Step 1: What is the Meaning of This

Today a stone is cast in the pool of humanity; concentric circles rippling into the Universe, sending shivers down its starry spine. And as with the Japanese Koan for Peace below, this circle never ends.

A Koan is an unanswerable question that demands an answer to reveal the limits of logical thinking and used in Zen practice to provoke the “Great Doubt”, a sort of homeopathic for excess intellect. The Koan presents a symbolic paradox to abandon dependence on reason as to bring about sudden, intuitive splashes in your Understanding that lead to enlightenment.  Read that last sentence again, taking in as much as you able. The key word in this passage is dependence. As we move through this course, Paradox will continue  alleviate your dependence on Duality, setting Dependence free.

In the world of Peace there is no door. To have Peace, one must employ peaceful means. Yet this Koan applies to all things; if the end is freedom, the beginning must be free, for the end and the beginning are one, are unified – that is, neither dependent on the other for meaning. Dependence is currently a kind of violence, for it is rarely at peace. Yet it is Peace that connects humans with the animal, plant, spirit and other worlds upon which we do depend on completely for our survival and growth.  For just as Soul and Spirit are inseparably intertwined, so is survival and growth.

In our forgetting that we are interconnected and truly dependent on one another, the quest for the “meaning of life” came about; a relatively recent occurrence aligned with the unchecked development of the ego. Without guidance the ego became its own best friend, what we term the little ego or little self. Meaning is a kind of comfort food the little ego has become very fond of. Indeed, meaning has become the favorite addictive snack food of an insatiable little ego, yet holds very little nutrition for the soul and spirit, in which true meaning lives. In the age of Reason, meaning was thought to be what words spoke, or represented. Yet before this, the meaning behind language wasn’t spoken, for that would ruin it.

Much of this Course requires a thorough looking at of all the things that make us human, and that which we are.  In the stage of the Adult, this is termed Complexity, a developmental stage one must undertake and move through for the Adult to move in. Often we will separate out particular elements that they may be seen more clearly. Let us tease out meaning and reason in this way:

“Reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning.
And truth and meaning are not the same.”  Hannah Arendt

Upon this first step of your development as an Enlightened Adult we begin to wean your dependence on meaning, which first must be cleared before one can abandon their dependence on reason. Yet it is an extended time with reason that has calcified the addiction that hardens one to Truth. The addiction to meaning is fed by our craving for certainty, for security - major activities of the little self. Meaning is used by the little self to create doors between you and the ability of your Pure Perception to connect with the Truth of What Is, also referred to as Reality. Yet as said, in Peace, there are no doors. All is held within its openness.  Furthermore, in the egoic dependent state, Imagination can soar no higher than your previous experiences and Inspiration derived solely from the overtones of convictions formed by a 6 year old, known as the childhood myth. As for your Intuition, we will come to that upon subsequent steps in this Course once Trauma has been put in right place. For Intuition is no more than superstition when trauma is imprinted on it.

In the meantime, it is wise to understand the compulsion behind our desires to dominate and be dominated, to be certain, to be right, to be successful, to know. One has to be constantly watchful for the self to reveal its tricks, and a maturing in Complexity helps with this.  In the the over-aged adolescent, Complexity is unnecessarily complicated by splits/schisms/unresolved parallel realities, moving one in a direction directly opposed to Who You Are though packaged as if aligned. Complication is the territory of the Saboteur in the egoic. In the mature Adult, Complexity is the “new norm” - following the ways of spirit, which are many; emptying, deepening, going high and going low, believing and disbelieving, and falling apart. But often you are too busy “narrating” your experiences as you are having them – making selfies and mentally writing script for posts. This too is a more recent form of dependence, on an authority based on the views of others for approval rather than following the ways of Spirit.

