In  Line  With  The  Big  Flow

excerpts  from

The East-West Interview  with  Gary Snyder

I never started sitting [in meditation] like that [ten hours a day] until I went to Japan and was forced to. I still wouldn't sit ten hours a day unless somebody forced me, because there's too much other work in the world to be done. Somebody's got to grow the tomatoes. There's not going to be that much meditation in the world if we're going to have a democratic world that isn't fueled with nuclear energy, because there isn't that much spare energy. We damn well better learn that our meditation is primarily going to be our work with our hands. We can't have twenty-five percent of the population going off and becoming monks at the expense of the rest, like in Tibet; that's a class structure thing, a by-product of exploitation—sitting an hour a day is not. Sitting ten hours a day means that somebody else is growing your food for you; for special shots, okay, but people can't do it for a whole lifetime without somebody else having to give up their meditation so that you can meditate.

I had a pretty fair grasp of what the basic value of meditation is—an intellectual grasp, at least—even then. It wasn't alien to my respect for primitive people and animals, all of whom/which are capable of simply being for long hours at a time. I saw it in that light as a completely natural act. To the contrary, it's odd that we don't do it more, that we don't, simply, like a cat, be there for a while, experiencing ourselves as whatever we are, without any extra thing added to that. I approached meditation on that level; I wasn't expecting anything to happen. I wasn't expecting instantaneous satori to hit me just because I got my legs right. I found it a good way to be. There are other ways to be taught about that state of mind than reading philosophical texts: the underlying tone in good Chinese poetry, or what is glimmering behind the surface in a Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape painting, or what's behind a haiku, is that same message about a way to be, that is not explicable by philosophy. Zen meditation—zazen—is simply, literally, a way to be, and when you get up, you see if you can't be that way even when you're not sitting: just be, while you're doing other things. I got that much sense of sitting to make me feel that it was right and natural even though it seemed unnatural for a while.

I still think a lot about Oda Sesso Roshi. Oda Roshi was an especially gentle and quiet man—an extremely subtle man, by far the subtlest mind I’ve ever been in contact with, and a marvelous teacher whose teaching capacity I would never have recognized if I hadn’t stayed with it, because it was only after five or six years that I began to realize that he had been teaching me all along. I guess that’s what all the roshis are doing: teaching even when they’re not “teaching.” One of the reasons that you have to be very patient and very committed is that the way the transmission works is that you don’t see how it works for a long time. It begins to come clear later. Oda Roshi delivered teisho lectures in so soft a voice nobody could hear him. Year after year, we would sit at lectures—lectures that only roshis can give, spontaneous commentaries on classical texts—and not hear what he was saying. Several years later after Oda Roshi had died, one of the head monks, with whom I became very close, said to me, “You know those lectures that Oda Roshi gave that we couldn’t hear? I’m beginning to hear them now.”

Unenlightened consciousness is very complicated—it’s not simple. It’s already overlaid with many washes of conditioning and opinion, likes and dislikes. In that sense, enlightened, original mind is just simpler, like the old image of the mirror without any dust on it, which in some ways is useful. My own personal discovery in the Zen monastery in Kyoto was that even with the extraordinary uniformity of behavior, practice, dress, gesture, every movement from dawn till dark, in a Zen monastery everybody was really quite different. The dialectic of Rinzai Zen practice is that you live a totally ruled life, but when you go into the sanzen room, you have absolute freedom. The roshi wouldn’t say this, but if you forced him to, he might say, “You think your life is too rigid? You have complete freedom here. Express yourself. What have you got to show me? Show me your freedom!” This really puts you on the line—“Okay, I’ve got my freedom; what do I want to do with it?” That’s part of how koan practice works.

The truth in Buddhism is not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture… What I felt at the time and what I think all of us feel is that we’re talking about the Dharma without any particular cultural trapping. If a teaching comes from a given place, it’s a matter of courtesy and also necessity to accept it in the form that it’s brought. Things take forms of their own; we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. The Buddhadharma, which is the Dharma taught by a line of enlightened human beings (rather than the Dharma as received from deities via trance, revelation, or bhakta, which is what Hinduism is) is nirmanakaya-oriented—it goes by changeable bodies. Right now it goes primarily through human bodies. Already it is all over the globe, and it has no name and needs no name.

Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenment—traps for eager and clever fools—three-quarters of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage that they were tricked into entering.

There is a very fine spiritual line that has to be walked between being unquestioning, passive on the one hand and obnoxiously individualistic, ultimately-trusting-no-one’s-ideas-but-your-own on the other. I don’t think it’s uniquely American; I think that all people have these problems on one level or another. Maybe that’s one meaning of the Middle Way: to walk right down the center of that. In one of the Theravada scriptures the Buddha says, "Be a light unto yourself. In this six-foot-long body is birth and death and the key to the liberation from birth and death.” There is one side of Buddhism that clearly throws it back on the individual—each person’s own work, practice, and life. Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.

Americans have a supermarket of adulterated ideas available to them, thinned out and sweetened just like their food. They don’t have the aparatus for critical discernment either. So that term “infantilization” [used by Robert Bly, who spoke of the infantilization of humanity—each generation following the Industrial Revolution is more infantile than the previous, thus, for example, needing many more supportive devices merely to survive] is something I can relate to. I think there’s a lot of truth in it. The primary quality of that truth is the lack of self-reliance, personal hardiness—self-sufficiency. This lack can also be described as the alienation people experience in their lives and work. If there is any one thing that’s unhealthy in America, it’s that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work—the young, especially, get caught in that. There is a triple alienation when you try to avoid work: first, you’re trying to get outside energy sources/resources to do it for you; second, you no longer know what your own body can do, where your food or water come from; third, you lose the capacity to discover the unity of mind and body via your work.

The overwhelming problem of Americans following the spiritual path is that they are doing it with their heads and not with their bodies. Even if they’re doing it with their heads and bodies, their heads and bodies are in a nice supportive situation where the food is brought in on a tray. The next step, doing their own janitorial work and growing their own food, is missing, except in a few places… This is one of the legacies of Zen, Soto or Rinzai—to steadily pursue the unity of daily life and spiritual practice.

One of the things I learned from being in Japan and have come to understand with age is the importance of a healthy family. The family is the Practice Hall. I have a certain resistance to artificially created territories to do practice in, when we don’t realize how much territory for practice we have right at hand always.

[In your essay ”Buddhist Anarchism” you added the qualifier “gentle” to the “violance” you felt was occasionally permissible in dealing with the system.] If I were to write it now, I would use far greater caution. I probably wouldn’t use the word “violence” at all. I would say now that the time comes when you set yourself against something, rather than flow with it; that’s also called for. The very use of the word “violence” has implications—we know what they are. I was trying to say that, to be true to Mahayana, you have to act in the world. To act responsibly in the world doesn’t mean that you always stand back and let things happen: you play an active part, which means making choices, running risks, and karmically dirtying your hands to some extent. That’s what the Bodhisattva ideal is all about.

The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness—the nub of the problem [is] how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a non-acquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature—the revolution of consciousness [can] be won not by guns but by seizing key images, myths, archetypes … so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.

It cannot even be begun without the first of the steps on the Eightfold Path, namely Right View. I’ll tell you how I came to hold Right View in this regard, in a really useful way. I’m a fairly practical and handy person; I was brought up on a farm where we learned how to figure things out and fix them. During the first year or two I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo, out back working in the garden, helping put in a little firewood, or firing up the bath, I noticed a number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day one of them took me aside and said, “We don’t want to do things any better or any faster, because that’s not the point—the point is that you live the whole life. If we speed up the work in the garden, you’ll just have to spend that much more time sitting in the zendo, and your legs will hurt more.” It’s all one meditation. The importance is in the right balance, and not how to save time in one place or another. I’ve turned that insight over and over ever since.

