Zara here with the first of a rather esoteric series of contemplations from Jed.
Today, you may have noticed, is a brand new day, unlike any that has ever happened before. Every several hundred days (365.24 to be exact), the world seems to notice that everyone gets a fresh start with the coming of the dawn. Everyone walks around wishing each other a "happy new year," and we all hope we won't screw this one up. Of course, that fresh start is not only available on January 1st. It's available every day, and throughout the day for that matter.
New year's resolutions, which could of course be made any day of the year, are a kind of crude acknowledgement that life does not just happen to you. You create it. Even if only for a few days, you remember something about your status as creator. These three Cube contemplations are designed to remind you that you create a lot more than just goals and intentions, and far more frequently than once every several hundred days!
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THE FIRST CUBE
(( CAUTIONARY NOTE: Don’t assume you know what’s going on here, that you know the next move or any purposes that might apply. In order for these contemplations to be effective you need your beginner’s mind. And, you need your beginner's mind every time you come back to the Cube. ))
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Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
So, if the Bible is the word of God, who is this "Our"? Is there more than one God? Well, let’s leave that aside for later contemplation. The key word here is 'image', which, with a little modification, becomes 'image-in-nation'. Assuming there is a God, or Gods, is this what they did, literally? They just sat around the campfire with a few brewskies and imagined you and I into being? But they needed some kind of canvas, so they imagined a universe for it to happen in. While there may be a little more to it than that, can you think of a better or more efficient way to do it? If you were a God, isn’t that how you would do it? Could this all be one big 'thought'? How could it be anything else?
Now, if we have been created in the image of God, we might (as what could be called an 'artifact'), retain certain qualities of our creator - like the one he (purportedly) used: imagination. If God made us like him/her, then it would make sense that we are a kind of Mini Me. I’m sure that God has a very large skill set from which to draw upon, but what if every creation skill boiled down to his or her use of imagination? After all, every invention and discovery of humans started with imagination. Obviously, God would need a little more focus than you and I generally exhibit. If everything humans imagined actually materialized, life would be even wilder than it already is.
So, assuming there is some truthishness in the forgoing, let’s play with your imagination.
First off, you have to realize that you can imagine anything at all.
Try it. Imagine a giant aspirin pill walking up and down the street and hitting people on the head. This would give folks a nasty headache and aspirin sales would jump. Did you get that? Silly, ridiculous, but real to your imaginary skill . . . of imagining. You see, you imagined that you can imagine and that started everything, a kind of germinating seed to a blossoming flower. Sorry - I couldn’t come up with a better metaphor. But I bet you can imagine one!
Remember now, beginner's mind, and follow directions as closely as possible:
1.) This contemplation can be done with eyes open or closed. Try both ways. If you find closing your eyes tends to make you zone out, then sit up erect with eyes wide open.
2.) You can do this anywhere, at any time, however, use a quiet place initially to acquire your basic skills.
3.) Imagine some small object, a cup, a spoon, a salt shaker, or the like. Focus and imagine its texture, the space it occupies, and its shape. Take a moment to acquire this data.
4.) With the imaginary object on a table in front of you, generate a second imaginary object, described as follows. It’s like a glass aquarium, slightly larger than the first object, with glass sides and bottom and top. Place this aquarium-like structure over the first imagined object. It should now completely enclose it on all sides - hence the ‘cube’. All six sides are clear just like a standard aquarium.
5.) Imagine moving around the cube and observing the small object inside it. Take a moment to do that.
6.) This particular aquarium is constructed out of a very unusual kind of glass. It’s called crypto-crystalline volcanic fused silicon (CCVFS). Once created by your imagination, it starts to change in transparency. It slowly but surely gets darker and darker until no light gets in or out. It looks very much like obsidian.
7.) Still using your God given skills, imagine walking around and viewing your cube from all angles. You can view the cube from any angle but you can no longer see what you put in it.
8.) Time to move to another level and ask yourself, 'Is there a knife, spoon, fork (or whatever object you chose) really inside that cube?' I want you to get into the mental space of not really knowing if it is in there or not. This is obviously a stretch, but put some effort into it. You don’t really know. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Spend some time contemplating that.
9.) Once done, use a real or imaginary sweep of your hand and say, 'Be gone,' thus letting it all return to its source.
There you go. You just consciously created a Cube, and whatever you put in it, but something much more profound happened as well. I'm betting you have yet to realize what you did. You created the requisite time and space for it to occur in.