Severance, disintegration or letting go can produce great Sadness, yet it is the quest of this Sadness to get you back onto your own life path, into union with Reality - the bridge between world of matter/form/names and Mystery. The union with Reality is not a rare and improbable operation but one we are doing all the time, in a vague, imperfect fashion albeit with thoroughness and intensity in the more true and aware moments of our life. Reality is something that is permanent, not something that can be produced yet discovered. Likewise, Enlightenment cannot be attained for it is permanent. As such it fits readily into the terms of Reality. So does Truth - not something one can seek or hold onto - and neither is Being for the two are inseparable. That these things cannot be attained maddens Reason, which in its maddened state opposes Reality, like the jilted “reasonable” son who stayed home while the prodigal son got an equal share of their fathers land.  And does Reason send its jilted energy into the quest for meaning; a quest that is often void of healthy spirituality. Indeed, one may need to go some ways back, before the age of Reason in which the Culture of Disconnection was born; back to our ancient, ancestral roots before Conditioning plagued the world with thoughts, with projections; back to the sources which pull us towards Health - connection with family, feeling that we belong, connection to the land and means of contributing.

We can only know a thing by uniting with it, not by describing it with language for words only point to something other than what it is. In effect, depending only on words for communication would render everything meaningless. The “oral”, wordless tradition of Transmission is necessary to unite with a thing, person or place. At first this may be “spooky” yet it is the natural means of interspecies communication amongst earthly life and re-adapting to it necessary for Reason to give way to Reality as an equal.

I saw two geese flying
and then all words fell away
and I was watching a miracle

As each step upon this course brings you into intimacy with the simple Truths of What Is, your spiritual development as an Adult flushes your Self of the contaminating influences of the bonding-rejecting impulses so attracted to your earthly existence – the domain of little self. Step by step, you transcend (move through) your little ego to the Conscious Ego, directly responsive to Divine Consciousness and its reality within you, your living and your environment, all of which in Truth are one. Be clear, Ego has a place here. It has simply gone sideways, gotten backwards, along with many other aspects of your being. And does this backwardness have resistance to Complexity, causing a “stunting” of your growth so to speak.

Alchemy is transformation. We work with the seven stages of Alchemy within this Course, which actually began before you came across this website. Already much has come up via Calcination, the first Alchemical stage. Yet unmoving, this has built what we term, the Western Front, where overwhelming numbers of over-aged adolescents flounder. There is a constant burning here; a insatiable need to consume. Yet one cannot light ash. Something new cannot be born of the old. So must we go deeper, behind the curtain, to the old one who got lost in a hot air balloon and use that billowing energy as for the Phoenix to rise and so shed its healing tears that all the alchemical processes may be carried on, raising your own inner physician/healer; which cannot be done without the unknown. It was Paracelsus that said: “a person becomes a physician only when he knows that which is unnamed, invisible, and immaterial, yet efficacious.”

As you cast yourself into our website your eyes caught this script:

You Don't Know that You Don't Know.

In Arabian Proverb these words are attributed to the Fool, yet fear not. Even the Tarot begins here for it is preferable for beginnings to start with a 0, a circle. And it is the fool that fears not; that trusts and gets hurt and still trusts again and again. The circle is also the symbol of a wholeness that contains the emptiness which grows into its own fullness.

An intermediary channel between the unknown and the Great Mystery is Understanding – a central focus of this course. In most the channel of Understanding is a hairline fissure and we work to widen your bandwidth to be able to take it all in. Understanding is certainly not the be all and end all, yet fertile ground for Wisdom to take hold, for intelligence to come to its highest state – Compassion. But to do so, at some point we must stop making sense. So it said, that one must do only that which you cannot not do.

And too it has been said, as if a warning, that “the fire has gone out in the West”. Yet this is natural, for the West is the place where the sun goes down and so natural - not a threat at all. Let these words put your fight or flight system to rest now, for it is a good time to let the you that thinks they have been running the show die down, disintegrate, that we may come to where the sun also rises. And here Understanding affords you to pick up the teachings and be an echo of that teaching, a part of the frequency of Healing, a naturally occurring transmission of this planet that may be heard as:

Everything is everything and all there is to be, is happy.

