My last article examined human nature and argued, through reasoning and experience, that we, at core, are thought-energy-will. That is how we animate our bodies and how we move through the field of matter.
Thought-energy-will in the form of “I” is an individual, a little spark that woke up within the infinity of intelligent potential that some physicists like to call “the unified field.” We are each pieces of the Infinite, totally connected with the Infinite, yet independent as doers and experiencers. As individualized expressions of thought-energy-will, we are the way the Infinite expresses itself, the way it creates. We are the reason for creation. Our individuality is precious to the Infinite, and if we ever dissolved that, we would defeat the purpose of life.
The part of my being that makes me individual is my unique thought and will. The will is the impulse within me to do and to choose and to create. What I do, choose, and create is unique in all the universe. No other impulse of the Infinite (no other individual) will ever or can ever observe life from quite my perspective, nor will they ever do or allow or create exactly as I choose to.
Our choices and inspirations are based on our positions where we stand as an individualized sparks of infinity. When all the sparks know their nature as the Infinite and at the same time fully engage their individuality, the world will become like a symphony, with every note sounded full and sweet, harmonizing with and adding to every other note. It will become a colorful flower field, every blossom vibrant in its distinct and separate uniqueness, yet each contributing to the perfume and beauty that is all the flower field together.
Religion works against this. It tells us to surrender our will to something greater, but the Infinite actually delights in our will and its expression. Religion tells us to dissolve our ego – the author of our doing, creating, and choosing – into the cosmic ego of the whole. This is completely counter to the purpose of the Infinite. It would be like every flower in a garden surrendering itself to the garden, wilting in its self-hood instead of being the best flower it can be. The entire garden would die.
Each person is an individualized expression of thought-energy-will – like a car and driver, moving across the universe. Mind is the automobile, energy is the fuel, and will is the driver. Telling me to surrender my will is a way of taking over my thought and my energy.
The car goes nowhere without a will to drive it. If I step out of the driver’s seat of my life, merely reacting to the world instead of initiating things in it, someone else will climb behind the wheel and direct where I go. This is especially true if I invite such an arrangement through self-deprecating prayer or by prostrating myself before the gods in mantra meditation.
When we dissolve our will or ego, “I” no longer exists. All that remains is the shell of what was once a person. We are left with body (energy) and mind (thoughts). The lights are on, but no one’s at home. Or rather, someone new has taken up residence, the entity to whom one has surrendered one’s ego or will. Some call this enlightenment. It’s actually possession. The will has been abdicated, that which makes us uniquely human. One becomes a vessel for the will of that to whom one has given oneself.
Decades back, when I was a girl, religion outright asked for surrender of the will. That’s back when will was talked about still in common parlance. Now, religion has evolved and asks instead for surrender of our ego. But will and ego are the same thing. By demonizing our desires, by telling us ego is arrogant and selfish, religion has made the will seem like something that must be relinquished for perfection or goodness to be attained.
In fact, when we surrender that spark, through “namah-ing”our way through years of mantras or asking Jesus to save us, the very reason for our existence is defeated. We become empty shells, sounding to the noise of that which blows through us and possesses us. That entity is not God, for True God is the Infinite which never wants to take over anything. God desires its children’s freedom, their will unfettered, so they may dance wherever and however they like, and in so doing, delight their creator.
When we truly get that we are thought-energy-will in our essential nature, that this impulse is our spirit, the eternal and infinite personhood that animates our body, then it becomes possible to command the body and control it. We understand that every physical limitation is a limitation of thought, and that thought can reverse it. If all matter, including our bodies, is made of nothing but energy, then by thinking our physical energy patterns different, they must change. We’ve accepted that we must age and die, and so we do. But if we decide to reject that thought and supplant it with a better one, we can order the body to thrive and to live forever.
This is why I went into such detail in my last article examining what we are at our core. Because unless we intuitively get that, unless it’s something we’ve reasoned to ourselves, so thoroughly and deeply that it becomes our essential reality, then the idea that we are thought-energy-will pulsing in an infinite field of potential is only a pretty concept. It must become our most fundamental experience. When our true nature becomes as clear and real to us as the ground we walk on, we can start to live from that reality, with the authority that understanding grants us. We can ordain things and they happen. We can tell the body to do what we will. We can infuse the body with the infinite energy of the unified field and never need to eat (take life from others) in order to survive. We can survive on our essential, infinite nature.
And if all beings learned to do this, if all egos understood their essential power and immortality, no one would need to feed on anyone else. We all would exist in our own self-empowerment. The basic premise on which this universe is founded would dissolve, and that premise is the need to take life from others in order to live. The universe would start to operate on a different principle, the principle of its essential unlimited potential.
Let’s look at this from another perspective. Jewish mystical texts, as well as other esoteric manuscripts, describe the shape of the universe as a torus. A torus looks like a doughnut, a doughnut capable of turning in on itself. Think of it like a piece of vacuum cleaner tubing, taped to itself to form a circle, a doughnut shape. Imagine rotating the tubing, so the part that is the top moves toward the center, then down to the bottom, then back up to the top again. That is the description of a torus.
In this model, the universe is a black hole on one of the sides of the torus, a white hole at the other side. The white hole is constantly spitting out new creations – new worlds – that live, thrive, then decline as they move around the outside to the reverse side of the torus, where they are absorbed by the black hole there. (Astronomy now actually postulates that there is a black hole in the center of the universe, toward which all galaxies are constantly moving.) As they move through the center of the doughnut, worlds are destroyed then recycled, emerging on the other side of the torus – through the white hole – as new forms. Individual forms have been consumed; new forms have been created. And so the cycle of creation and destruction continues.