Time is required for cognition. You only know, in the human sense, over a period of time. Otherwise, everything would happen all at once, and that would be pretty messy. Space was required, as you needed some place in which to objectify and cognize your Cube. Make sense?
So, how did you create time and space? You played God and probably never realized it.
Whoa, it can’t be that easy. Where is the best place to hide something? In plain view. Make it so obvious and simple that no one would get it. But was it real? I mean, was it really tangible? Let’s examine that.
In the past, have you created things like jealousy, anger, love, insecurity, fear and the like? How real were they? Did you experience them as actually existing at the time, perhaps REALLY existing and impacting you? Since that time, where have they gone?
Time and space just seemed to arise in order to add some conviction to your creation. But they were created as a matter of course and by you. In my experience, this is what people are doing all day long, creating experiences along with time and space in the process . . . and not realizing what they are doing. Yes indeed, the universe is expanding.
Was your Cube real? I don’t know. Only you know, and that depends on your degree of conviction. If you want to have someone else believe in your creations, that depends upon their degree of conviction. Conviction is transferable, but only if you have it yourself to some significant degree. If this sounds like hypnosis, it certainly is the mechanism that makes hypnosis possible.
How does anything 'exist'? A simple question but not such a simple answer. Do any of those aforementioned things exist? Do they exist as a unity if not extended in time and space? Do time and space only come into existence in a kind of coordinated effort to render them cognizable. Do things exist 'in and of' themselves’?
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ONLY TWO THINGS EXIST
I trust I have your attention. That was a little click-bait because there appear to be more than two things in this dream - that's pretty obvious. However, there are only two types of things in existence: perceived things, and real things. Let’s start with all you will ever know: perceived things.
These are things that you know by the data you have received from your senses, in combination with the data in your memory, your experience, your culture, and the like. You, and I, are living in a kind of second hand store, a thrift shop like affair. We have no idea about that original product, the real thing. It’s like a mirror. We'll come back to mirrors when it's time for the second cube.
For now, a little more about this two things thing. Look at something in front of you right now and contemplate that you have just taken in sensorial data and converted it into something that is meaningful in some way. We love to attach meaning to things, even if the meaning is that we don’t understand or like something, we are still meaning making machines.
Behind every perception is the real thing, that original something. If you were to find that original real thing, you would only turn it into a perceived thing because you would have perceived it. Please re-read that. It's significant. You can never know the real thing because to do so would mean you have perceived it, reducing it to a perceived thing. This mechanism is why one can never 'know' Truth, God, The All, The Void, whatever you wish you call it. To know it would mean you had brought it down to the level of a perceived thing and it would no longer be the source. The True Source can only be what it is, as it is, and it is unchanging. You can realize that it is, but that is very different than knowing it.
Life in the thrift shop isn't so bad when you understand what's going on. Humans think that for something to exist, it must be tangible in some way. However, it's not real; it's all happening in perception. We don’t know what is real . . . ever. But we can develop a profound understanding that there is indeed a real thing behind every appearance, including you and I. That real thing is not called 'The Mystery' by accident.
I will attempt a pithy summation - ahem (clears throat with an air of significance) . . . Nothing exists as a true thing that we can perceive. We are always watching in a mirror. Other than perceived things, we have no idea what really is. We have no idea what is, separate from the 'me' perceiving it as a perception. This is why I tell students that an experience is not the real thing. An experience is only a thing perceived.
There, I have said it as many ways as I can come up with, but it is not an easy point to grasp, because all of our human existence is a perceived thing. Thus its dreamlike nature.
I'm going to change the two previous expressions to something I consider more accurate, more truthish. The thing perceived is, forthwith, to be called the 'lie', and the true thing is to be called the 'truth'. So we have a perception, which is a lie by virtue of the fact that it has gone through all the processes required for it to be perceived, and there also exists a Truth, which is the genuine reality behind the lie. We, as humans, are always living in the lie, and yet, our true beingness always remains in the Truth. If we were to 'know' truth, if we were able to point it out, it would be a perception and thus not true. We are definitely the people of the lie, yet we maintain that we are honest and don't lie. How can that be when all we have ever perceived has not been real? How could we possibly come up with something that is true? We only know the lie. Certainly it’s not intentional, as most people do their best to tell the truth. This rabbit hole goes deep and few venture into it, but that’s where we must go.
(to be continued in The Second Cube . . .)
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