(Spoilers)
I haven’t read the book, but I have had some spontaneous experiences of inter-dimensional perception and to me that’s what this movie (and the glittery symbol) are really about. Roughly a quarter of the way down the page at this link http://www.digital-brilliance.com/themes/tol.php are side by side diagrams that show two versions of the inter-dimensional Tree of Life, a very old teaching schematic that illustrates the esoteric idea that the structure of human consciousness and the structure of the manifest Universe that human consciousness perceives are the same because each individual consciousness is simply a smaller scale ‘holographic’ extension/expression of the larger consciousness of the Universe. The movie plays with this idea by drawing a comparison between tiny grains of sand and vast constellations of stars/suns, suggesting through the use of the glittery symbol, that they are both reflections of the same underlying pattern.
Notice in the diagrams the four large, overlapping circles made of dotted lines. These represent other-dimensional ‘worlds’ that co-exist with our familiar ‘material’ world, each higher world associated with a larger/deeper/richer perception of what ‘the material world’ actually is. And if you squish the four circles/worlds together so they have the same center, and put them in motion to indicate movement between dimensions, you have the same idea as the inter-dimensional ’alien machine’ in the movie.
I see the diagram of the Tree and its ‘four worlds’ as a speculative ‘tool’ that can be used to help to visualize potential journeys that consciousness can make as it evolves through time, but the important thing to me is the nature of the actual experience that the map may lead you to, and not any limited, intellectual definition of the map itself. Despite apparent structural similarities, each journey, like each psyche, is unique (which seems to be a major intent of the design, to maximize the diversity of perceptions and experience), but each individual human psyche has the potential to ‘tune-into’, experience, and reflect on a smaller scale, all of the qualities of being that are represented by the larger Universe, though this potential is usually only realized in ‘small moves’ over time. Every so often though, life may unexpectedly take us on a ‘trip’ like Ellie’s, and then the change can be more mind-boggling, as Jodie Foster showed us through her ecstatic reactions to it.
When consciousness is focused at the lowest point of the Tree, we perceive only the physical, ‘material world’ that we’re familiar with, in which each of us is a separate body in space. When consciousness is focused at higher levels, it starts receiving higher-dimensional signals it wasn’t ‘tuned into’ before. The next highest dimension may look outwardly the same in terms of form (except that you might realize that it’s ‘alive’ in a way that you’d never noticed before), but your relationship with it will be completely changed in a way that is awe-inspiring, beautiful, and radically shifts the way you perceive the meaning of it. I think they did a great job of presenting the ‘otherness’ of the other-dimensional ‘beach’ scene, but because the outward appearance doesn’t change even remotely as much as the inner experience of it does, the inner effect of the dimensional shift is also pointed to in the movie using the glittery symbol.
I agree that it’s possible to see the pattern in the spilled popcorn and the glittery grains of sand on the two hands (as well as the shape of the constellation above the ‘beach’) as part of a ‘Golden spiral’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_spiral which is found in Nature in the shapes of seashells and galaxies, meaning that it is somehow ‘built-into’ the structure of this reality. *How* it’s ‘built-in’, to me is a major subject which the movie hints at with its eye symbolism (touched on at the end of this post). Choosing to identify the glittery pattern as part of the golden spiral adds another layer of meaning to the way the pattern is used as a symbol.
A related theme of the movie seems to be that space/time, as we experience it in our lives and in Nature, may often seem random or chaotic, but its structure is actually full of hidden, meaningful connections based on patterns of balance and harmony, like the golden ratio which creates the golden spiral shape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio. A famous property of the golden ratio is that forms that incorporate its proportions appear to us to be ‘beautiful’, and you might remember Ellie during her ‘trip’ looking out the porthole, completely awestruck, and saying “So…beautiful…no words”.
Because she is perceiving from the perspective of a higher dimension, the beauty she sees is both the outward form, and the vast structure of meaning and inter-connectedness that creates and sustains that form and holds her in an immediate relationship with it, a relationship that, before her trip, she “had no idea” existed. She “had no idea” because ‘ideas’ are the language of the intellectual aspect of the mind, and the intellect does not receive the signals of that higher dimension. Only after she *experienced* the higher dimension does her intellect register that something extraordinary happened that it has “no words” in its vocabulary to adequately describe. This to me parallels the tape that recorded static. And although apparently the relationship between the intellectual and memory functions of the mind is not yet understood, the fact that the tape recorded 18 hours of static is parallel to the fact that the mind ‘remembers’ even what the intellect can’t quantify in words.
Ellie’s training as a scientist and her specialization at SETI took the pattern-recognition skills that she had in common with all the rest of us and developed them to a high level. She is a pioneer by temperament so she had been using those skills to look for a connection to other forms of life that hadn’t been discovered yet, and she had conceptualized that search as taking place within the context of the only reality that her intellect recognizes, the ‘material world’, the lowest world on the Tree, labeled Malkut. “Space: the final frontier” of the material world (as Star Trek saw it), then surprises Ellie by turning out to be a lot more complex in its nature (and its discoveries much closer to home) than she ever expected.