What it comes down to is simply this: If what the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Shoshone, the Hopi, the Christians are suggesting is true, then all of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because it’s drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving—real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind and into liberation. Implicit are the possibilities of a way of living and being which is dialectically harmonious and complexly simple, because that’s the Way. Right Practice, then, is doing the details. And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting—that ask, “What is the natural/spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor-saving?” “Spiritual price” means the time at home, time with your family, time that you can meditate, the difference between what comes to your body and mind by walking a mile as against driving (plus the cost of the gas). There’s an accounting that no one has figured out how to do.

The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension. The literalness of that other dimension is indeed going to have to be taught to us by some of these other ways… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that which I recognize more clearly now. Nobody can move from Right View to Right Occupation in a vacuum as a solitary individual with any ease at all. The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In a way the one that we pay least attention to and have the least understanding of is Sangha—community. What have to be built are community networks—not necessarily communes or anything fancy. When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.

In actual fact, I’ve lived more in the flux of society on more levels that practically anybody I know. I’ve held employment on all levels of society. I can pride myself on the fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college.

I grew up with a sense of identification with the working class. I have lots of experience with this society—always have had and still do. I realize the danger of getting locked into self-justifying groups, which we see all around us. Since I’ve come back to the U.S.—and for the last seven years I’ve lived in rural California—I’ve been able to live and move with all kinds of people, which has been very good for me. A lot of my friends are doing the same. The whole “back to the land” movement, at least in California, at first had the quality of people going off into little enclaves. But the enclaves broke down rapidly as people discovered not only that they would have to but that they would enjoy interacting with their backwoods neighbors. A wonderful exchange of information and pleasure came out of what originally was hostile; each side discovered that they had something to learn from the other. Certain things that at first were taboo have become understood and acceptable.

[“Snyder does not face problems of modern life… His poetry doesn’t answer to the tensions of modern life and depends on a life no longer accessible or even desirable for man.”— Thomas Parkinson, Southern Review] The interesting point is the criticism of my poetry as evoking essentially outmoded values or situations that are not relevant or desirable. It’s complicated to try to defend that. The answer lies in a critique of contemporary society and the clarification of lots of misunderstandings people have about what “primitive” constitutes, and even simpler clarifications about what your grandmother’s life was like. It isn’t really a main thrust in my argument or anyone else’s I know that we should go backward. Whenever you get into this kind of discussion, one of the first things you are charged with from some corner is that, “Well, you want to go backwards.” So you have to answer it over and over again, but still people keep raising it… Jerry Brown asked me the same question in a discussion about three weeks ago; he said, “You’re going against the grain of things all the time, aren’t you?” I said, “It’s only a temporary turbulence I’m setting myself against. I’m in line with the big flow.”

When we talk about a “norm” or a “Dharma,” we’re talking about the grain of things in the larger picture. Living close to the earth, living more simply, living more responsibly, are all quite literally in the grain of things. It’s coming back to us one way or another, like it or not—when the excessive energy supplies are gone. I will stress, and keep stressing, these things, because one of the messages I feel I have to convey—not as a preaching but as a demonstration hidden within poetry—is of deeper harmonies and deeper simplicities, which are essentially sanities, even though they appear irrelevant, impossible, behind us, ahead of us, or right now.

[“The peculiar strength of the technological culture is to be able to make tame commodities out of potentially revolutionary states of consciousness”—Marcuse]. The point by Marcuse that you raised is a real danger. I’m conscious enough of it, but I’m not sure about how one handles it except by being really careful and wary; that’s one of the reasons why I stay out of the media pretty much—maybe a simpleminded way of keeping myself from being prempted or made into a commodity.

I think it’s inevitable that American society move farther and farther away from certain kinds of extreme individualism… The negative side of the spirit of individualism—the “everybody get their own” exploitive side—certainly is no longer appropriate. It can be said to have been in some ways productive when there were enormous quantities of resources available; but it’s counterproductive in a post-frontier society. It’s counterproductive when the important insight for everyone is how to interact appropriately and understand the reciprocity of things, which is the actual model of life on earth—a reciprocal, rather than a competitive, network… We are moving away from Darwinism. As the evolutionary model dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, henceforth the ecological model will dominate our model of how the world is—reciprocal and interacting rather than competitive.

