Stagger Li

Here is a story of Exile and Return, one that goes to the depths of Hell, then ascends beyond the beyond. But I get ahead of myself. It starts with Stagger Li.

Certain Death

Like a fish that leaps from the ocean into the air and then returns to the ocean, we come out of something into the arc of here and then return to the something. Many of us call the return "death." That's it. The end. We hate and fear death. We try to abolish death. We try to make the fish stay in the air as long as possible. We make death an enemy.

On the contrary (which we are so often), we make the emergence from the something adorable and wonderful. We praise it. We call it birth. We make birth our friend.  We are for birth and against death. We are for emergence and against return.

We do not see that the process is not birth and death. It is birth-and-death. Using less emotionally laden words, it is emergence-and-return. More accurately, it is ocean-and-emergence-and-return-and-ocean. Nothing to get all shook about. 

Why do we get so upset? Attachment. Attachment to being in the air. Attachment to others being in the air. Forgetting that when we were first invited to leap from the ocean, we felt fear. We thought it was certain death.

The Slaying of Jabber

And as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwok, with eyes of flame,

Cam whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

-- Lewis Carroll

A major distraction and trap for humans is the Jabberwok, the burbling chatter/jabber of the rooftop brain. In our fascination with this burbling stream, we risk being eaten alive.

Standing in offish thought, the hero/ine of Carroll's story is going nowhere. No longer on the move, no longer open to the continuous transformations of life, she stands in the tulgey wood hypnotized by the movies of her mind. Like her colleague, Br'er Rabbit and his nemesis, Tar Baby, she is fast becoming stuck in something she mistakes for Reality. 

Like a fly on fly paper, like a duck stuck in a frozen pond, like a sinning pilgrim in wooden stocks, she is on cosmic display, helplessly hoist by her own petard.

Deep in the swamp of thought, she has lost her mindful way. Up to her ass in alligators, she dreams of other lands. Caught in internal illusion, she is fair game for whoever / whatever comes by. 

And something always comes by.

The Jabberwok is preparing to eat her alive.

Jabber means "chatter; rapid, incoherent, or trivial talk; gabble, babble." This poor human stands in the midst of the tulgey wood, gabbling and babbling away in high-speed incoherency. S/he is throwing away, trivializing her existence.

Certifiably insane, on the back wards of her self-created asylum, s/he is the ideal patient: tranquillized by zombie drugs biochemically manufactured through her own whiffling, cheerfully wearing a strait jacket woven of her own cortical strands.

S/he is the Living Dead.

"One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker - snack!"

Fortunately, s/he is not TOO far gone. S/he awakens, realizes s/he has (is) a powerfully effective weapon, and frees herself from the toothy jaws of Jabber.

The Jabberwok is slain as our hero/ine opens to Greater Awareness. This Buddh is for her. 

S/he is not entirely safe however. S/he keeps the Jabber's head. 

"He left it dead and with its head

He went galumphing back."

So we can see that s/he has not allowed full enlightenment. Galumphing along, s/he still needs some Budhi. (As the Blues Brothers sang: Every buddy needs some Budhi.) But that's okay. S/he's going back -- returning to the market place -- to show the Jabber head to others. S/he is a true buddy, an authentic buddysattva.

"He chortles in his joy," embodying the first stage or dimension of a buddysattva -- the Joyous. S/he is safely on the path. All those other stages and dimensions are bound to manifest.

S/he now lives with newfound skill.

S/he knows how to slay Jabber.

three steps

Stanley Hopper (1907-1991), teacher and friend of David Miller, who in turn is teacher and friend of Flagstaff’s very own Bradley Olson, spoke and wrote of the time we are now in as the time of the transformation of human consciousness. He described this transformation as a three step process.

The first is a step back. We step back from the dualistic thought process that has caused us so much harm with our regarding everything that is not “me” or “us” as “objects” over “there.” As objects out there, we can do anything we want to “them.” We have even killed “God” this way. This is exile. This is alienation.

The second is a step down. We step down from the throne of our ego and its self-justified arrogance and despair. We leave our encapsulated shell of protection we have created since childhood. We step down into the core of mystery at the center of our being. We stand vulnerable and open.

The third is a step through. We step through the open door at our core into new recognitions. We step into the mystery that we are. It is said, “The deep calls unto the deep.” We deepen. We hear the calling and we become the answering. 

a head on top of our head

Exile comes from clinging to a view of the world rather than opening to that-which-is-viewing.  In exile, we each cling to our view and take that view to be “reality.” Reality is much more subtle, deep, mysterious than this isolated imaginal petroglyph. We become both rock hard and stuporous in our self-enhanced view. When we find others who agree with us, we become even more attached, rigid in our envisioned melodrama. We are comforted. We may be in exile but we are in exile together. 

From what are we exiled? From the one who is viewing. We do not back up enough in this viewing process to even become aware that there is one viewing. This one has no name and, if named, becomes just another object in the view.

Our exile is produced and reinforced by our continuous internal and external chatter about who we are and who we are not, about this and about that -- an ongoing self-hypnotic state. We put a head on top of our head. We will defend this second head unto the death.

This second head we have developed and furnished since childhood with occasional tossing of furniture and redecoration is not a good or bad thing. It just is. It is part of being a human. The second head turns into a detriment, however, when we cling to it with great insistence. We are not moving on to our birth right, to an expansion of awareness, of consciousness allowing identification with, becoming, being that-which-views.