I would describe what happens to Ellie during the inter-dimensional ’trip’ as the opening up of a higher dimension of perception that makes it possible for her to experience the ‘meta-patterns’ that structure everything in this reality and intimately connect us with everything around us (regardless of apparent distance). The structure of the alien message hints that it is the shift in perspective that allows us to recognize that we co-exist with other dimensions here and now that makes the ‘key’ to the message visible and allows us to see the nature of our next evolutionary step. Although all existing dimensions already structure our experience of the world, it’s not common yet for us to be consciously aware of those dimensional aspects that, to paraphrase Palmer, ‘the intellect can’t even touch’.
This limitation of the intellect is why I suggest that Ellie ‘experiences’ the meta-patterns, rather than ‘seeing’ them or ‘analyzing and understanding’ them, because the dimension of ‘experience’ or ‘perception through participation in a higher state of being’, is beyond the rational mind’s capacity to engage in, since it experiences only itself as a ‘subject’ and sees everything else that it perceives as an ‘object’. When you ‘experience’ yourself, your personal identity, as being a tiny (but uniquely precious) inseparable participant in a mind-blowingly vast, complex, and perfectly balanced meta-pattern that includes everything that you have ever seen or experienced before, then everything becomes a ‘subject’, an individual aspect of the same Subject, to try to be more precise. The beauty of that level of vision shifts your understanding of your relationship with ‘the world’ in a way that the intellect is not capable of grasping, but can at its best helpfully point to. The Tree of Life, like the movie, is an intellectually understandable ‘metaphor’ that ‘points to’ qualities of potential experience that are beyond the intellect’s power to describe (a limitation that I know this post demonstrates also).
If you think of the whole Tree as representing all possible states of human awareness, the consciousness focused at the ‘material world’ of Malkut has only one line of connection to the Whole (in the ’Tree of Ascent’, which is the one on the right at the first link). In contrast to that, you can see that consciousness focused at Tiferet is directly connected to all the other points on the Tree, greatly expanding potential awareness, and making it possible for Ellie to make ‘contact’ by realizing that her identity was an integral part of a larger Whole, and that in the same way that this Whole both perceived Itself and expressed Itself through her, she was perceiving and expressing herself through ‘It’.
The inter-dimensional trip also takes the caliber or quality of experience that we have to draw on when considering the meaning of a word like ‘God’, and cranks it up exponentially enough to reconcile all the possible ’definitions’ or ‘refutations’ that the intellect could come up with. The catch is that the nature of this reconciliation can only be appreciated from a point of view that exists ‘above’ the intellect, based not on faith, or on logical proof, (which are both essential and positive in their own appropriate applications) but rather based on a personal experience of ‘knowing by participation’, which is the only faculty capable of perceiving and engaging with the higher dimension of reality that the movie depicts. As Ellie says at the final hearing “I had an experience…I wish I could share it.”
I believe that we live at a time when more and more people will be (one at a time) ‘visiting the beach’ (or however their individual psyches choose to structure that dimension). Ellie’s qualities show us what you need in order to gain access to the inter-dimensional ’Merkavah’ vehicle that gets you ‘there’: scrupulous honesty, fair play, a naturally curious mind and a relentless determination to satisfy that curiosity, an interesting combination of the ability and willingness to pay attention with something close to a scientific focus and an unshakable not-yet-proven ‘faith’ that there are ‘unknown unknowns’ still waiting to be discovered, and finally, openness to recognizing new patterns of meaning when they unexpectedly appear.
Was the man on the beach who took the shape of Ellie’s father an ‘alien’ from a ‘material’ planet in the dimension we’re all familiar with? Maybe. Or maybe he was a ‘higher dimensional intelligence’ assuming that doubly disguised identity in order to meet her where she was in her conception of reality (“small moves, Ellie”). But either way, to me the ‘big reveal’ of that moment was not the question of his identity, but rather Ellie’s. Ellie is aware that what she’s seeing in the ‘alien’s’ hand are not grains of sand. She knows that they’re part of a transcendently beautiful pattern (which she has already experienced) which draws, from her own memories and consciousness, a ’language’ through which to engage with her on a new dimensional frequency, beyond the realm of concepts and words. She experiences herself as being a necessary part of this dimension, participating in a collaborative process of creation in which she is an extension of the larger reality and ‘it’ is an extension of her. To me, this dimension of perception delivers the ultimate moment of ‘contact’ when Ellie realizes that everything that had seemed ‘alien’ and separate from her before is somehow now ‘known’ in the same immediate way that she ’knows’ herself. As she says at the final hearing, “None of us is alone”.
