Creation - Holographic Universe...An Open Discussion On Existing

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluŸ whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

WHAT IS SUFISM?

Sufism is a philosophical and spiritual system of thought and ethics associated with Islamic mysticism. It is a tradition which has contributed indirectly and directly to many great spiritual, cultural and intellectual achievements in the history of humankind, not only within Islamic civilisation, but more widely. It is also found at the heart of or associated with: Sikhism, the Bahai religion, Freemasonry, Zoroastrianism, Paganism, Druidry etc. It is a tradition which has close parallels in the Jewish Kabbalah, and which has interpenetrated the Kabbalah almost to the extent that it is ultimately difficult to say where one tradition begins and the other ends.

It is a tradition which has interpenetrated with Christian mysticism to such an extent that it is impossible to say where in this world the living spirit of Jesus would be situated if not in some way in association with Sufism. It is the experience of perplexity and loss which is also at the heart of Classical philosophy, of the initiatic experience of the Classical mysteries, about which one cannot speak other than in poetry or riddles, or in true philosophy. It is the joy of homecoming to the beloved again and again and recognising her each time as both different and the same, as in a spiral of knowing and unknowing, as embodied in Celtic spiral forms and design.

It is a love which is at once transcendental and so human, spanning the full spectrum from our animal nature through to the inmost spark of the divine within us all. It is a word whose meaning is unknown, whose practices have become overextended and overformalised. It is a love song to God which can never be finished, and which can hardly be begun. It is that special and strange feeling that however hard one works, that one is always just starting. It is that feeling of not knowing which comes with true love. It is the balance point of knowing and loving, when both are in harmony, and sing together in a melody of praise and joy. It is that feeling of specialness which comes with true love, and with spiritual love, and the source of that specialness, and the ordinariness and universality of that specialness, as one sees it diffused also in the rays of sunlight, the greenness of grass, the blue of sky, the sounds of bird song at dawn and the hushed stillness of all nature.

It is the humour which comes flooding into the soul even after the worst pains, and it is the hard learning which comes when suffering has been assimilated and the mind's sanity restored. It is the purity of motivation which must accompany the seekers as they set off on an impossible journey with no hope of arriving. It is the love which unites enemies and which divides friends. It is a journey, a pilgrimage, which can never be begun, and which, once begun, can never be ended. It is the light behind all seeing, and also the darkness. It is the mediator between the West and the East. It is the cause of justice which arises out of the desert and out of the deserted soul when all hope seems gone. It is an impossible aspiration beyond the reach of any possible striving, a hunt with no quarry, except for the inmost spirit beyond the reach of self where the hunter becomes the catch, and the setting forth becomes the returning, empty handed.

It is a dream which restores memory beyond the realm of all possible awakening, to a deeper slumber, from which there is no awakening except the Real. It is all that can be said, yet in itself it can never be said. It is a false poverty which knows unbounded riches, and false riches which are worth less than dust in sunlight. It is an equation stretched out between unknowns, and the balance between them, in which all past and future states are held equally, created in the tension of love.

It is the fear and hope of the lover in equal measure, tortured by silence and distance. It is the love beyond love in which everything that has been lost is mysteriously returned by the moment of surrender to nothingness. It is the true voice which says nothing, a wind which holds the planet spinning on its axis, which blows through us each second, yet which can never be felt or heard, until we surrender. It is the moment of final reckoning in which one's debts are weighed and found uncountable, and it is the thankfulness of spirit which balances all this, and the flood subsides. It is nothing, a mystery, about which those who have some knowledge will deny it, and those who profess it remain excluded. It is a strange scattered network of light workers, beyond name and form and station, in which synchronicity governs their deeds, coincidence provides their daily bread, faith forms the air they breathe, and peace and justice their only craft and skill.

It is the betrayal of everything, in which the final loyalty is proved and tested. It is a loneliness in which only absence can provide comfort. It is to feel again the pain which Jesus felt when he realised the crucifixion was upon him. It is a feeling of inadequacy and powerlessness at the scale of suffering and abuse going on in the world. It is the strange ability to cancel out all one's past, and the burden of one's past achievements, and to reduce them to dust particles dancing in sunlight, and to let the spirit catch them and blow them where it will, to make new configurations, to make new patterns of meaning out of the fragments of our lives - it is the spirit stream of water without which it is indeed a miracle that the iceberg is seen and not seen. It is a dream which can never be quite remembered and yet which can never be quite forgotten.