Exile is being stuck in our own head, our self-created head, this appendix of inflated presumption.  Home is when we open to the deep within, to our ever-flowing core, to the dynamic surging of being which we are. To open to the deep within and act from here.

the eternal return

Out of this moment everything rises ... and falls, appears ... and disappears. We weave reality out of this. Since we are often ignore-ant, we may not see what appears for a long long time. Since we are often clinging and attaching, we may not see that what is gone is gone.

With these favored habits of ignore-ance and attachment, we live in exile. We become stuporous clods in an ever-bubbling spring. Exile.

Out of this moment everything arises and falls. Within this moment all arises and falls. I am this arising and falling. I am this appearing and disappearing. I am this. Home.

I split myself in two. I experience longing and despair, hope, confusion, anger, reconciliation. I am this rising and falling, this seamless appearing and disappearing while living in splitness. I am at home while exiled, while exiling myself into splitness. Exiled at home.

With prayer, with centering and opening, with grace, I live as the eternal rising and falling. All is rising and falling. No remainder. Home.

Interflow

Let us say we are a circle. The circle represents our being. Allow the circle to be two hemispheres. The circle is now two 180 degree arcs, each arcing from horizon to horizon. 

One of the hemispheres represents our inner world, the other the outer. Our inner world is our soul, our spirit, our imagery, our feeling, our invisible self that we believe others cannot see. The outer world is the realm of objects, of nature, of things and people.

These two hemispheres, connected yet separate, represent the dichotomous split we generally entertain without a second thought. The inner is me; the outer is you. The inner is private; the outer is public. The inner is spirit; the outer is flesh. The inner is familiar and claimed more as my domain. The outer is somewhat alien, strange, seen as beyond my control.

Exile is when the two hemispheres are experienced as separate arcs, never to meet. 

See the arcs, the hemispheres, as different colors. Perhaps one is blue, the other red. (Allow them to be the colors that feel most natural to you.) Consider that the circle begins to revolve and is picking up momentum. The blue begins to flow into the red, the red into the blue. Each arc opens to the energies of the other. You reclaim your merge-unity.

Now allow the spinning circle to surrender and open to the Above, to move upward into merge with the Divine, with The-One-That-Births-Us. The spinning circle is now a spinning whirlwind, a vortex of horizontal (circle) energies merging with the spiraling energies of above and below. We are receiving the energies of the Divine while opening to all around us.

We are no longer divided into the inner and the outer. We are not divided at all. We are a continuous interflow. Our sense of self expands to encompass all. We are THIS. 

THIS is Home.

the journey home

In the story of The Hymn of the Soul, the voyager, the adventurer, is deliberately sent on the journey to find and recover the pearl, his own soul. Are we ourselves on such a journey? Whether any of us believe we are or not, the metaphor is striking. We are here to find and recover our own and the world’s soul. We become entranced by the soulless world, stare overlong at it, dress ourselves in its attire, take on as nourishment what it has to offer, and move into stuporous sleep.

We cannot forget our origin, however, and messages to awaken continue to call to us, to pester us in our state of zoned-out slumber. The story says that we wake up, throw off the clothes, stop eating the food of hypnosis, do not even glance at the dragon serpent that guards the pearl, that kept us from our soul ways. We recover our soul. We are strong. We are happy. We rejoice. Nothing gets in our way because our way is the way of soul.

The world soul is the way it is because our consciousness had been captured. When our consciousness changes, the world soul begins to change. As each of us awakens, the world transforms. We know what to do and we do it. We move in right relationship with all around us, with all that is. This is the journey home.

thus far

Thus far in our search for understanding the process of exile and return (believing that this process applies to us as individuals, as a society, and as a global community), we have looked at an exile story (The Hymn of the Pearl), symbols of human consciousness (Jacob’s Ladder, Caduceus, Cross, Star of David, Tao Sign), and stages of the alchemical process. 

All this merely serves as an introduction. Though a couple more exile stories can be told and a few more symbols can be added, with some benefit, we have yet to speak of the current nature of our exile and the path or unfolding of our return. Our state of consciousness as individuals and as community is seen as at the heart of this process.

As a prelude to that, I wish to look more carefully at the stories, the symbols, and the alchemical process. Valuable information is encoded there that will aid us in our struggles with our situation today and as a forecast of  our potential future. The next three sections will do so.

First up to bat will be Story.

Form and Forming

Railing against the way we are doing things is not sufficient. If we wish to DO differently, we must BE different. Consciousness change is essential. We no longer live in the world of Appearance and self thumb-sucking but as THAT WHICH IS APPEARING. Rather than identify as the Form, we open as the FORMING.

We are that which enthuses the body. We are the enthusiasm of LIFE. The enthusiasm of LIFE knows boundless JOY in its FORMING. Concentrating on the Form, on the Appearance, produces a dead scab that covers over, a sepulchre of rot.

We allow the Form to be ever-changing, a reflection of the deep and cool currents of the FORMING, of the healing, loving, joyous powers of the FORMING. All will be well. We throw in our lot with the FORMING. Then our Form becomes the Forming, becomes an effervescent everchanging Forming upon the surface of the waves of the Deep.

Not only do we “play ball on running water,” we are the running water playing ball.