Star Wheel

Frithjof Schuon writes in Logic & Transcendence.“A drop of the ocean cannot rise up against water; if our sense of justice is not delusion, it comes from God. Our intelligence cannot be other than intelligence itself.”

The shaman is the guardian who keeps an inviolable sanctuary for those who want to connect a deeper truth to their being. The consciousness is always connected to being. As they rise together, a higher, limitless truth is revealed that the Vedantic sages have called “Ananda”. The heart is the ocean of Ananda; its surface reflects the superficial mask of self-perception, but at a deeper level, the heart relinquishes that convenience to reveal the individuating clarity that has been brought about by the waves of Self expression. This expressive wave is always drawn from the larger ocean of intention that moves beneath it. Therefore, the personal surface of expression has the facility through ritual, to interpret a deeper, universal intention. The spirit of limitless purpose keeps that stream of expression moving through the depths of intention. As such, purpose is both individually and ritualistically inspired.

The felt sense that gives equal weight to expressions and intentions, is the heart of soul. The soul’s heart is a symbolist that interprets felt events into symbol, and has a limitless constellation of symbolic images to draw from. This constellation is a “Mundus Imaginalis” that reads the world as an ikon that plays a part in a larger mythos. By entering the pool that is an inviolable sanctuary, the shaman gains counsel from the two vertical Worlds of Upper and Lower, and bring those to the horizontal World of corporeal day and night. The inviolable sanctuary has a ground cut from the vertical ravine that encases layers of ancestral strata. At the center of that sanctuary is a refracting pool of light that connects the upper and lower kingdoms into a dynamic percolation where spirit dissolves and coagulates ancestral memory into universal oceans of potential.

The great wheel of the horizontal Self turns slowly on its axis that is held by greatest potential. With greater purpose than good reason, the wheel drags the individual through physical hurdles, sensory regressions, insurmountable mentalities, and curves of intelligence. Through these shifting sands, the Underworld rises to become the new platform of perception, where the amnesia of the soul can melt to let more of the memory to comes back into Self. As if for the first time, a heightened horizon stretches a new layer of personal sinew into space. Old wisdom held as ignorance becomes new knowledge with each turn of the wheel.

With the child’s first breath, the immensity of the decision to join into life, all those unchosen obligations of being part of a larger family of nation and ecosystem, becomes apparent as an inheritance that the individual has unwittingly enmeshed themselves. Nevertheless, at some level, this inheritance is what is chosen, and has a singular hold on that individual’s life, from which their liberating spirit has an inseverable bind. Knowledge does not arrive to the being as an orphan, knowledge is held by the ancestors with a mission to call the individual into the potentiality of who they could be.

Accountability is a space and time in the Sacred West to assess what is relevant to our divinity, what constrains it, and the oneness that enables it.  The account of what has constrained and enabled holds the tender root of the soul, from which a sensitive tendril can grow into the greatest light. Every point along the stream of consciousness between soul’s root and its lateral tendril is a provisional camp to pitch a personal identity. Energy will not move freely except in the presence of love. Out of that slow percolation between intending root and expressive tendril, curiosity finds the nutrients to build identity. Every persona is tethered to its past and has an account to settle with its future. In the meantime, it searches far and wide for an expression it can claim as its own. Originality is not in the uniqueness of personal gesture, but is that tight connection of travel from the rooted intention to the tip of expression. That shift in attention from beneath, and its powerful gesture at the surface is originality.

This awareness of a vertical unity of the Self, gives a larger dimension to the challenge of becoming an evolving, autonomous individual. The barely seen predispositions of the Self impressed upon Greek philosophers the need to credit this subtle guide with the name “divine double”. Receiving guidance offered by the divine double depends on standing within neutral ground on which to detach one’s sovereign Self from the magnetism of another’s convictions and beliefs. To bring full disclosure to a deeper perception requires meeting one’s “daimonion” at the middle stream that runs deep. In the case of Socrates, this daimonion was an instructor who always counseled restraint. Assessing the next move, his spirit guardian would sometimes simply warn him by a terse “no”. In contrast, guidance that came to Francis of Assisi was to extend dignity and acknowledgement to say “yes” to the wild. That guidance assured Francis that all of nature lies within the care of God – to dignify nature was to honour God. The guardian or guiding spirit, in whatever form it assumes, opens the passage of greater awareness from creating a neutral center to discern polarity from affinity.

