March 23, 2024
If I said that I understand this morning’s vision, I’d be wrong. I’m left pondering what really happened. It was powerful and clear but the meaning escapes me…unless we go with the simplest, most straightforward explanation. I guess that applying Occam’s Razor to all of my experiences would yield the result that they’re just fantasies. However, the number and variety and unpredictability of them sort of undermines that.
The simplest explanation to today’s experience, which occurred within what I would consider to be Judeo-Christian realms, is that good v. evil is a thing. If you’ve read many of these entries, you know I’m not a fan of black and white thinking and frown upon simple good versus evil thinking. In my opinion, people are far too obsessed with these generalities. Good and evil are concepts and we’ve piled so much on top of them that any meaning that may have been contained in the words has been lost or at least severely abstracted.
Yet I can’t deny that my personal experience involves embracing the toxic, harmful and malicious parts of my soul as well as the bright, shining and lovely parts. The soul has no meaning unless all is included and rejecting the parts of ourselves that we don’t like does nothing but create a split. It is within this split between desired and undesirable that a lot of humanity’s (and our personal) problems live.
I am fond of the Absolute, that is no lie. The Absolute is Black. Black tends to be associated with evil. Therefore, it’s no surprise that humans shove all sorts of crap into the Black. Seeing through all the clutter projected onto the Black is a lot of work. One must tease out the truth, feel into the experience, allow oneself to be pulled into it completely and then shine a little black light on it. Or golden light. Or whatever color of light happens to be radiating from within one’s soul at that moment.
This morning I found myself in an in-between realm. It was gray and shadowy. I first saw the bare feet of a man before me and the tattered hem of his robe. Looking upward, I was reminded of Christ on the cross because the old man’s arms were outstretched like he was hanging from a cross and his feet were pointing downward like he was suspended off the ground.
See? Strong Christian vibes, right?
This wasn’t Christ but he was clearly a holy man. As I gazed upon his face, he opened his eyes and they were filled with golden light.
Ah, so he’s like me in a way, I thought, because his eyes–the windows of the soul–were also a portal to another realm, a realm of golden light.
I stepped through and entered a holy library. The place was dazzling and enormous, level after level spiraling upward so far I couldn’t see the top. There were other ‘monks’ like the one who had brought me here, robed in gray and busily tending the books, writing new ones, storing completed ones, retrieving them from the shelves, studying them, etc. Each ‘book’ was a living being. Not a human being but an angel. I could tell by their purity and from their golden light. I walked up to one and saw the golden lettering on the page was alive and moving. The story was being written and rewritten as I looked.
The monk librarian seemed barely aware of my presence and I realized they dwelt within multiple realms. Part of their consciousness was here, tending the library of living wisdom, and part of it was elsewhere. In other words, they were all like the original monk hanging with outstretched arms, who had brought me here.
I wondered why I’d been called here until my gaze happened to land on a particular book. It was lying open on a stand, its page filled with golden lettering that quivered with life. The interesting thing about this book was there was also blackness contained within it. The Black wavered on the edges of the letters, deep and dark and mysterious. Of course, I was drawn to it.
Stepping closer to the book, I was immediately drawn into its page and found myself standing in darkness. There was a soft golden light cast from above, the light of the library that I’d just left, I realized. There was also a soft, golden light radiating from my heart.
There was a winged sphinx beside me, her body like a black lion and her black wings folded. She was clearly a guide and I felt drawn to her. We enjoyed a companionable silence and I could tell she was more assuredly not human.
She led me through the darkness to the ruins of a temple. The temple had collapsed and its stones were covered with the black, furry skin. This was the skin of a living animal, like the pelt of a black leopard. It was soft and warm to the touch but I could also feel the temple stones beneath it. Very strange.
Because it was living, I didn’t want to step on it but there was a fur-covered stairway leading downward. I gently stepped onto the skin and walked down the stairs, finding a deep, still pool at the bottom. The pool’s waters swirled with inky blackness and starlight. It was very beautiful.
Kneeling beside it, I reached down into the black waters and drew out the limp body of a young boy. He was clad in a simple tunic and appeared to be about ten years old. At first, I thought he was a human soul but soon realized that he was too straightforward to be human. (Human souls are complicated beasts.) This was an angelic being that had somehow become trapped down here.
What to do but bring him back to the golden library? I carried him, following the sphinx back the way we came until we were once again standing under the golden skylight opening into the library. I pulled the boy up and out of the blackness but we didn’t stay in the library. For some reason, I knew we had to go so I led him through the library with its busy monks and back to the monk who had brought me here. We stepped through him and found ourselves in the gray, in-between realm.
The angel changed after we entered the gray realm. He grew and matured, becoming a full-grown man. He towered over me and we embraced. I could feel his gratitude and also his sense of wonder. Reaching out to touch my heart, he marveled at it. “It’s both black and gold,” he said, touching it. “Like a living pearl. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He lifted his eyes and looked at me. “So, this is what humans can develop? I had no idea.”
If I’m making it sound like I’m somehow this amazing being, I apologize. I don’t feel like the subtle body–or Pearl Body–is my possession and it doesn’t make me feel special. I view it as a development, a natural development of the human soul. It develops as we struggle with our lives and our egos, suffering a lot but (hopefully) learning from it and allowing our suffering to change us. It’s what happens as we mature and there is no endpoint. The Pearl Body isn’t a completion because I am still a very flawed individual. It’s an entree into the subtle realms but doesn’t in any way indicate perfection.
I was reminded of one of the laws of quantum physics. You know, the one that states something like the observer and the observed can’t exist separately from each other. This is true in the Imaginal Realms because my very presence there has an affect on the beings I meet. They are changed and so am I.
In this case, merely touching my pearly heart had a profound effect on the angel. Black, pearly veins began to creep up his arms and soon he had transformed first into a goatlike demon and then an old man whose bones crumbled into dust. As I watched, the dust transformed, first becoming golden and then becoming mixed with blackness. The glowing dust rose upward toward the heavens, becoming a vast celestial being wearing a golden and black cloak of stars.
Soon, the blackness began to take over and its started to bear more of a resemblance to a horned devil than an angel. An undeniable aspect of the Black is power and I could feel this being reveling in unbridled power. I couldn’t help but feel a little dismayed at this. How could it be so naive? Also, I felt consternation at myself. Am I so tainted that I taint others that I meet here? But tainted is a loaded word and doesn’t capture the complexity of human experience which, by necessity, must be allowed to reach from the depths of the Absolute up to the heavens. However, the human heart mediates this experience, tempers it with compassion and keeps us humble and grounded.
The heart is the key.
Without it, power corrupts and things get dark fast.
Before this being could glory too much in its newfound power, I metaphorically tugged on its shirtsleeve. It looked down at me questioningly and I reached up to it, offering my complicated, pulsing, very human heart.
“Hey,” I said, offering my heart to it. “Don’t forget your heart.”
This made all the difference. As soon as it reached down and accepted my offering, it was changed. Humbled. Attuned. And it understood the meaning of having a heart in the first place: The heart brings us closer to that which we love most (the truth) so that we may serve it. We don’t exalt in our power, we serve all beings with it.
That’s the true meaning of love and the real reason we develop a Pearl in the first place.
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