Healing acknowledges that when something dies, gives way, another something is born. All Rites of Passage, which begin at the age of 8, are centred on accepting death as a part of life; the ultimate union of life and death. And as with the Tibetan teachings on death and dying, which we will also visit in this Course, that which has died must be ushered or guided out. In this time there is grieving, wailing, sadness, a sense of loss as long held trauma, also known as dimensional tendencies, release from the body. And at the same time, one must also tend to the newborn that has come in the very same moment as the “death”. One need not die physically to experience this but a guide is recommended.

Grief accompanies each major movement through the stages of human development. Where there is no movement there is not only immaturity but the unmoved Grief is often projected. Justin Trudeau, the leader of government in Canada at the time of this writing is a prime example. Not having had the Rites he runs the risk of holding unresolved or stuck grief related to losing his father when he was young, his brother to an avalanche some years later and a mother that is bi-polar. These obstacles life has sent might make him an excellent leader, once acknowledged and resolved, “guided”. But unattended make for projected grief that coats others in fear, which can endanger others.

In the Lakota/Sioux tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most holy. There's a sense that when someone is struck by the sudden lightning of loss, he or she stands on the threshold of the spirit world. The prayers of those who grieve are considered especially strong, and it is proper to ask them for their help. You might recall what it's like to be with someone who has grieved deeply. The person has no layer of protection, nothing left to defend. The mystery is looking out through that person's eyes. For the time being, he or she has accepted the reality of loss and has stopped clinging to the past or grasping at the future. In the groundless openness of sorrow, there is a wholeness of presence and a deep natural wisdom.

Yet and still, how are we to work with this information practically? The teachings in these texts, stories and pictures are to be taken allegorically, which has little use for the loopy logic of Reason. Just as Christ, Muhammad and Buddha were fully aware of, the practical application of Enlightenment is the ability to act without reaction, to find meaning without reason. And though Reason might be as amenable as squeezable relish to being straightened up, we will give it a go in Step 2.

Your head may well be swimming here as the ripples of Peace make their way to wash over you, so let us come to the key that opened the tiny door for Alice when she experienced this sensation on her way to Wonderland. The magical “key” to any passage, any series of words, is the Truth contained within it. Sometimes the key is lost upon you for it is far beyond your ability to comprehend amidst the wasteland of meaning held in your minimized memory, currently no more than a label making machine which mistakes concept for experience. Even so, a thread of Truth dangles right under your nose. Tug on that thread, breathe it in, and the Truth unravels in the inner invisible space of the Third Eye, the spacious ground or “seat” of Consciousness. Then Consciousness rises from its seat and with this thread of Truth goes for a walk-about through the entire body, the world as Body.

Another focus of this course is to renew your quest to that of Vision - a sophisticated view of the subtle nature of how things work; the cosmic consciousness able to see human behaviour as being in harmony with the entire Universe; seeing that the good has to have the bad to balance it. That yes, there is A reason for everything and it is this: when there is this, there is that. Just as Grandmother Spider teaches that Life is always counterbalanced in perfect equilibrium with no ultimate right and ultimate wrong.

Here, there is no longer need to search outwards for the ever-expanding place of Freedom for one who is free wants nothing. This nothing is not to sit in the West and simply say “the fire has gone out”. Recall now that Freedom begins with being free. Therefore, neither did the Christened and Bodhisattvas hide in a cave when they discovered the liberation of Enlightenment, which simply came to them. What impedes the ability to take what is there in your own two hands, to “discover it”, is that something is out of alignment, the road within you too crooked and tight for the breadth of The Vision to come through. And so that road, the pathway and all its congestants, must be straightened out. Furthermore, when energy is trapped it not only turns to “black goo” but begins pumping cement into ones ruts, often experienced as extended replays of childish convictions. Fortunately in Enlightenment, even a shooting star understands Right Place.

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.  