It is the secret language of the Muses, and the secret language of the Angels, and the secret language whereby they speak to one another. It is the secret language of philosophers and the codes and signs whereby they communicate their deep perplexity and love to one another. It is a mystery school which has no borders, which one can never join, and yet which one can never retire from. It is a chance meeting with destiny, a flash of soul recognition, soul to soul, deep within the place the truest words come from. It is the Word within all words, the spirit of pure breathing and life, the spirit of the good, from whom all other words are partial out-breathings. It is the truth within the soul, the waer within the wer as the Anglo Saxon tongue put it, which carves and traces our destiny, our weird, and according to the purity and motivation and depth of our utterances, and the inner sound of our soul essence, so is our weird. It is a lover which we will always disappoint, which we will always leave, which we will always forget and turn away from, yet which will never leave us, even right deep down into the grave, even beyond the resurrection. It is also a lover which we will never betray or abandon. It is the frog which turns into the prince, and the wicked witch, who turns into the glorious Goddess of peace and joy. It is the secret language of Allat, the consort of Allah, the hidden goddess of Arabia and the Middle East, whose voice was misunderstood and misheard, and whose voice has never yet been properly heard, and without whose wisdom, and the wisdom of her servants, there can be no complete Islam, no complete surrender, only forced surrender, for without the divine mother and Goddess, under all her names, without the Beloved, how can man be tamed and civilised, how can our true stories be told, how the continuity of time with timelessness be restored? It is the heresy for which all heretics have always been persecuted - the witches, the cathars, the Gnostics, the freemasons, the sceptics, the Unitarians, the rationalists, the philosophers, and its name is Truth - the scattered fragments of truth.

It is the secret in the heart of Abd ar Rahman's library in Cordoba which the Spanish flames could not destroy. It is the secret of John Dee's library which even the rampage of the mob and their flames could not destroy. It is the secret of the library of Alexandria which even the flames of the Christians and the Muslims and all who helped fan them, could not destroy. It is the hiding place of the missing works of Aristotle, the esoteric teachings, delivered orally to his chosen students in the garden, in praise and honour of Apollo lyceus and all the Gods.

It is the secret of the possibility of peace between the USA and Iran and Europe and Russia, between the West and the Middle East, and between the souls of Ancient Greece and Ancient Persia. It is the secret which the Magi represented to the infant soul of Jesus. It is the sigh of the suppressed poetry of the world, and the dispossessed. It is love, and poetry, and dolphins, and starlight, and kisses, and wine, and it is the absence of all of these and yet their spiritual fulfilment. It is a teaching which has been forgotten, a way into a secret garden which has been lost, and a courage which few have retained. It is a courage which Gandhi knew, and Jesus. It is the secret source of the power of non-violence. It is a tradition which contains the inner knowledge of the power of cannabis as a sacred sacrament for the soul, which wings the consciousness back to its source, which welcomes the inflowing power of the plant world and nature spirits, the world of love and sensuality and mind combined, and which understands also the dangers and cautions needed for this work, and which can help teach the lost generations of youth who have overindulged in this vehicle, and still do. It is spiritual law beyond the world's outward law. It is the source of true justice as love.

It is the inner secret of peace and the most glorious Beloved to which all outer forms and paths of peace and religion would surrender to, be they Islamic, Bahai or Gnostic or Sikh or Druidic, or Freemasonic or Buddhist, or Theosophical, or Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Pagan or Humanist or Taoist or Confucian or Zoroastrian, did they only know the way. - and it is the way to that way, and the name of its true Country which cannot be spoken. It is an unnamed way which would disavow the name of Sufi should people come chasing it there. It is a path to a lost cave near the village of Pequin in Upper Galilee where the Zohar was communicated, and the search for that cave, and the knowledge of that cave, and the legend of that cave, and the losing of that cave.

It is one of the scatterings from the secret assemblies of the wise, from all times and all places and all traditions, gathered out from among us, whose notes and reports we have largely lost, save where summoned by Emperors, yet whose results are all present in the heart of every human, buried deep down inside their listening. It is the religion of the jester at the court of kings, the way of the fool watching the antics of the powerful and the lordly. It is the cup of poison Socrates drank, and the wine served at the symposium of love both, and it is the vine and the grape and the press and the long slow fermentation of beauty and wisdom . It is the fire which has burned all heretics throughout all ages, and it is the invisible fire of conscience which burns those who applied the visible light for their destruction, and it is the fire of loving forgiveness which burns from the heart of those wronged and who yet wish no vengeance save only wisdom and peace.

It is the silent cry for justice which escaped the lips of Ali as he realised he had been betrayed to his death, and the source of the heart of compassion which wished no ill to come to his murderer. It is the sigh from the lips of all those of light who have ever been killed, or tortured, or assassinated, or martyred, in the cause of love, and it is the love which inspired them. It is a ray and a series of rays and an occult text and the source of those rays and the invisible light and the source of that invisible light and the journey to that source and the love of that source and the love of that journey. It is the womb of all form and the lovemaking with that womb and the secret of that lovemaking, and the secret of conceiving and the moment of conception, and the fusion of male and female parts of the soul and body in an unutterable glory, and the form of the perfect child, who was, and is, and is to come. It is the substance of the secret teachings of the wise and foolish alike and the innocence of the dove and the wisdom of the serpent. It is the inner faith of the one who does nothing at all, unknowably, and who yet accomplishes the work, and then vanishes, as if (s)he had never been, and it is the tracks left of their vanishing, for those with eyes to see, and with the courage to follow.

It is the secret source of faith of he and she who accomplish everything without even knowing what is being accomplished. It is the secret rain of grace falling upon humanity at all times and in all places, without our realising it, and it the method of awakening to the constant service of that rain of grace, and the method of praising and giving thanks for its fertilising and cleansing beauty. It is all this and more, much more, and less, much less. It is both nothing and everything, and the source of everything and nothing. It is.....

Thomas Daffern

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.