(Originally written 12/9/2011; edited and completed 6/27/2012; Links Fixed on 12/14/2012)
I know it’s been a while since I was inspired to write a Life-related post (or any post in general), but today I found a muse… here goes.
This morning, I meditated upon waking. In my inner silence I resided in a calm formless darkness as small thoughts bubbled up to my consciousness. I was rather good today at maintaining focus and non-thought, and nothing was able to distract me from my goal. After about 25-30 minutes, I began my intentions. I sent out my wishes to the Universe, and felt them resonate deeply within me. I felt the desire within, through my emotions, and I visualized them in my mind’s eye. At this time, my visualizations were somewhat unclear. I tried to visualize an ideal living space out of mostly nothing, but thoughts and memories of other places I’ve been filled my mind’s eye. I focused on the aspects and qualities of those places that I most loved, and made those my intention. After doing the intention, I calmed my mind again for a minute or so, then opened my eyes and started my day.
On the drive to work, it was very foggy. At first it seemed cloudy and gray… I could not see the sun very well through the clouds close to my current residence. Once I got on the highway, the sun became apparent through the fog. At one point it was so brilliant that it lit up the fog, piercing through and filling it with light, yet still hidden as a blurred glow. The corona around it was blooming with light; I’m sure the cars going the other way on the highway could probably see colorful spectra and rainbow-like colors in the air surrounding it. I turned onto the on-ramp, back to the sun, and started on my path towards work. The road ahead was still foggy and reminded me of a dream-like state. Beautiful music poured out of my car speakers as I drove through my dreamland, perfectly awake and aware. I was aware of the road ahead, I was used to making this journey and knew the way. As I got closer, the fog began to fade… the path ahead crystallized and came into form. I passed a car that had been in an accident, a signpost on the way to remind me to be careful. I made it to work on time.
As I was making the drive, I realized that it very well fit the metaphors and concepts that have been coming into my realization and life lately. When doing intention or creating new things in our lives, it is difficult to simply conjure them out of thin air. As we guide our vessel through life, the path ahead is sometimes foggy and unclear, filled with the unknown, dangers along the way, and our fears. To move past them, we must focus on where we want to go or what we want to create. We must look at our past, focus on the aspects or things that we most loved, the good, and sometimes the aspects of the bad things that we can transform into good by learning from these experiences. We must create the new things in our lives out of these ideas. This iterative and perpetual process of crystallization of ideas is what I liken to an ‘alchemical’ process of the mind. We are each a single expression of the Great Mind of the Universe, and so for us we cannot see the whole picture all of the time. We combine the elements, concepts, ideas, qualities, and processes that work best for us to create the most wonderful forms and effects in the real world that we can. This is very vague and general, but it applies to any field (ie: intention, chemistry, art, programming, engineering, teaching, etc…)
There is an astounding amount of places in the universe where we can see these progressive evolving patterns. The Universe is a massive fractal of beautiful patterns! One of these is the Fibonacci sequence, and can be seen in many places in nature. A common example in nature is found in the sneezewort plant. This plant grows its branches in a Fibonacci pattern. For example: first 1 branch, then 2, then 1+2=3, then 2+3=5, 5+3=8, 8+5=13, etc…) Reflecting on this we may ask the question: “How does the plant know how to grow in this way?” It appears that this is just essentially the plant’s nature, which is stored in it’s DNA. It can also be said that it is the plant’s pattern of being. However, since it follows this additive pattern we could deduce that it looks at it’s past developed branches, and adds them to determine how to grow in it’s future.
Drunvalo Melchizedek puts it this way:
“When the plant adds it’s past, 3, to it’s present, 5, it knows where the future is, and it knows exactly that the number is 8. And this is the situation that humanity is in right now. It’s like, we are, the modern world is like, 5 right now, and it doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s completely disconnected from it’s past. And when it reconnects with it’s past, which is what’s about to happen on Earth, when it does reconnect with it’s past, it then remembers the ancient world. And when it adds the ancient world to the modern world, it knows exactly where it’s supposed to go. We have to know where our consciousness is going to expand to. And we can’t know that without the ancient world. It’s essential, It’s not an option, we have to. And the ancient world is completely prepared, they’re ready, they know they need us. And, um, but we just don’t know we need them.”