On why grains of sand or dirt were chosen to communicate the symbol, there is a poetic convention from a popular song called ‘Lost in the Stars’, which contains a line about stars falling through God’s fingers ‘like grains of sand’, and Carl Sagan famously drew a comparison between stars and grains of sand back in the 80s when he said on his television series Cosmos that there are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth (more recent estimates suggest there may be up to five times more stars than grains of sand). And then there is the view of the scientific theory of the ‘Big Bang’ that everything that now exists once existed at the heart of a star, so everything is essentially made of ‘star dust’. Even though something as humble as grains of sand can reflect an incredible diversity of color, shape, composition, and history http://www.inspirationgreen.com/magnified-grains-of-sand.html, (and this is not even considering their unseen dimensions), our intellects, in labeling them ‘dirt’, have subtly trained us to dismiss their significance. Over the past several thousand years, the idea that we need to leave Earth and ‘dirt’ behind and ‘ascend’ into ‘non-physical’ realms became accepted as true. Well, it is, in a way. But the four worlds *interpenetrate* each other. Earth and ‘dirt’ are not left behind when consciousness achieves a ‘higher dimensional’ perspective; the depth and meaning they have always had is just seen more clearly, which radically changes our experience of them.
So what does it mean to see the same patterns of harmonic structure in constellations of suns/stars that we also see in the molecules that make up grains of sand (both symbolized by the glittery pattern)? It suggests to me that, like the mysterious ‘medium’ that Ellie poked with her finger ‘at the beach’, the Universe, in all its vast diversity and complexity at all orders of magnitude, may be an expression conveyed by a single, undivided ‘fabric’ of reality in which each pair of eyes and everything they envision all participate consciously, as subjects. This perception of a unified, conscious world that I have tried to describe, and that the diagram of the Tree of Life and this movie both metaphorically point to, has sometimes been called 'enlightenment' which may be why the symbol chosen to represent it ’glitters'.
To the intrepid few who may have persevered this far, thank you for your interest, and congratulations on demonstrating that you have at least two important aspects of what I would see as ‘the right stuff’ — curiosity and the relentless determination to satisfy it, even if the pursuit of that satisfaction may involve reading ridiculously long posts.
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IceColdFire612
9 years ago
Like the grains of sand viewed under a microscope or the vast universe, your post is simply too grand, too poetic, too......otherworldy. I thank you good sir/madam for writing such a detailed analysis on one of my favorite films of all time. I knew Contact was a special film the moment the credits rolled but, like Ellie, I didn't know it went *this* deep.
I may be 17 and may not of comprehended everything you have written but i'm willing to try. I've always been interested in esoteric subjects and am about to start college and while getting an education and career is important, I feel like gaining vast knowledge like this would is completely necessary and would probably take a lifetime of intimate studying just to understand it let alone analyse it. You make it approachable and seem effortless in the way you write and I can only dream to have this sort of intellect. Again, thank you for writing this long post. At least one person appreciates your unparalleled effort here.
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noctilucent_piglet
9 years ago
Thank you, Ice/Fire, you made my day. I started my own studies at about 16. Back then, there were a lot of things about the world that seemed extremely unfair to me. But for some reason, I also had an inner conviction that there was a hidden, internal ‘key’ that could change your experience of the world once you found it. All the world’s mythologies, fairy tales, accounts of mystical experience, so-called ‘occult’ subjects like the symbolism of astrology and the Tarot, and the esoteric teachings of religious traditions like Sufism and Kabbalah, all seemed to me to be just different ways of pointing to the existence of this key and giving clues about how to become trustworthy enough to discover it. Today I would add to that list the mythologies presented in some films that become popular because they contain these themes and we, consciously or unconsciously, respond to that. Because it’s an inter-dimensional key, Contact probably describes it about as clearly as possible.
Over the years, I read everything my intuition called to my attention (in my spare time, since subjects like ‘Consciousness Studies’ and ‘Integral or Transpersonal Psychology’ didn’t yet exist as academic subjects), and gradually the outlines of ‘the glittery symbol’ (the nature of our inner relationship with the world) began to appear — the same patterns expressed in different words by widely different people (from religious mystics to alleged ‘sorcerers’ like Bruno, and fellow explorers of consciousness like Jung) some of whom had been searching long before I was born, but who had left bread-crumb trails behind them, describing their experiences and giving hints about what was possible. Following some of those trails changed my life, so now whenever I get a prompting, I try, in my own small way, to do the same thing. You never know if or when someone else might find what you have discovered to be helpful or even just encouraging. (As Brazil’s outlaw ‘plumber’ Harry Tuttle said, gesturing to what covered his wetsuit, “We’re all in it together”.)
If you’re not already aware of this, you might be interested to know that the number 612 in kabbalistic gematria represents a vibration of great significance, corresponding with the word beriyth, meaning the ‘covenant’ that exists between the Creator and all of humanity. Coincidentally (?) in the film, becoming aware of what the glittery symbol represents is directly parallel to becoming immediately aware of the existence of exactly the ‘bond’ that this covenant ultimately refers to. It’s hard to imagine a more auspicious vibration for a prospective student of esoteric subjects to become aligned with. In my experience, this reality is deeply mysterious and the more you learn about it, the more mysterious it gets, but in a mysteriously orderly and meaningful way.
Anyway, thanks for your response. It’s always nice to have my faith in the future justified. As the first of the intrepid few to respond, I urge you to stay motivated — we need you! :)
_______
wandering with the Woozle along the wu wei
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thisnameinuse
8 years ago
IceColdFire... where to begin?