You’re asking me what is my Buddhist practice? I’ll ask you, “What do you mean by ‘practice’?” — So you’re defining “practice” essentially as a concrete, periodic activity… Periodic, repetitive behavior, to create, re-create, enforce, reinforce certain tendencies, certain potentialities, in the biopsyche. There is another kind of practice, which also is habitual and periodic, but not necessarily as easily or clearly directed by the will: that’s the practice of necessity. We are six-foot-long vertebrates, standing on our hind legs, who have to breathe so many breaths per minute, eat so many BTUs of plant-transformed solar energy per hour, et cetera. I wouldn’t like to separate our mindfulness into two separate categories, one of which is your forty-minute daily ritual, which is “practice,” and the other not practice. Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all of the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, “practice” is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, and all of life is practice. At any time when the attention is there fully, then all of the Bodhisattva’s acts are being done.

I’ve had many teachers who have taught me good practices, good habits. One of the first practices I learned is that when you’re working with another person on a two-person crosscut saw, you never push, you only pull; my father taught me that when I was eight. Another practice I learned early was safety, where to put your feet when you split wood so that the axe won’t glance off and hurt your feet. We all have to learn to change oil on time or we burn out our engines. We have to learn how to cook. By trial and error, but also by attention, it gets better. Another great teaching that I had came from some older men, all of whom were practitioners of a little-known esoteric indigenous Occidental school of mystical practice called mountaineering. It has its own rituals and initiations, which can be very severe. The intention of mountaineering is very detached—it’s not necessarily to get to the top of a mountain or to be a solitary star. Mountaineering is done with teamwork. Part of its joy and delight is in working with two other people on a rope, maybe several ropes together, in great harmony and with great care for each other, your motions related to what everyone else has to do and can do to the point of ascending. The real mysticism of mountaineering is the body/mind practice of moving on a vertical plane in a realm that is totally inhospitable to human beings.

From many people I learned the practice of how to handle your tools, clean them, put them back, how to work together with other men and women; how to work as hard as you can when it’s time for you to work, and how to play together afterwards. I learned this from the people to whom I dedicated my first book, Riprap. I came also to a specific spiritual practice, Buddhism, which has some extraordinary teachings within it. The whole world is practicing together; it is not rare or uncommon for people who are living their lives in the world, doing the things they must do, if they have not been degraded or oppressed, to be fully conscious of the dignity and pride of their life and work. It’s largely the fellaheen oppression and alienation that is laid down on people by certain civilized societies throughout history that breaks up people’s original mind, original wisdom, the sense and sanity of their work and life. From that standpoint, Buddhism, like Christianity, is responding to the alienation of a fragmented society. In doing this, Buddhism developed a sangha [community] which is celibate as a strategy to maintain a certain kind of teaching that in a sense goes against the grain of contemporary civilization, but will not go too much against the grain because it’s a survival matter.

The larger picture is the possibility that humanity has more original mind from the beginning than we think. Part of our practice is not just sitting down and forming useful little groups within the society but, in a real Mahayana way, expanding our sense of what has happened to us all into a realization that natural societies are in themselves communities of practice.

To me, the natural unit of practice is the family. The natural unit of the play of practice is the community. A sangha should mean the community, just as the real Mahayana includes all living beings. There is cause and consequence. On one level, Theravadin Buddhism says, “Life is suffering, and we must get out of the Wheel”—that’s position of cause. But from position of consequence we can say, “The life cycle of creation is endless. We watch the seasons come and go, life into life forever. The child becomes the parent, who then becomes our respected elder. Life, so sacred; it is good to be a part of it all.” That’s an American Indian statement that also happens to be the most illuminated statement from the far end of Buddhism, which does not see an alienated world that we must strive to get out of, but a realized world, in which we know that all plays a part.

Some people don’t have to do a hundred thousand prostrations, because they do them day by day in work with their hands and bodies. All over the world there are people who are doing their sitting while they fix the machinery, while they plant the grain, or while they tend the horses. And they know it; it’s not unconscious. Everybody is equally smart and equally alive.