After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

What is the difference? Just as each planet has its own bodily functions, spinning at different rates of time, having different “climates” etc. so does each world (or “realm” as used in Buddhism) have its own set of rules and laws. The laws that govern Existence for instance are different from those of Reality, in which Meaning lives. The laws that govern Ignorance different than those of Enlightenment, those that govern Judgment different from Discernment. These may seem subtle at first so the actions appear to be the same. And for the most part the actions do not change. What changes is on the subtle level, which is within. These subtle, complex differences are also true in relationships between people who are operating in different worlds with different laws, which can bring confusion, isolation and loneliness in those unable to celebrate Difference as key to Diversity - the humble servant of Great Mystery that adheres to this teaching:

Ours is not to clear up the Mystery.

Ours is to make the Mystery clear.

Ego and Reason have difficulty seeing this for they have difficulty with Diversity in their realm of Existence. Yet too is the etymology of Existence and Ecstasy the same. We will look at this more deeply in Step 2. In Reality, “seeing” is a kind of oral communication, which in this, the Age of Aquarius, is limited not to the verbal yet Transmission which requires opening to the frequency of the feminine, the Great Mystery, and in doing so, making it clear. This in essence is the nature of Vision – clear communication with Great Mystery, the divine feminine.

In the words of Osho, a transmitter himself via the word: “The greatest thing in life is to ready to receive, to be feminine, to be a womb. And the real disciple is one who becomes feminine, who becomes a womb.” It is said too that the stages of human development are a moving from one womb to another, within one life. But when you are the master, “you are just receptive; having dropped all seeking, all searching, all hankering. One forgets all about truth, all about God and paradise and all that. One simply goes on allowing the master to enter; becomes the host for the master.” One can read these words, take it in intellectually, but with Vision the entering begins. Once filled, both master and disciple disappear. And in the disappearance is paradise, the garden. You have come back home.

Vision is the open, receptive stage that depends not on the human senses, yet neither does it exclude them. Let us now dwell for a spell in Enlightenment, which can be considered the allowing stage. For many this still seems like something hovering around you, something you dream of when you look towards the stars yet more like the sunglasses perched on your head that you thought were lost. The fact is one must raise their arms and simply pull it on like a cozy sweater for it is waiting to be incorporated so as to warm the place reserved precisely for the unexpected guest.

It is possible you will not recognize the place Enlightenment has reserved for you at its table and so the host shows you the way. Too you may not be accustomed to the culture and customs of this transcendent field of existence where all opposites, dissonance, are woven by Paradox, nor be familiar with the response abilities inherent to the place of the Enlightened Adult. You may not yet be able to understand that reaction is the cause of suffering and by accepting our responsibility we can alleviate suffering just as the Buddha did, thereby blowing up the bridge, so to speak, between cause and effect thus giving Karma nothing to do. It is necessary however to spend a good spell in Suffering, for it is for this that we have been given this beautiful planet to live on. And perhaps you are unaware that Trust has no sense of direction. And for this, you need a guide, which is different than the host yet serves it that all may be familiar enough for the little ego to remember to take its Right Place in Consciousness and Consciousness to move from its “minority” seat within the brain into the wholeness of form and oneness of the world as body, a body with a heart as big as the Universe.

As you might have already experienced, the Course of Changing Mind will guide you through some strange territory, with scents of familiarity amdist forgotten inner terrain. Indeed the complex readings are a challenge to get through as your eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend, and you are not used to “not knowing”. And this is fine, for will this highlight limitations that you might discover them, eventually understanding the entire structure of the mind that takes shelter behind the various activities and forms of the little self and its systemic conditioning to be small, rather than humble.

The fact is, in this Course at least, the Words are reading you, finding the places where the extraordinary lives in you, calling you from the stiff complications of the age of Reason back into the fluid circulation of voluntary simplicity that brings forth the teachings of your own medicine bundle inside you, your eyes as diverse and complex as that of a dragonfly. Eventually you will take the medicine of your own voice and the value of your own word as doing your best and in blending your best with that of others, make the world a good place.