The downward press that compacts physical, sensual, mental, and intellectual bodies shows as pain. That steady, almost oceanic weight on the soul is neither punishment nor error, but a signal to pay attention to the shift in one’s method of unity. Pain accompanies the intent being out-of-step with expression, and is disunited in contravention to the purposes of constitutional honesty. The barriers that constrain the integration of expression and intent is shame and grief; something of purpose is lost, and nothing lasting can be gained from that loss. There is no shortcut through such pain; it must be held, and held conscientiously; the way one holds a mast-line in rough weather, knowing that to release it would be catastrophic. Although there is no end of shame and grief that pulls at the end of that line, to hold it is to sense the soul’s resonance that is anchored in the underworld. Energy grows from contraction, and follows higher orders of love, but the depths as well as the heights of that love are distilled through feeling, and unites the singular existence of being that ties intention to its expression. Limitless Self needs its anchor; the full scope of pure energy depends on that low-high oscillation.

The shaman would be nothing without a lineage with the ancestors. Their rituals activates as a percolator that heats and rises wisdom from the crystalline recesses of the past. The cloud of intention is given life and distillation into something that can be drunk in by the soul. The vine of ancestral knowledge is not a sentimental taste of past days, but rather a structural trellis for new growth to use as support. Through that ancestral trellis, spirit moves and conveys the teachings of the archetypes. Nature’s rules are encapsulated within those gestural displays of deities. A God or a human’s life has an inception that moves from still permanence into wild fluctuation, and then concedes its space to fix back to its original permanence. Lessons learnt are the wild events distilled back into the ancestral strata. The strong sinew grows within the soul due to adaptation of its lateral branches in the world of night and day. The vertical intention is adopted by a higher expression that touches even deeper into intention. The underworld strips away the trappings of being recognized in reputation. Presented naked to the bare light of truth, the soul is weighed against the lightness of its full potential.

Every journey has horizontal and vertical interpretation. Inspiration comes from the ancestral remains of previous experience and knowledge that gets handed up to the archetypal layers. From there, inspiration becomes reinterpreted. This is not a dictation taken down as a fully formed interpretation from divine sources. Inspiration gives leeway to the emotional space needed to reinterpret physical memory into a personal life-path. The physical-emotional coupling of inspiration finds unity in what the Vedantic sage would describe as a ternary of “Sat, Chit, and Ananda”. The Sat of Being, the Chit of Consciousness, and the Ananda of their limitless unity that dissolves the edge of attention and coagulates it in a completely different order of reality. One “wakes up” into a new world where all supposed predisposition is forgotten. To think as another with another’s predisposition, is to give subjectivity to that other half of the objectified Self, and allows that divine double to play out its unfamiliar patterns, hence the place of Ananda is an enabled, limitless aspect of Self.

To find an unfamiliar version of Self is to invite a divine double into the frame that can offer a neutral territory in which to transition. Some see this neutralizing Self as a serene space of settled truth. To follow the flow of energy allows for the entrance of love and appreciation. The steady downpour of pain in a section of the body signals an opposite force to take up a position. To mask this condition is to stay ignorant of life needing attention. Pain indicates that something is already changing downstream, and that change requires the intellect to integrate that shift into a new reality. Pain is a polarity caused by a collapse in the various bodies. That compression can be held and unpacked conscientiously. The initial point of attention is an inception that leads all the way downstream to an image of Self reflection. The movement requires love and a warmth from the source upstream. To hold the source of the soul is to appreciate the ocean of intent has shifted and needs the affinity of vibrant expression. To become anchored again to the body reveals the source of intending will, which is the seed subsequent outcomes. After all, energy follows love, and the energies of love are messengers from vertical dimensions that need to percolate onto the horizontal plain of personal expression.