Where I am, we love occasions to come together. We have a little more time now that we’ve gotten some of our main water system, fence building, and house building done; we now have the chance to sit together, dance together, and sing together more often.

from  The Gary Snyder Reader

Counterpoint   Washington, D.C.   2000 

Dan  Bern

I  Am  the  Messiah

When I tell you that I love you don't test my love
Accept my love, don't test my love
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much
Don't ask what kind of music I'm gonna play tonight
Just stay a while, hear for yourself a while

And if you must put me in a box, make sure it's a big box
With lots of windows and a door to walk through
And a nice high chimney so we can burn, burn, burn
Everything that we don't like
And watch the ashes fly up to Heaven
Maybe all the way to India, I'd like that

All the ancient kings came to my door
They said, "Do you want to be an ancient king too?"
I said, "Oh yes, very much, but I think my timing's wrong"
They said, "Time is relative or did you misread Einstein?"
I said, "Do you really mean it?"
They said, "What do you think we come here for
Our goddamn health or something?"

Everybody's waiting for the Messiah, the Jews are waiting
Christians are waiting, also the Muslims
It's like everybody's waiting, they've been waiting a long time
I know how I hate to wait like even for a bus or something
An important phone call so I can just imagine
How darned impatient everybody must be getting

So I think it's time now, time to reveal myself
I am the Messiah, I am the Messiah
Yes, I think you heard me right, I am the Messiah

I was gonna wait till next year, build up the suspense a little
Make it a really big surprise but I could not resist
It's like when you got a really big secret
You're just bursting to tell someone
It was sort like that with this
And now that I've told you, I feel this great weight lifted

Dr. Nusbaum was right, he's my therapist

He said get it out in the open

I spent ten whole days in Jerusalem, mmm Jerusalem
Sweet Jerusalem and all I ate was olives, nothing but olives
Mountains of olives, it was a good ten days
I like olives, I like you too

So when I tell you that I love you don't test my love
Accept my love, don't test my love
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much

danbern.com

Time  Travel

Alan Hammond   August 22, 1999

The human consciousness is a most wonderful instrument of divine action—for one thing, it’s multi-dimensional. It can function in various ranges of vibratory substance. For example, there are the stratums of time and space, of thought, of feeling, and of quality. However, because it now has less fine substance available, there are many aspects of divine technology which should operate through this consciousness which are now incomprehensible to it. One remnant experience is what we call “feelings”, but because of this lack of fine substance, those hints of creative arenas are no longer meaningful to the outer human mind.

The most dominant range of vibration to human consciousness now is probably the dimension of time and space. However, this currently is an unbalanced experience. The most dominant awareness should be that of True Identity. This is a qualitative factor, so that’s why we tend to emphasize the necessity of reintroducing more vividly the sense of Divine Identity. This is the starting point for the restoration to a balanced consciousness.

I thought this morning it might be of some value to explore the use of consciousness in the realm of time and space. It is possible, after all, to time travel in consciousness. We can quite easily go into the past or the future, and from an Angelic point of view there are reasons to go into the past or future from time to time. For example, there are, for some people, events in their past experience which they had interpreted as destructive. That interpretation may have remained with them in the ongoing cycles of their lives, and we know that so-called destructive events in a person’s past can certainly mar the experience of life now. So, identified as the Creator, we can go back into the past, revisit such an event, and change it in consciousness. We could probably all think of such happenings in our own lives. But I ask you, “Did not that experience eventually cause a greater expression of Divine character in you? Didn’t you need to mature to overcome the effects of such an event?” Sometimes people look at destructive interactions with their parents, for example, and blame their parents for their present misery. But we can go back to that interaction and see now that our parents were psychologically damaged goods themselves, and we can understand why they behaved the way they did, and forgive them. Or in retrospect we may discover that our interpretation of circumstances was very incomplete or inaccurate in our then immature minds.

In any case, if we have trouble changing our experience of the past in the ways I’ve just described, surely that event back there was part of the life process which has brought us to today and our awareness of True Identity, to whatever degree, and to the quality of that Identity and of our purpose of expressing this quality in every moment? That is a tremendous position to be in on Earth. So we look back to uncomfortable events and realize they were not as destructive as we may have thought. We are thankful for them, actually, because they brought us to where we are now. So we’ve just visited the past, and if we need to, we can do it again and continue to change our false interpretations.