This statement is key to the analogy: “When the plant adds it’s past, 3, to it’s present, 5, it knows where the future is, and it knows exactly that the number is 8” It looks at it’s past and combines them together to determine the future! This is an example of the alchemical (sexuality) aspect of the creation process of the Universe. We can see another example of this creation process in the trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching. The Yin and Yang aspects combine to form many combinations. We combine these combinations to produce 64 hexagrams. If you are not familiar with the I Ching, but are familiar with binary code, you can see essentially the same process as we add more bits to represent larger and larger numbers. For any given number of bits, we combine the Yin (0) and Yang (1) ad-infinitum to produce all combinations of zero and one that fit in this space. Eventually, we keep adding more bits until we can represent all the numbers stretching out towards infinity. Even the concepts of Dark (Yin) and Light (Yang) complement each other to produce all the colors we can see on our displays ( in hex #000000 = black and #FFFFFF = white ). All of manifest reality is dual in nature, and with a trained eye, One can spot the Yin and Yang at play in anything.
The cycle of Yin and Yang can be seen in Earth’s Day & Night cycle. Yin Yang is the fundamental principle, and the most important theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine, underlying all physiology, pathology & treatment. Source: Sacred Lotus Arts: Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Each pair of opposites complements the other. Light and Dark, Left and Right, Front and Back, Acid and Base, Hot and Cold, East and West, Summer and Winter, Past and Future, Order and Chaos; One cannot truly understand one part without the other for contrast. Without contrast, things would deteriorate into sameness. Without balance, things would deteriorate into extremes and self-annihilate. The key is balance.
“On one level, when there is an antagonistic relationship between opposites this leads to destruction. However, from the larger perspective, the balance of Nature is always maintained.”
This can be seen in many ways, but the one humanity (especially the West) struggles with most is the ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ duality principle. One way to begin understanding and reconciling this is that each contains a part (potential) of the other, either manifest or unmanifest. If you look at either one side of the paradox, it does not make sense because it is a half-truth. To solve the riddle, we must pull each complementary pair together in the middle. For good vs. evil, the answer is Unconditional Love. For Unconditional Love to exist philosophically or religiously speaking, one must learn to love one’s enemy as Jesus taught. For to put any condition upon love through the polaric lens of separation does not make it Unconditional by simple definition. This divine dance has played out throughout history, with archetypes tracing back all the way to ancient Greece and beyond. The interplay can be seen in the movie the Dark Knight. If You truly think about it… Batman would not be such a great and amazing hero if there weren’t an equally opposing evil force like ‘the Joker’, now would he? However, One must notice that he is not allcompletely and totally good (Yin) himself. (Remember also: Each contains an aspect of the other, and each of these aspects can be further separated into Yin and Yang principles as well towards infinity.)
“One must transcend from the duality of ‘for’ and ‘against’ into one organic unity which is without distinctions.” – Bruce Lee
Jun 28 2012
On the Nature of Duality and the Universal Alchemical Process
(Originally written 12/9/2011; edited and completed 6/27/2012; Links Fixed on 12/14/2012)
I know it’s been a while since I was inspired to write a Life-related post (or any post in general), but today I found a muse… here goes.
This morning, I meditated upon waking. In my inner silence I resided in a calm formless darkness as small thoughts bubbled up to my consciousness. I was rather good today at maintaining focus and non-thought, and nothing was able to distract me from my goal. After about 25-30 minutes, I began my intentions. I sent out my wishes to the Universe, and felt them resonate deeply within me. I felt the desire within, through my emotions, and I visualized them in my mind’s eye. At this time, my visualizations were somewhat unclear. I tried to visualize an ideal living space out of mostly nothing, but thoughts and memories of other places I’ve been filled my mind’s eye. I focused on the aspects and qualities of those places that I most loved, and made those my intention. After doing the intention, I calmed my mind again for a minute or so, then opened my eyes and started my day.
On the drive to work, it was very foggy. At first it seemed cloudy and gray… I could not see the sun very well through the clouds close to my current residence. Once I got on the highway, the sun became apparent through the fog. At one point it was so brilliant that it lit up the fog, piercing through and filling it with light, yet still hidden as a blurred glow. The corona around it was blooming with light; I’m sure the cars going the other way on the highway could probably see colorful spectra and rainbow-like colors in the air surrounding it. I turned onto the on-ramp, back to the sun, and started on my path towards work. The road ahead was still foggy and reminded me of a dream-like state. Beautiful music poured out of my car speakers as I drove through my dreamland, perfectly awake and aware. I was aware of the road ahead, I was used to making this journey and knew the way. As I got closer, the fog began to fade… the path ahead crystallized and came into form. I passed a car that had been in an accident, a signpost on the way to remind me to be careful. I made it to work on time.
