The Pearl(cut off from reimagining our journey through consciousness)The Pearl(cut off from reimagining our journey through consciousness)The Pearl(cut off from reimagining our journey through consciousness)The Pearl(cut off from reimagining our journey through consciousness)
Of what value to us is our ego? Our ego can be likened to the shell of an oyster, which is rarely recognized for its beauty. Like the oyster shell, our personality may be appealing to some, ugly to others, or just plain uninteresting. Yet we all have access to different, unknown, and potentially sublimely transformative layers of ourselves, even though the personality often fails to consciously engage with them.
In an oyster, natural pearls form when an irritant, usually a parasite, or perhaps the proverbial grain of sand, works its way into the shell. As a defense mechanism, a fluid is used to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating, called nacre, is deposited until a lustrous pearl is formed.
The pearl developed inside gives the oyster its unique value to human beings, who prize the oyster’s positive response to a major irritant in its life. But, the shell has to be opened, for all to witness the beautiful visual delight developed and hidden within.
The ego is formed and continuously affirmed in an environment where spiritual discernment has not yet sufficiently evolved. Our ego is our static assessment of a dynamic, changing world, and it is constantly engaged in a state of “catching up” with the truth. It can be likened to taking a picture of a movie in midstream and assuming that the picture represents the entirety of the movie. Wisdom is gained through our experiences in the journey through space and time and the reinterpretations of and the release from all of the illusory static images stuck in our memory. Wisdom is the perception that our memory may be clogged with a lifetime of the accumulation of static images, all out of context with our present-day intentions to evolve and heal. Life in the now is eternally dynamic and changing, while the fragile ego clings to its static fantasies and hopes spawned from its past.
If we resist conscious, rational change, our ego will hold onto worn-out understandings of life and become out of touch with the ever-unfolding new reality. Yesterday’s truth is today’s superstition, and yesterday’s inaccurate assessment of others is today’s isolation and pain. So it is imperative to keep an open mind to change. Otherwise, the ego will be left behind and suffer according to the cognitive dissonance it allows itself to experience.
At all the intersections of the points of conflict between our inner world and our outer world, there are choices to be made. When a conflict arises, do we resist any new message or lesson being offered by another, especially when their understanding does not conform to our own? What about that daughter-in-law who hangs up on you or the husband who talks more than he should and is unwilling to change? What about that person who promotes a way of viewing life that does not conform to our own? These are irritants, and if we use the irritant to justify an inaccurate judgment against or physical separation from the offending party, we may have pushed away a layer of nacre for our internal pearl of wisdom. Our judgments are only verbal measurements of an ever-changing environment. Any judgment should be a temporary rest stop that is left behind when we move in resonance with the new reality continuously unfolding before our eyes. This is the way of forgiveness.
Change is irritating and often threatening to the ego. Our egos exist to help bring context and balance between what we are witnessing now with what we have experienced in the past. It helps us assess what actions in life we must undertake to meet our social and societal obligations. It is our mind’s conscious attempt at bringing a balance between the world of form that we share with all of life and the almost secret world inside of the personal mind. We might believe that we are keeping secrets from each other, but the truth is that we all share the vast majority of thoughts and inclinations with our fellow humans. And we are only in denial of that fact when we don’t believe it and fail to act with compassion toward ourselves and others.
If the oyster was a closed system and did not allow for an internal response to irritants, whatever parasites or grains of sand that entered into the oyster might cause its very destruction. Because the irritant has been addressed and stabilized through the deposit of the layers of nacre, the oyster continues to thrive. Though it is now growing an internal body consisting of the layers of the nacre, which are forming into a most lustrous pearl.
So too do we, as humans, have the capacity to make pearls. But we must approach all irritants with love and compassion, or we will produce no spiritual nacre, only more pain and suffering. All of the forgiveness that we offer to ourselves and all offending parties in our world also creates lustrous layers of nacre. Do not judge another by their shell, but instead, wait until they can open themselves up and reveal the pearl of the greatest price.