First, I want to thank you for YOUR post. Piglet's post was indeed thorough and deep, but what excites me most is that you read it, and are thirsty for more. At 17, in a world of 140-character max texts, I love that you aren't part of the TL;DR crowd.
I, too, discovered Carl Sagan as a young child, with his Cosmos series. As I entered my teens I started getting into more of his books, and by the time I was 16-17 I was reading Contact, Broca's Brain, and more. To see you doing the same is, to me, a positive, uplifting happening. Keep going. Do not let anyone around you "beat" you into shying away from this thirst for knowledge, especially Carl's brand of science and wonderment.
You should definitely pick up the book version of Contact as written by Carl and Ann, as it has some tasty morsels and goes even deeper than the movie does.
I'd also like to suggest that you give the Dune series a try, by Frank Herbert. Especially books 1-4, Dune, Dune: Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune. It's more imaginative than Contact, with Contact being more rooted in hard science, but I think Herbert's ecological and societal observations carry a lot of the same "weight" that Sagan's did.
Piglet, again thanks to you for writing your post. And thanks again to you, IceColdFire, for not ignoring it.
————
You're makin'... me... beat... up... GRASS!
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kristiandoesit
8 years ago
Perhaps you would enjoy Chaos by James Gleick for more hard science. Or A hitch hikers guide to the galaxy for more space adventure. ;D
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wartengu
8 years ago
I have had some spontaneous experiences of inter-dimensional perception
uh uh, sure you have, what were you smoking at the time?
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noctilucent_piglet
8 years ago
It’s not that I have anything against the traditional use of mind-altering substances, but I was never drawn to using them. I was raised by Christian Scientists who didn’t drink, smoke, or take any kind of drug, medical or otherwise, so that has always just seemed normal to me. I was focused on studying metaphysics from a very early age though, so I had a good intellectual base of knowledge to draw on to help me to understand the experiences after they happened, which was always unexpectedly and when I was in a perfectly normal state of consciousness.
The major experience I had happened at 2 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon as I was reading a metaphysical book and had a sudden insight that hit me powerfully enough to send me, for the first time, out of my body and into a dimension of pure Light. I had no idea that was even possible before that, but within a few days, I ran into a Jungian psychologist who had had the same experience himself many years earlier, and he helped me to integrate that new perspective into my ordinary consciousness. Since then, I have met several other people who have had the same experience, and my sense is that it will become more and more common for people who are, for one reason or another, ready to make that transition.
I think the main difference between drug-assisted trips and spontaneously occurring experiences is that when the experiences come to you in a state of ordinary consciousness, it’s because your study or practice has prepared you to deal with them, which makes it easier to stabilize and integrate them into your ordinary life than it might be with a drug experience. But Ram Dass is a pretty good example of someone who made that transition successfully after beginning with his LSD research, so each person’s experience will be unique. But no — no smoking or other mind-altering substances were involved in my own case.
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thulk01
7 years ago
Interesting post. What do you think caused the experience to occur, and in what way has it changed your life or aided in your learning?
As far as higher dimensions existing in such a way that they just "can't be described" with language/logic/etc, I've never been a fan of that because it just seems too similar to the cop-out line that religious people give, that humans "just can't comprehend it ..." I think it's possible that the essence of the experience/dimension may not be able to be conveyed, but I also think that if one has assimilated the "knowledge" of it to a sufficient degree than he should be able to understand and explain it, at least to an extent. Otherwise it's similar to a drug trip, where a lot of people simply aren't ready and don't know enough about what they're experiencing that they do get a "just can't comprehend it" moment, while others who are further along can very well comprehend it even on a rational-thinking level.
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noctilucent_piglet
7 years ago
Thanks for your interest, thulk01, which will hopefully be enough to motivate you to read this. It's long, but in my defense, it's kind of a complex subject.
Okay, in what way did my inter-dimensional experience change my life? Basically, it provided an entirely new, unexpected and vastly expanded context for my personal experience, which radically changed its perceived meaning. You may be familiar with the symbol of the ‘third eye’, often represented as being slightly above and centered between your two eyes, which corresponds to the interior placement of the pineal gland within the brain. So imagine that after you have this experience, you continue to see the world as you did before through your original two eyes, and at the same time, you also directly *experience* — or ‘perceive’ in a way that is not visual — the same world from a perspective that is not divided and dual, but unified.
Everything that the two eyes (and the left hemisphere of the brain) see and interpret as being separate and often chaotic and conflicting, the third eye experiences as being one undivided reality, in which everything — despite the outward appearance of separation — is always intimately connected to everything else and subtly influencing and reacting to everything else in a coherent and meaningful way. The ‘third eye’ dimension of perception experiences the self and the world as one undivided, living, conscious Entity expressing Itself through many forms and perceiving its experience from many different perspectives and levels of awareness. The experience is that you, and everything and everyone existing in the world, are all the infinitely varied, individual facets of one Being.
