The deck is empty, littered with refuse, and while you have a huge sail set against the onslaught, you find yourself with neither functioning rudder nor compass. Instead, you find an ornate painting of a wheel next to an equally elaborate painting of a compass. It is obvious that someone, or far more likely a series of someones, had carefully put them there, but regardless you are now alone. You know how these things should work, but no matter how hard you claw at the wood, no matter how bloody your fingers become, the vessel does not respond. It does what the ocean has compelled it to do.

So you turn to the map, which of course, has been torn into a thousand pieces and scattered. Those few fragments that have not been lost to the waters can only be found in the darkness of the damp corners and hidden nooks and crannies. What little information that you have gathered is now clutched into your white-knuckled fist and you are forced up to the mast, where you then begin to navigate only by blind force; you raised and lower the sails, driving you more or less into nowhere, from nowhere.

However, as you are nearly overcome with the absolute futility of this cruel arrangement, you find yourself starting out over the ocean. In these long moments, you have become aware of something else, something far more subtle than the pointless ropes and pulleys and painted facades that appear to present themselves to you. This something you sense is beyond the ocean and the creaking of the wood, the spray of the waves and the rolling of the wind, the pain and the loneliness of the current endeavor. Even though you are aware of it, you cannot look directly at this new thing, as if it can only be looked at out of the corner of your eye. Regardless, it is there. You know it.

It is growing awareness of a new vessel that exists just underneath everything, and you are aware that it somehow carries the entire scene. The boat, the water, the wind, everything. And it is here when something in your heart whispers, “now, up to the helm with you”.

I hope this voice finds you.