We all experience the effects of thoughtless, capricious human activity. Bring on those irritants, as they are the gatekeepers to new layers of consciousness! Remember, most people ask for forgiveness, rather than permission before they engage in their controversial behavior. Our wisdom, created through spiritually discerning the irritants in life, is our shiny pearl.
The point is to learn meaningful lessons from the pain and not assume that it arose out of nowhere. Unaddressed pain tends to take over small centers within the mind. Over some time, the traumatized mind loses its ability to be an avenue of present-moment awareness, and it becomes fixated upon a past that cannot be healed. The institutionalized pain embedded within our memory becomes virtual scabs over our unexamined wounds. Are we just forming scabs that only partially cover our wounds? Or are we facing our brokenness, in spirit and in relationships, that contributes to the formation of a healing spiritual nacre within our own minds and hearts?
But truly, what is the pearl of the greatest price? It is your pearl, strung on the same string as the rest of humanity. Our stories imbued with collective wisdom create the necklace of ultimate value. We must each build our own unique consciousness of truth and love, and then our stories become part of the ever-unfolding wisdom of mankind.
Enlightenment
“The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can’t grasp them. There is a pattern in creation. If we look outside at this tree, it has roots which search beneath the pavement for water, or a flower which sends its sweet smell to the pollinating bees, or even our own selves and the inner forces which drive us to act, we can see that we all dance to a mysterious tune, and the piper who plays this melody from an inscrutable distance—whatever name we give it—Creative Force, or God—escapes all book knowledge.” —Albert Einstein
With our eyes, we only see one percent of the entire spectrum of light. Yet, there are other forms of light that we may witness, if we can develop the sensitivity to its presence. There are even those, known as “seers” who see way beyond the standard views afforded to us by our eyes and our training. Those that see deeply, and well beyond the veils of illusion that most of humanity lives behind, are considered to be either insane, or spiritual lights, or perhaps a blend of the two. Those who can see into the heart of Truth are a rare breed indeed, and our culture rarely honors and acknowledges such lights until well after their deaths.
Who does not want to be the light of the world? Do we even know what that question truly implies? The world of art has attempted to capture what an individual living in the light might look like. Over many centuries, we have seen artists’ renditions of saints and sages, with paintings often showing the blessed person as having a golden light about them, usually concentrating around the head. Is this divine light a real phenomenon, or only an artistic interpretation of that which may not be completely captured by art, science, religion, and philosophy?
The physiological truth about humanity is that humans do have the capacity to emit light through bioluminescence, yet that light is not readily witnessed by normal human eyesight. Humans do not innately embody luciferin, which would give us the capacity to glow like fireflies. Yet what about that inner glow, the glow that erupts within one’s heart and soul when finally touched by transcendent spiritual power?
I believe that we can experience the power and a life greater than any limited, personal sense of self because I experienced it for myself. I no longer look to the darkness for the light. I found my light, a light that dispels the darkness of others, their religions and economic philosophies, and the darkness of my historical self.
Leonard Cohen said that his teacher once told him that the older we get, the lonelier we will become. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories. We take on the role of “hero” in our journey toward healing, yet we still remember all too well being kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. Being the hero of our story is a temporary vehicle for us to borrow until we no longer need those stories from our dysfunctional pasts to give meaning in the present. When we let go of our “rental vehicle” we can find our rightful place in the universe, and experience a love more satisfying than anything we have ever known before.
It is important to remember, many of us have to take the posture of being the hero, at least for a healing time period, to give us the extra motivation to follow new paths of consciousness on our way out of the distress of our younger years. The real deepest meaning of the word hero is “to serve,” so the humility that is gained through being roughed up a bit on the way to enlightenment helps us to better serve the community of which we claim membership. If we have found wisdom, we have allowed ourselves to be shattered, and return to our homes, humbled, but with a newfound sense that we no longer need to identify with the parts of us that need to win, need to be recognized, and need to know. This is where our transcendence truly takes root and grows into a unity with the tree of life, where we can live by the sunlight of truth.