You continue to be your individual ego self with your own roles to play in the world, but this perspective is expanded and supplemented by a new awareness that your personal identity is a within-space/time expression of a beyond-space/time Greater Identity that includes everything that exists within space/time in a higher-dimensional form. This perception is not an intellectual theory, it is an immediately experienced personal awareness. What you perceive depends on what dimension your awareness is focused in, which changes your perspective. The challenge from then on is to integrate the two dimensions in a way that honors your human experience, including emotions of all kinds, while learning how to reconcile that personal level with your larger experience of the ultimately benign unfolding of the world. That’s about the best I can do with that I’m afraid.
You might remember that in the film, Ellie was not able to convey the nature of this experience to anyone else. Each consciousness has to personally encounter it when the time is ripe. The description of the third eye comes from the Eastern spiritual tradition of the energetic chakra system, where it is called the ajna chakra. Activation of this center is related to other-dimensional experience, and when I ‘came back’ from being apparently ‘out-of-body’ in the dimension of Light during the experience, in addition to being intensely aware that my ‘energy body’ was highly activated, I immediately noticed that something in the center of my head, behind my forehead, felt distinctly different. The best description I could think of was that it felt like there was ‘more space’ there than before (I had never felt anything at that location before). I believe this sensation is related to the energetic connection that is made during such an experience between the third eye and the Crown chakra. The closest generally accessible parallel I can think of to being consciously aware at this level is an experience that is more familiar to most of us — the activation of the energy of the lower sacral chakra, corresponding to the sexual organs.
You can probably remember either yourself or someone you knew, in the earlier years of their life, not being sure whether they had yet had an orgasm. Anyone who had actually had one would respond to that confusion by saying, “if you’re not sure, then you haven’t had one”. That’s not particularly descriptive, is it? But it’s accurate because an orgasm is the temporary opening up of awareness to another dimension of experience, and when it happens, there’s rarely any doubt. But no matter how many words you try to use to describe it, until someone personally *experiences* it, any attempt to ’understand’ it or try to ’explain’ it will not be enough to actually convey to that person the immediate nature of the experience. Even the best words are just a pale reflection of the reality, because we’re dealing with two different dimensions of perception. So, should anyone who has experienced an orgasm be able to ‘comprehend it on a rational thinking level’?
I have found that looking at word roots can be a valuable spiritual tool. To ‘comprehend’ carries the meaning of its Latin word root prehendere, ‘to grasp’. The implication is that when you ‘comprehend’ something, you *have* it, and to an awareness that is habitually focused in the rational mind (which is almost all of us), whose currency is concepts expressed in words, to ‘understand’ something in those terms can seem like the ultimate standard. I believed that to be true for decades. But although you may understand and be able to describe in words in great detail what is physiologically (and maybe psychologically/emotionally/spiritually) happening in an orgasm, the subjective *experience* itself does not take place in the realm of rationality and conceptual thinking, which is why the rational mind can never fully ‘grasp’ it, and its essence remains ultimately ‘beyond words’.
I think there is actually a kind of parallel between the way some men describe delaying orgasm by deliberately ‘thinking about baseball’, and the fact that when you are fully aware at the level of perceiving from Unity — which in my experience is registered as a conscious participation in a beyond-space/time state of Unified Being/Pure Light that includes everything and everyone I have ever known — the fastest way to take yourself out of that dimension is to allow your habit of being intellectually focused to interfere by automatically trying to rationally analyze it. Endless descriptions have been attempted by experiencers as far back as we have records, and studying other people’s experiences can be very helpful to your own progress towards being open to such experiences. But even though the experience itself confirmed everything I had read and been intuitively certain was true up to then, that previous intellectual understanding did not experientially shift my perception of the world and was not adequate to convey the nature of the actual shift in perception that eventually happened. Only the experience itself was capable of that.
What do I think caused the experience to occur? The circumstances for the two other people I’ve known who have had this experience were different in some ways, but I can speculate about my own case, and the film gives some clues about this also. I personally believe that some form of reincarnation makes the most sense of what I see in the world, so I assume I’ve ‘been here before’. There are a lot of valuable things to be learned from a human life, and I suspect the number of people who are here ‘this time around’ to experience shifts to other dimensions is probably not a very large percentage of the population. I speculate that you first have to develop a healthy, well-rounded ego structure that is grounded enough so that experiencing other-dimensional energies won’t cause a harmful loss of balance, and this may take a number of lifetimes to achieve.
In my case, I felt a strong sense from a very early age that there was something ‘hidden’ that I had to ‘find’ (I speculate now that I might even have found it ‘before’ and retained an unconscious memory of it which motivated me). Even though I had no clear idea of what ‘it’ was, I found myself drawn to study the writings of religious mystics and other metaphysical explorers. Nothing else that I saw in the world really drew me anywhere near that powerfully, and so I focused on those studies one-pointedly and intensely, even though I also worked full time, got married, and lived an outwardly ‘normal’ life ‘in my spare time’. In the film, Ellie is much the same, being intensely driven and focusing her life on her quest to discover something she seems to have no doubt that she can find.