We can also travel into the future. Let’s do that. Let’s go to our deathbeds, assuming we’ll be in bed! But anyway, let’s visit our last gasp! Surely at that moment we wish to look back upon our lives on Earth and have it have been a glorious cycle of experience and Divine achievement? So there in the future we’re looking back to today, which is in the past as far as that future point is concerned. We’re looking back to August 22, 1999. And here we are, and what do we do? We intensify our awareness of our Divine Identity, and we intensify our aspiration to give expression to the wonderful Being that we are. So we’re coming out of the future into the present. That’s a form of time travel, and that too was a creative journey.

Let’s take a different look at time and space. There is a specific relationship between time and space—they’re two aspects of this dimension which most people find dominant. There are heavenly bodies moving through space. Without this there would be no time. Time is perceived and measured because heavenly bodies—planets, moons, and so on—move through space. That creates the experience of time. For example, the rotation of the Earth measures days, the movement of the moon around the Earth creates months, and the Earth traveling around the Sun creates years—so you can see that space and time are two aspects of this dimension.

And here’s an interesting thing. We have radiation coming towards the Earth from everywhere else—that is our future. The radiation coming towards us contains factors which constitute the future for this Earth, but you’ll notice it’s in the past. When we look at the light traveling to us from other places, we know that actually that light originated in the past. Anyway, what is coming towards us is our future. Once it reaches us, and leaves us, going out beyond—it’s then in our past. Once it’s leaving us it’s in our past, and it will be the future for whatever it’s moving towards. Incidentally, as the radiation leaves the Earth and moves out, it obviously mixes with and therefore modifies the radiation coming towards us, so that our past affects our future. And actually the radiation coming towards us meets the radiation that is leaving us, so the future is also modifying the past.

Now all this may seem rather meaningless to this point, but it isn’t. One obvious fact here is that just out beyond us is a mixture of the past and the future. And whereas we can see it most easily in this planetary sense, it is also true for us as individuals. When we express something it is immediately in our past, but it is in our world’s future. And when anybody expresses something in the world, that is in our future and their past. And the same principle of the mixing of past and future radiation goes on all around us individually.

This may seem to be getting us nowhere, but it actually brings us to the point. And the point is: The significance of where I AM, here and now. Outside of this point where I AM, is a mixture of future and past vibratory factors. This is why we emphasize the matter of coming into perfect expression of True Identity—I AM, because who I AM is the undimensional Identity, the Eternal Presence. The starting point for all real experience is the true, qualitative Identity.

Here is, you might say, the truth back of man’s desire to travel in space and travel in time. The greatest journey in time is to come into the present moment. And the greatest journey in space is to actually be where the physical body is. Most people are not in that state. They think they are. If you ask someone if they are present, here and now, they would say, “Well of course I am.” But it is virtually never the True Identity that is present. The identity answering is invariably a mish-mash, psychically speaking, of  “I was”, and “I will be”, which we don’t have time to analyze now, but that identity is a mixture of  “I was”, riddled with guilt and regret, or “I will be”, full of dissatisfaction and fear.

The greatest accomplishment of space and time travel is to come out of the undimensional levels of Being into the dimension of time and space here and now. And the only way one can successfully arrive here and now is by the balanced presence of I AM—the undimensional reality. Then when we are where our physical bodies are, in space, we begin to correctly administer the other vibratory factors coming to and leaving us. Only an undimensional Identity can handle the complex material of time and space. Most people are not physically where their physical bodies are. Often they want to be somewhere else, or they’re trying to populate where they are with people that aren’t there, or get rid of people and things that are there, and so on and so forth. They are not actually the Angelic Identity present where their physical body is. So the greatest journey is into True Identity—and then, we find ourselves where I AM in true position in the dimension of time and space.