As I was making the drive, I realized that it very well fit the metaphors and concepts that have been coming into my realization and life lately. When doing intention or creating new things in our lives, it is difficult to simply conjure them out of thin air. As we guide our vessel through life, the path ahead is sometimes foggy and unclear, filled with the unknown, dangers along the way, and our fears. To move past them, we must focus on where we want to go or what we want to create. We must look at our past, focus on the aspects or things that we most loved, the good, and sometimes the aspects of the bad things that we can transform into good by learning from these experiences. We must create the new things in our lives out of these ideas. This iterative and perpetual process of crystallization of ideas is what I liken to an ‘alchemical’ process of the mind. We are each a single expression of the Great Mind of the Universe, and so for us we cannot see the whole picture all of the time. We combine the elements, concepts, ideas, qualities, and processes that work best for us to create the most wonderful forms and effects in the real world that we can. This is very vague and general, but it applies to any field (ie: intention, chemistry, art, programming, engineering, teaching, etc…)
There is an astounding amount of places in the universe where we can see these progressive evolving patterns. The Universe is a massive fractal of beautiful patterns! One of these is the Fibonacci sequence, and can be seen in many places in nature. A common example in nature is found in the sneezewort plant. This plant grows its branches in a Fibonacci pattern. For example: first 1 branch, then 2, then 1+2=3, then 2+3=5, 5+3=8, 8+5=13, etc…) Reflecting on this we may ask the question: “How does the plant know how to grow in this way?” It appears that this is just essentially the plant’s nature, which is stored in it’s DNA. It can also be said that it is the plant’s pattern of being. However, since it follows this additive pattern we could deduce that it looks at it’s past developed branches, and adds them to determine how to grow in it’s future.
Drunvalo Melchizedek puts it this way:
This statement is key to the analogy: “When the plant adds it’s past, 3, to it’s present, 5, it knows where the future is, and it knows exactly that the number is 8” It looks at it’s past and combines them together to determine the future! This is an example of the alchemical (sexuality) aspect of the creation process of the Universe. We can see another example of this creation process in the trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching. The Yin and Yang aspects combine to form many combinations. We combine these combinations to produce 64 hexagrams. If you are not familiar with the I Ching, but are familiar with binary code, you can see essentially the same process as we add more bits to represent larger and larger numbers. For any given number of bits, we combine the Yin (0) and Yang (1) ad-infinitum to produce all combinations of zero and one that fit in this space. Eventually, we keep adding more bits until we can represent all the numbers stretching out towards infinity. Even the concepts of Dark (Yin) and Light (Yang) complement each other to produce all the colors we can see on our displays ( in hex #000000 = black and #FFFFFF = white ). All of manifest reality is dual in nature, and with a trained eye, One can spot the Yin and Yang at play in anything.
Yin Yang is the fundamental principle, and the most important theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine, underlying all physiology, pathology & treatment.
Source: Sacred Lotus Arts: Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Each pair of opposites complements the other. Light and Dark, Left and Right, Front and Back, Acid and Base, Hot and Cold, East and West, Summer and Winter, Past and Future, Order and Chaos; One cannot truly understand one part without the other for contrast. Without contrast, things would deteriorate into sameness. Without balance, things would deteriorate into extremes and self-annihilate. The key is balance.
“On one level, when there is an antagonistic relationship between opposites this leads to destruction. However, from the larger perspective, the balance of Nature is always maintained.”
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20121210231452/http://asiarecipe.com:80/cuisine-evolution/yin-yang.html
This can be seen in many ways, but the one humanity (especially the West) struggles with most is the ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ duality principle. One way to begin understanding and reconciling this is that each contains a part (potential) of the other, either manifest or unmanifest. If you look at either one side of the paradox, it does not make sense because it is a half-truth. To solve the riddle, we must pull each complementary pair together in the middle. For good vs. evil, the answer is Unconditional Love. For Unconditional Love to exist philosophically or religiously speaking, one must learn to love one’s enemy as Jesus taught. For to put any condition upon love through the polaric lens of separation does not make it Unconditional by simple definition. This divine dance has played out throughout history, with archetypes tracing back all the way to ancient Greece and beyond. The interplay can be seen in the movie the Dark Knight. If You truly think about it… Batman would not be such a great and amazing hero if there weren’t an equally opposing evil force like ‘the Joker’, now would he? However, One must notice that he is not allcompletely and totally good (Yin) himself. (Remember also: Each contains an aspect of the other, and each of these aspects can be further separated into Yin and Yang principles as well towards infinity.)
“One must transcend from the duality of ‘for’ and ‘against’ into one organic unity which is without distinctions.” – Bruce Lee
By DJPhasik • Life