When you study the lives of other experiencers, you see also that some kind of sincere spiritual practice is a common theme. An effective spiritual practice will help you to remove ego-based obstacles to experiencing expanded awareness. Negative emotional states, anger, projecting blame on other people for things you experience in your life, or a habit of defining yourself as being in some way victimized, all keep you focused in ego until you learn to take responsibility for your own life *regardless of what anyone else does*. As long as you focus on judging others or even the world as a whole as being ‘unworthy‘ while absolving yourself from any blame or responsibility for change, you can’t move beyond the duality of the ego realm, so forgiveness of self and others is an essential step in shifting awareness.
Any spiritual tradition that you resonate with is capable of taking you in the right direction to correct these obstacles since the intuitive resonance is a reliable indicator of the presence of something that is appropriate for you to learn. For many in Western cultures, the teaching of Jesus as it is presented in the gospels (what he is quoted as actually saying), may be the most accessible and is a teaching that gives a central importance to forgiveness. I’m talking about the teaching itself here, not the religious/political bureaucracy and dogma that have grown up around it. The teaching is simply stated and focuses not just on outward behavior but on purifying one’s inner state, something many self-identified Christians seem to overlook. I have personally found that many Sufi writings also resonate for me a lot.
Another factor for me was that because of a marital separation, I was celibate for about two years before the experience, which I think was significant. I don’t think celibacy is a requirement for spiritual development, but if you happen to be celibate while pursuing an intense spiritual search, it makes sense to me that turning that energy inward instead of discharging it would contribute towards the goal of ‘raising your energy’ to higher chakra levels, which is why many spiritual traditions practice this. On the other hand, conscious, heart-centered tantric sexuality with a spiritual partner can be equally or even more powerful in its own way, as I learned in later years. But at the time of the experience, I had been celibate.
And finally, I didn’t begin studying astrology until after the experience, so I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but for a period of months before the experience, I was being influenced by what astrologers would describe as a quite powerful Uranus conjunct Ascendant transit. Uranus is called ’The Great Awakener’ and apparently if you are ready at the time a transit like this occurs, one of the things you can ‘awaken’ from is the illusion that your identity is limited to the awareness experienced by the ego personality. Astrology provides a vocabulary and language to describe the different dimensions of subtle energy that are reflected in the chakra system at the personal level, as well as at much larger-scale levels that affect the world as a whole, and in my experience, studying it helps you to attune to the energetic dimension of yourself in a way that is a very effective spiritual practice in itself.
The astrological ‘Age of Aquarius’ that we are now entering has two major dimensions — a personal dimension symbolized by the energy of the planet Saturn, which relates to the consolidation and preservation of personal ego boundaries and identities (which is an important grounding influence during this time), and a Transpersonal dimension symbolized by the energy of The Great Awakener, Uranus, which operates to raise awareness for anyone who is prepared for that experience. So over the next roughly two thousand years, that awakening influence will be a constant factor for everyone, encouraging the expansion of consciousness beyond ego for those who are ready. I expect this to affect increasing numbers of people as time goes on, which is why I write posts like this which may resonate with people who are ready to begin that journey. Every experience is different, but the personal stories other people have written have been helpful to me, so I want to try to do my part.
What I consider to be the final ‘trigger’ of the experience was being at home on a quiet Sunday afternoon and reading something that referenced the word ‘God’ and for the first time having it occur to me that there was no experiential reference in my own life that corresponded to that word — that it was just a concept for me, which was something I hadn’t really ever thought about before. But then I remembered that for the past few weeks, I had been feeling some kind of benign, feminine-feeling ‘presence’ that seemed to appear above and behind my right shoulder whenever I was studying. This correlated with an increase in intuitive direction and I had begun thinking of her half-jokingly as ‘my guardian angel’.
But as I recalled this experience of feeling a presence and it came into focus for me in the context of what the previously only conceptual meaning of ‘God’ meant to me, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks that I *did* have an experiential personal reference. I was so overcome and awe-struck by this realization that I felt as if I had fallen into a heap on the floor (that was the sensation in my energy body) and I said out loud “I don’t care if I ever understand it or not, just keep telling me what to do.” This came from someone whose whole life work was invested in ‘understanding’, so it was apparently enough of a surrender to open the door. The dimensional shift hit me with a force and momentum that reminded me of an onrushing train and a split-second later, my previously experienced reality was gone and I was a part of the Light.
To try to summarize how this experience changed my life, on the most practical of levels, not feeling separate from the world and others means that the basic good things that you want for yourself, you automatically also want for all other people and all other sentient beings. Empathy becomes virtually effortless. All of the ‘rights’ movements which are such important indicators of our evolutionary progress, become simply obvious and second nature — of course I recognize my common identity and fellowship with all people and my kinship with all life and with the planet as a living being. How could I not? This very simply changes everything.
I hope something here may be helpful to you.
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thulk01
7 years ago
Thanks for the detailed reply. I have some followup questions/thoughts for you:
the self and the world as one undivided, living, conscious Entity expressing Itself through many forms and perceiving its experience from many different perspectives and levels of awareness. The experience is that you, and everything and everyone existing in the world, are all the infinitely varied, individual facets of one Being.