To find the light of truth, there must be a release from the controls of the crowd, whether it is the crowd of old thoughts or the crowd that blindly follows others. I am saddened that mankind is becoming increasingly dependent on its technology for communication, while not concurrently developing the sensitivity to connect with the energy that we all share in and with which we communicate with each other continuously. Our technology, especially the hand-held media devices that we use to entertain and hypnotize ourselves with, only serves to continue the energy of the past, without offering alternatives to the present collection of corrupted choices that humanity has seemed eternally resigned to make.
Scientists, though able to define relationships and the laws that dictate behavior between all observable and quantum phenomena, are only now beginning to understand the ramifications of the real law of our existence, which is all that we will ever see, unto eternity, is ourselves. Science provides laws for what we see, yet unlike enlightened spirituality, provides no laws predicting or supporting what is possible for humanity. Quantum mechanics will not be understood fully until the self-centered perspective toward infinity is replaced with the understanding that the collective, as well as the individual, is present in each of us in each moment of existence and definitely impacts both the seer and the seen.
The impacts that we all have on each other are not yet fully understood. Yet prayer, meditation, and mindfulness prepare the mind for the unknown source of all true creation. It is a much more collaborative effort being a human—or any other form of life on this planet—than our minimally conscious minds understand at this time. There are mysterious threads of energy that connect all of life together into one unified whole, yet we continue to create understandings that often fragment our worldview and the objects of our perceptions within it. Ultimately, science, religion, medicine, and technology will all be united as manifestations of mankind’s expression of true being.
The ego is created from our desperate call for love, from a world that has not yet learned how to love. The most significant question remains: why care, or why bother? The sacredness and the sanctity of our universe depend on our recognition of who we are, and how we express our understanding of that connection. Therein lies the absolute necessity that members of the human race seek true enlightenment.
If we can’t drill down to the foundation of our world’s and our individual problems and find and replace the foundation, there is little long-term hope for any of us.
If the desire for liberation from the damaging and fatal illusions of our deteriorating society is great, we are ready for our transformation. By letting go of the societal controls that keep us imprisoned in an outdated image of ourselves and the unrealistic and unhealthy expectations of others, we become ready to travel onto new paths of consciousness and to a new era of transcendence in our lives.
I grieve with the rest of humanity for the early deaths of all damaged souls and the loss of human potential to the rest of humanity. Please, America, listen to, and retell their stories, so that we can all heal, grow, and love together in a new, transformative environment that can celebrate wholeness and our individual contributions to it from both the male and female perspectives. May all sentient beings be released from suffering. May all spiritually and emotionally damaged men be released from the cultural conspiracy of silence, which contributes to personal and collective suffering.
With all of the antipathy being expressed towards those in our culture who are waking up, or “woke,” it is important to understand what the conservative tribes are judging against. The conservative mischief makers fear meaningful change and rush to create an “us vs. them” diatribe to distract from the need for our culture, and ourselves, to make necessary corrections in course and evolve in love and truth. Woke people aren’t monsters, nor should we be feared, but there are always political points to be made in this divisive culture. We typically don’t stock up on AR-15s, or form militias to protect our rights and our needs. We do not allow unconscious fear to dominate our lives and instead look directly into the face of any fearful situation to see where our experience, intelligence, intuition, compassion, and love can assist in making decisions that benefit the whole, rather than just special interests.
Typically, a person moving on the path toward enlightenment exhibits the following traits:
We read books and have no desire to burn any of them, no matter how controversial they may be.
We embrace science and scientific methods for understanding the world and reality itself.
We are willing to change our minds when confronted with new information that disproves previous understandings.
We understand that most issues are not black and white, but exist on a spectrum.
We believe in the equality of all people, all races, all ethnicities, all gender identifications.
We like to share our prosperity with those considered less advantaged.
We cooperate and collaborate with each other with a minimum of tribalistic or us-versus-them attitudes.
We respect the rights of everybody, including ourselves.
We believe that our culture, religion, and arts are manifestations of our creative nature, and we have the right to re-create each according to the dictates of our evolutionary progress in understanding.
We care for Mother Earth and all of its life as if our lives depended upon it, because it does.
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