This torus is the physical shape of the universe, according to mystic sources, and the shape resembles that of someone eating, digesting, and defecating. Food in (at the black hole end), food processed (interior of the doughnut hole), food out (at the white hole end). In this way, the torus that is the universe resembles the interior shape of human and animal bodies: mouth at one end, digestion and transmutation of food in the center, anus at the other end. And just as animals defecate, their feces fertilizing the earth and becoming new plants, that which was defecated gets consumed again in the form of a new dinner. This torus system is the pattern or shape of the universe we live in. And it is our essential shape as organic beings, as long as we are eaters, dependent on taking life to survive.
The torus also appears to be the shape of Brahman, the Vedic/ East Indian name for the entity or consciousness that is or upholds the universe. Brahman is another name, in India, for the cosmic Self. It is that consciousness which those pursuing the traditional concept of “enlightenment” are striving to attain. Brahman functions in a self-destructive feedback loop. “Curving back onto myself, I create again and again,” says Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, speaking for the consciousness of the universe. Energy in, energy out. Galaxies dissolved, galaxies created. An endless cycle of creation and destruction. The universe is like a dog forever chasing its tail.
The ancient mystery schools depicted the reality of the universe another way: through the symbol of a snake swallowing its tail. (Picture a dot on the torus, and the path it takes as it moves from the top inner side down the outer side, across the bottom, up the inner side and back to its position on the top. It makes a perfect circle, which is the shape of a snake swallowing its tail.) The symbol is one of self-destruction, because a snake that devours itself will die. The universe will also someday die, because it cannot go on eating itself endlessly. In time its energy will wear out, from the endless recycling project. The universe will implode.
Brahman (the consciousness whose outer form is our universe) knows this, and it is terrified. That’s why all its children are terrified. All beings are afraid of death, and are subject to death. Because the great entity we are part of, the universe, is subject to death. Like Brahman, the great torus, we little toruses must eat to continue our existence. Or so we think. But in fact, we are no more in need of consuming others to continue existing than a dog needs to chase its tail in order to stay alive. It’s a thought we had that became a belief. It’s a thought Brahman had, that became a belief. And what we think, we manifest as reality.
The universe is self-destructive because it thinks that way. Brahman eats its children because it thinks it has to, to survive. Brahman is an insane parent, pursuing a course that is madness, knowing no other. But healing is only a thought away. Brahman only needs to conceive of another possibility, and it can change its pattern of existence.
In fact, Brahman, like us, is an individualized expression of the unified field: pure and infinite intelligent energy. If Brahman could but remember its nature as infinite, it would stop trying to eat itself. It eats itself in an effort to consume energy, because it thinks it will run out. But its very nature is thought-energy-will, and the energy it expresses from is infinite. By remembering that, Brahman would no longer need to consume itself to stay alive. It can simply shine in its own self-effulgence. It can bask in its own infinity of energy, and dance an endless dance in the forms of its immortal children. The insanity can end, when the insane thinking ends.
We are children of Brahman, and we also ARE Brahman, as a leaf is an individual but is also the plant it is part of, as a cell is an individual, but also the body it is part of. If the leaves change their minds, the plant changes its mind. If we, as children of the universe, wake up to our essential nature as unlimited and undying, then Brahman, our parent, must wake up to the same. If we stop needing to consume and stop agreeing to be consumed, consumption stops – not only for us, but for that which we are a part of. The universe starts to change its mind with every one of us that changes our mind.
When enough people wake up to our limitless nature, Brahman will wake up, and the torus that is the universe will morph into a new shape. The insanity will end, and the dog will stop chasing its tail. The need for anyone to devour anyone else will cease, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. It all starts with remembering what we really are, then using our wills to ordain change from that infinite, powerful place.
The definition of religion is from the root “religio,” which means “to bind back.” Think of the torus that is Brahman as a great firework explosion, where the sparks reach outward, then curve back to their source. Religion gives us the thinking that binds us back to the hole in the doughnut, where we must be destroyed and recycled.
By seeing through the lies of religion, by refusing to surrender our wills / egos to Brahman or to any other limited entity that religions may call God, we free ourselves from the need to cycle around from birth to ultimate death. We identify with something much greater than Brahman – the infinite intelligence from which Brahman and all universes sprang.
In so doing, we immortalize ourselves, body and spirit. We save ourselves, and we also save the universe. For being its unit members, we are the universe.
Keep in mind that Brahman is not the Ultimate Reality (although people in the Eastern religious traditions will tell you that it is). If Brahman is the cosmic consciousness of this universe, and as such is a limited consciousness (as we have seen), then the Ultimate Reality is beyond Brahman. The Ultimate Reality must be the pure ground of Being, from which all universes emerge, ours being but one of them. Brahman, the entity, thinks it is all there is – the ultimate of the ultimate – but that is not the case. Other universes exist, each with its own overmind or consciousness . Brahman is only one of these, only one of myriad universes.
Surely not every universe – not every cosmic child of God – is insane the way Brahman is. Surely not all of them are ignorant of how to live off the infinite energy they were conceived from. Surely there must be some creations that already exist in a state of eternal paradise. Because all possibilities exist in the Infinite Field that gave birth to all the worlds, and not all of God’s cosmic children can be that dumb!
If living a life free of birth and death is possible – and reason tells us it must be – then we can transform our universe into its own unique paradise. It’s only a matter of stepping out of the rut of old, engrained ideas – the dogmas we hold as unquestionable absolutes – and moving to a new way of perceiving, willing, and being. What a grand challenge and adventure!
Bronte Baxter
© Bronte Baxter 2009
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Splinter in the Mind 