This sounds sort of like the "mind of god" hypothesis where the entire universe is just a dream in a god's mind, yet without diminishing individual consciousness and free will (because if he dreams that you have free will then you do). What I've wondered about this theory is: would the "god" entity have its own avatar inside the dream, as in, he would appear to be (and believe that he is) another individual being inside the dream-world that he believes is the real world? Or would he have no individual consciousness, and rather his entire being would be split up at the initiation of the dream? I think it's the former.
The other thing I wondered about that is, how does one return to the state of "reassembling" everything into the one being and being it? (or in the context of the mind of god hypothesis, how would the god return himself to his true state?)
I became interested in this idea because one time I had a strange solipsistic experience where for a couple of minutes I felt like I was the only sentient thing in existence. Not like a "last man on earth" scenario, but like I was the only sentient thing in the entire universe and the only one that had ever existed, and I had subconsciously created seemingly-sentient-but-actually-not people/animals as as way to cope with that. It was more of an "experience" than an intellectual pondering of the possibility (similar to the distinction you describe later in your post), and it was very nightmarish (because I didn't want to be the only thing in existence, I wanted others to exist as well). I am not sure what caused it or if it was something "spiritual" or just a case of something basic like an anxiety attack (although I've never had anxiety). It prompted me to write in my journal "Would god want to be god? I think if there were a god, he would not want to be god. Unless he could create others like him. He would probably delude himself into thinking that he isn't god." Later I also added "Perhaps he would create a world that he could inhabit without the memory of who he is - a world with many atrocities happening to him and to others, things that could only be solved if he were who he actually is - thus serving the function of pushing him to wish he were a god, only to realize that he actually is." Pretty interesting. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this. I should probably note that I am not sure if that is true, it was just something I found thought-provoking after considering solipsism from a more personal perspective.
I was celibate for about two years before the experience, which I think was significant.
When you say celibate, do you mean just from sex, or did you not masturbate at all during that time either? Also, why would the discharge of energy through sexual activities have a larger impact than the discharge of energy through some other activity (for example playing sports, or walking, or going to the bathroom, or pursuing some other non-sexual hobby of your choice, etc)? I don't understand why sexual activity is always placed into a separate category by itself, whereas other activities are never seen as having the same significance.
the realization hit me like a ton of bricks that I *did* have an experiential personal reference. I was so overcome and awe-struck by this realization that I felt as if I had fallen into a heap on the floor (that was the sensation in my energy body) and I said out loud “I don’t care if I ever understand it or not, just keep telling me what to do.” This came from someone whose whole life work was invested in ‘understanding’, so it was apparently enough of a surrender to open the door. The dimensional shift hit me with a force and momentum that reminded me of an onrushing train and a split-second later, my previously experienced reality was gone and I was a part of the Light
What makes you sure that your experience was not some sort of hallucination or other "non-real" experience? Of course I'm not implying that it is, I'm just curious how you can be so certain that it was real and true.
Empathy becomes virtually effortless. All of the ‘rights’ movements which are such important indicators of our evolutionary progress, become simply obvious and second nature — of course I recognize my common identity and fellowship with all people and my kinship with all life and with the planet as a living being. How could I not? This very simply changes everything.
How do you think some people come to the same mindset independent of spiritual experience? For example, my close friend and I are both of the strong belief that all life is equal independent of trivial factors (race, nationality, even species, etc) and find it almost asinine that others don't understand this, while in a way still empathizing with the ones who don't agree with it and understanding why they might not understand it. However I am not sure if you would class us as "spiritual" people, we are not religious nor have we had some sort of personal spiritual experience like what you describe. Or, did we have one without consciously realizing it? Or is this just an innate knowledge in every living thing, and most just fight against it due to social conditioning or some other factor(s)?
Also, where do you plan to go from here? What is your ultimate goal? What do you want to accomplish? And what other things do you want to learn?
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noctilucent_piglet
7 years ago
Wow. Well, I’ll do my best with this. My best understanding is that everything that exists in what we think of as the material world, exists simultaneously on many higher dimensions, whether the individual is aware of that or not. The highest of these dimensions is the realm of Unity which I personally equate with our idea of God. When a person realizes his identity on the higher dimensions, and becomes able to act from that level of awareness, we call him/her at avatar, and this is the way I look at that idea. Everyone is a potential avatar and we all have the capacity to evolve to that state. We are not separate from God, we are expressions of that Divine Oneness on whatever dimension of awareness we have achieved so far. The Divine dimension is not subject to space/time divisions, even as it is expressed in individual entities. The only variable is whether we are aware of that or not.
Our intellect works on the basis of duality — that’s just the way it functions. This is very useful in many ways, but when we try to apply it to realities whose nature is *not* dual, it becomes inadequate. The intellect says ‘there is a God’ fine. But it conceives this God as being somehow ‘other’ or apart from the person who is conceiving it. There is God and then there is the Creation, which is somehow separate from God. No. The best model I know for creation is the Kabbalistic model, as expressed in the Tree of Life. God, Who is infinite, *emanates* the Creation out of Its own Being (what other material could there be?) From the highest level of the Divine Source, to the humblest material creature, God is always present and is not subject to separation. This has been expressed in teachings, but it is also what I experienced.