Now there is an absolute time, which is the same throughout the whole cosmos, and that is now. In the cosmic now, radiation is emerging out of the undimensional levels of Being simultaneously everywhere. And that simultaneous radiation is coordinated as it starts moving through the dimension of time and space, so that the cosmic action is in fact one action. Now that’s a vast organization, and let’s remember that our lives are part of this. As we are present in the here and now in True Identity, we are coordinated with the single action which is emerging through the whole cosmos in each moment.

Another aspect of this subject relates to memory. What is memory?  Memory is the impression of a moment registered in atomic substance. I suppose that’s how digital memory is emerging in the computer world—that is a crude copy of a divine technology. Anyway, an atom receives the vibratory impulse of the moment, and that imprint constitutes memory. In the human consciousness there is this storage of atomic substance then, which contains the memories of the moments of our lives. But in the fallen state these memories become crystallized—especially the highly charged destructive ones (as they were interpreted then anyway.) Those impressions are crystallized—petrified one might say, by intense emotion at the time.

In the individual case, the healing of memory relates to the bathing of these atoms in the Tone, by the spirit of the Creator. We already touched on this process when we traveled into the past. But when the healing radiation of Spirit is allowed to touch the crystallized atomic memory, it dissolves that impression, and the dissolution of that pattern begins to cause the memories and the feelings related to them to dissolve. That is healing. This core pattern of healing within the individual can obviously affect that person’s whole world. You can see how, in this way, that memory patterns tend to be the DNA of a person’s world. So as we let the distorted, destructive memories be changed through radiation from the present, we find those memories dissolve and come no more to mind. It is as if they never were.

This is a microcosmic or holographic example of what is true also of the Archangelic Consciousness, Body, and experience. Mankind’s consciousness has become crystallized and distorted in a crystallized state. As a result, of course, everything that human consciousness looks at is distorted and crystallized. The view of the cosmos has become a crystallized thing, and everything is not at all what it appears to be.

We, as focalizations of the Archangelic Spirit—I AM THAT I AM—are responsible for a much bigger task than merely healing our own individual psyches. This consideration this morning is part of the process of awakening to this larger responsibility as the Archangel—I AM THAT I AM—relative to the Archangelic distorted memory and the subsequent distorted Archangelic Body and its function in the universal design. That seems a very large task. However, there’s only one vast Spirit and we are part of it. And such a consideration as this morning’s is part of the generation of finer substance in which we may become aware of a larger Self, and our larger responsibility in the Whole.

So we’re present undimensionally, looking into this dimension of time and space, seeing how we can, through the human consciousness we have, move around much more flexibly than the outer consciousness was previously aware of. We can move into the past and the future—releasing creative radiation into the past, which brings healing there—or into the future, sending forth radiant lines of force which influence the movement of, shall we call them particles, or the circumstances of the future.

But we can only do this as we are, in expression, the Creator. This surely is a great adventure. And we realize now more than ever that we are not bodies, minds and hearts with a Spirit. We are Spirit with a body, a mind, and a heart. Our dominant experience is of the glorious quality of our own Beingness. That’s not an egotistical claim because it’s true of everybody—and everything else too. This is who we are. And our radiant action at whatever level, as fitting in the moment, is what we are eternally about.

We are redefining ourselves, redefining mankind, and redefining man’s experience on Earth—not making it up but letting it emerge naturally out of the undimensional, letting it shine into the dimensional and reveal itself in those levels of substance. This is a wonderful, magical activity. It’s not a matter of trying to do something—it’s a matter of letting the reality of our Beings shine into the lower levels of substance—some of which we’re aware, some of which we’re not aware (speaking of the outer mind now.) We know that the effect of that shining is to create heaven in those levels.

We’ve already healed many distorted memories of the past, so they don’t come to mind anymore. And this frees us, frees up the substance of consciousness from crystallization so that our Spirit, emerging out of the undimensional, moment by moment, can clothe itself exactly through fine and pliable substance as it wishes to now, no longer distorted by crystallizations of the past.

This is not merely an exercise of self-improvement for our own benefit. We are an integral part of a bigger design. So if something creative is happening in us, it’s happening in the larger design also, and that’s our joy. We’re not living for ourselves, we’re living in and for the Whole, moment by moment.

© archangelicbody.org