Through spiritual practice, psychoactive substances, and other methods inducing expanded awareness, one can move closer to the fount of experience. То ‘the still point of the turning world’.
This still point has been called the eternal flame or Holy Spirit at the centre of Creation. The point of origin of the cosmic mandala. Here, experience burns unmediated in a perpetual process of being born.
This still point is:
‘… the sphere where the paint is made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes shine the splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that fills the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of the void.’
Carl Jung
Beyond all definition – here lies the soul that animates the world.
Above time, this soul is always newborn, yet it is the most ancient thing in Creation. It is the alpha and omega that bracket the world.
This eternal I-am-ness is the light beneath the veil of Maya, the illusory tapestry of the world. It is also the light in Plato’s cave – whose shadows on the screen of our own consciousness hold us spellbound to sleepwalking existence.
And what seekers past, future and current always find is the deeper you enter into that light, the more it feels like coming back home.
Discovery becomes remembering – amazement turns into recognition.
All who‘ve seen the light and guide others to it – whether in books, sermons, art, or good works – they give the same directions to that inner sanctum of Being:
Right here, right now.
“If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you.
If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you.
Rather, the kingdom is inside you and outside you.”
“When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you yourselves are that poverty.”
The Gospel Of Thomas
The Great Self
The journey of discovering that wholly other, that no-thing in the midst of things, sooner or later becomes a journey of self-discovery.
Layer after layer, the ignorance of your identity falls away. The fleeting shadow of your small self dissolves into the light of the Great Self.
‘I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself.’
Meister Eckhart
When the poets, our finest wordsmiths, speak of the still point, they find themselves awkwardly caught up in the crudeness of language.
Awe-struck by the great mystery, they leave behind words of negation though they strive to praise the absolute Affirmative.
Divine inspiration not only makes poets out of fools, but fools out of poets too.
Such is the nature of the One ‘before whom words recoil’. There is no net of language you can cast over It. No frame or theory can accommodate It. No concept can chain It. No eye can behold It.
Too fine to grasp, too large to hold.
‘Swords cut him not, nor may fire burn him, […] waters wet him not, nor dry winds parch.
‘[…] He is called unmanifest, unimaginable, unchanging…’
The Bhagavad Gita
‘… beyond sound and form, without touch and taste and perfume.
‘[…] eternal, unchangeable, without beginning or end: indeed above reasoning.’
Katha Upanishad
‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
T.S. Eliot
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is…’
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