As to how we go about evolving back toward Oneness, I think your experience is an example of the answer. We all seem to have an inner longing for a sense of belonging that ordinary ego activities and even relationships can’t seem to satisfy. That level of experience of loving Unity with everything exists as a potential within us, and it draws us. Once you make the decision that pursuing that is more important than pursuing ego goals, you attune yourself to a higher dimension and you will begin to receive intuitive promptings. You will draw people into your life who are on the same wavelength and can help you to progress. I began with a great dissatisfaction with the state of the world, which improved with my discovery of reincarnation and karma. Then I realized that I needed to go over my life and forgive everyone I was holding negative thoughts about — to try to see things from their perspective, realize they were just doing the best they could at the time, and bless them for being catalysts for growth in my own life. And I had to forgive myself for my own imperfections and failings, see them as steps on the way, and let them go. The intellect always wants to ‘get rid of’ things it judges evil, but nothing is excluded from Oneness. I have always liked the saying ‘to understand all is to forgive all’.
As for sexuality, we all have different temperaments, and I understand that dealing with testosterone apparently represents another level of challenge, but my experience was that I have never felt driven by my libido and only really became aware of it when I was in a relationship. It makes some sense to me that since the kundalini energy is the same essence, regardless of the dimension on which it is expressed, focusing attention at the higher chakra levels (by intense study/practice and fervent emotional desire for Oneness) while not releasing energy at the sexual level would have the effect of ‘sublimating’ that potential sexual energy to express at higher levels. I’m not a fan of celibacy in general and don’t consider sexuality to be in any way opposed to ‘spirituality’ except maybe at certain strategic points in development. In my case, it was just a circumstance of my life and my relationship had become estranged enough that sexual release didn’t feel necessary.
What makes me sure that my experience wasn’t a hallucination? What makes you sure that your walking into the kitchen and making a baloney sandwich wasn’t a hallucination? You have a sense of yourself, of how it feels to act in the world, and a continuity of consciousness. I was ‘myself’ throughout the experience, and it felt every bit as real as my ‘ordinary’ life, in fact ‘more real’ — it was more convincing and it seemed clear that this higher dimension was the Source of the experiences of my ordinary life. Since I was raised a Christian Scientist, I never drank or used drugs either recreational or medicinal so mind-altered states are not part of my experience. Some people have the temperament to tune into other dimensions and receive visions, but I don’t have that temperament either. When I ‘came back’, there were physical effects: my ears were ringing, tears were streaming down my face, the space behind my eyes felt distinctly different, my energy body was lit up and vibrating, and I was ecstatically happy. I see no reason to doubt that it was a real experience.
On recognizing the equality of all people, I think this relates to the stage of evolution that your previous experience has brought you to, whether in this life or past lives. At the lowest level of awareness, you see others in terms of their physical characteristics and the ways in which they are different from you, and you react with fear and aggression. At higher levels, you become aware of quality of character as the most important aspect of another person, regardless of any other categories. You bond at the level of shared humanity and character, and the other categories no longer inspire fear but become matters of interest or curiosity. Like you, I saw all people as equals, but I didn’t yet have the experience that each one of them was ‘me’ and I was ‘them’ no matter who they were. It’s a poignant deepening of compassion and the sense of loving Oneness. These days, my greatest challenge is in seeing the necessary and ultimately benign function of people who play the role of oppressors, exploiters, and would-be autocrats who use others as pawns. My ego is rightly appalled. But a good villain catalyzes evolution and growth more effectively than anything else. Feeling my Oneness with some of these people is a challenge, but I’m working on it.
As for plans, I get the sense that i am quite a bit older than you and that will condition my answer. There is certainly nothing wrong with having goals and plans, but I will tell you that I stopped thinking of my life in that way when I began receiving intuitive guidance. But I have been powerfully drawn to the corrupt systems that are ravaging our bodies, producing an epidemic of diseases, now affecting even young children. Our agricultural system, which depletes the soil, uses poisonous pesticides, and mutilates the genes of natural plants, is destroying our health, along with the processed ‘food’ industry. The AMA/Big Pharma cartel is quite blatantly in the disease maintenance for profit business. The new revolution is beginning with Functional Medicine, which takes a holistic view beginning with soil quality and whole natural, organic produce, focuses on the health of the bacteria in our guts which regulate virtually all systems of the body, and recognizes that all the separate disease categories, including the multiplying autoimmune diseases the AMA treats as separate, all stem from the same basic dysfunction in the gut which can be corrected at that source. So to the best of my abilities, I advocate for food system reform, organic agriculture, pesticide issues, humane farming, animal protection, environmental issues, civil rights, famine relief and refugee rights. I’ve also been entranced by the beauty of our natural foods and enjoy spending time trying simple recipes. So, very down-to-earth, ‘material’ things. But I think this is how it is meant to be. The Gospel of Thomas tells us ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth, and men do not see it.’, and the Buddhists teach ’*this* is the Pure land*’. Thank you for your interest.
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