We are not discarding meaning nor reason. These too has their Right Place. In true spirituality nothing is discarded. All is the prima materia, the “material” for the sustenance of Soul, which is necessary to temper Spirit.  There will be leaps from meaning and reason necessary to be taken in this Course, which may anger you.  What has been commonly referred to as “meaning” is actually a naturally flowing aspect of the more mysterious, Quantum perspective without question or doubt, without being sought or taken as a goal. But your new, subtle muscle of “meaning” must be worked out with the fluidity of your developing Understanding. And we do so with regular cycles of repetition throughout this Course and some winding, perhaps even cryptic portions, to break free from any lingering dependency based on Reason, which always has an opioid effect on DNA. Here is an exercise designed to tickle sleepy, dormant DNA that it might send the codes for the development of your Understanding. Notice that each portion is completed with a period, a full pause of stillness after each movement.

Love manifests Beauty.
Contentment expresses Gentleness.
Tenderness begets Humility.
Humility creates Compassion.
Compassion creates Tranquility.

And for dessert, a slice of mystic pie in your eye: when you understand that you are a creator being, Creation can stop. Indeed we are taught that our place or purpose here is inside our feet. This is not likely what you have been taught but you are here with us now. And as a spiders web, the Course of Changing Mind continually brings you back to what you thought you understood as to see deeper truths inside them that run both straight and spiral webbing lines with many, many intersections. As such, it is crucial that you remain focused. We are not here to change your mind, hang it on another hat. No, we are here to keep the mind changing, fluid and self-cleaning.

These teachings are not just about the words yet the energy transmission and invisible guidance that flow therein, which can often only be noted through hindsight, highlighted in our weekly Council meetings that keep things flowing in the Interactive Field and one-on-one shamanic sessions for when one might be digging too deep without removing the debris and so bury them selves alive. For we truly need more people here who are upright and dignified.

This virtual vision quest rite to your Enlightened Adulthood is a direct, transformative experience of the sacred, until now, reserved for the mystics.  You may not even know that this is what you have been looking for, nor what the real meaning of it may be.  No matter. Word is, it has found you.  In the spirit behind the words of Rumi:

"When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety;
if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain.

From this I understand that what I want also wants me,
is looking for me and attracting me. 

There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it."

We ask that you download the pdf files given in this Course into a folder on your desktop for easeful access. It is recommended that you take this course in through the computer rather than the printed page and furthermore, that the words ought to be listened not just with the eyes or ears, but with the heart, unhurriedly, with peace and stillness moving through you in the constant motion that is healing, which comes of such authentic Listening, in which Transmission blooms.

We are aware that, of their own, words can as easily bring peace on earth as star wars and too that words only point to what they are not. It is said that our Ancestors fought to get us here. The Rest is up to us.  May we all Rest in Peace for the Rest of our Life. There is much Peace to be harvested from The Word through Transmission.  I request that you review the title of this step now, noting there is no question there, no tension, no conflict.

I leave you in this resting place with the words of a great medicine people of the Amazon who speak the sound of light, transliterated by the Plant Kingdom.

I will open your thoughts.

By doing so, I'll fill you with joy.

By doing so, I'll straighten your thoughts.

By doing so, I'll straighten your body.

Now, I will heal you to the depths of your heart.

By doing so, I'll fill you with immense joy.

By doing so, I'll return Life to your body and thoughts.

I will heal your being, your body

With the powerful essence of The Tree and The Universe

So you are Joyous.

Remember my words

So you will remember them,

I will repeat them in many ways.

Though I am small,
I made your thoughts shine like jewels.

The Universe is in Harmony.

The Word is and will ever Be.

Resources:

Meaninglessness of language – Alan Watts
Weavers of Wisdom – Anne Bancroft

Click Here for our next available course 

Original content under copyright Ne'ith Arrow/Changing Mind 2021
neith@changingmind.co         www.changingmind.co