Credit: wall.alphacoders.com
I had a friend say to me that it was not accurate to say I was love because I acted this way and that.
Yes, that’s true and raises a valuable point.
I am – we are – many ways at the relative level of existence. But, however we be there, we are love at the absolute.
When I say “I am love,” I’m speaking of my essence, my true identity.
At the relative level, I may be prickly, grouchy, awkward, etc. But that is not “me,” not the true and essential me.
The “new paradigm” concerns our essence. It doesn’t concern who we are at this everyday level. Our evolutionary movement is always from the relative to the absolute.
I grant that there are also paradigms for this everyday level. The sociologist Erving Goffmam was a master of those as are many sociologists and anthropologists. But I’m particularly, in the article “I Love; Therefore I Am,” (1) focusing on the absolute.
If we fail to make the distinction between the relative and the absolute, we run into all kinds of problems. One classic one is a student asking a non-dual teacher a question that concerns life at the relative level and receiving an absolute answer. Not helpful.
Oftentimes spiritual teachers (and I am not a spiritual teacher) pose conundrums for their students, in which they mix the relative and the absolute. The student cannot figure these puzzles out without (hopefully) having a realization.
An example is “die before dying.” This sentence mixes the relative and the absolute. “Die” refers to the death of the ego; “dying” refers to the death of the body. The first would give us an experience of the Transcendental; the second would give us an experience of physical death. While the words for death are the same, their references are different.
I should also clarify a second point. When I said earlier “trip through the ascension portal,” I was being metaphorical. I didn’t actually proceed through a gate marked “Ascension Portal.” I did not go from point A to point B.
I experienced an expansion of consciousness. And that expansion was temporary. I’m back in 3/4D again now. Archangel Michael calls this passing back and forth through the ascension portal. If I understand correctly, experiences will not be permanent until Sahaja Samadhi, which occurs one or two more years into the future.
But it does remind me that, especially when one is exploring new territory, one has to watch his or her use of metaphors. Others may take them literally – and why would they not? None of us knows very much about this new “land” (“land” is also a metaphor) as yet.
The “ethnographer” of a new land (this too is a metaphor) does not only establish matters that most other people will have no knowledge of – since ethnographers in the beginning usually go into territory that is as yet unvisited.
They also lay down metaphors for understanding that are like a double-edged sword. The metaphors make understanding easier. But they also serve as a filter. They at once focus on certain features of a “landscape.” But they also exclude other features from consideration.
In a social science, the initial metaphors, over time, become contested and new metaphors established. This process goes forward with these new metaphors themselves being contested over time as well.
This is the process by which scientific knowledge grows.
The revelatory knowledge that realized saints and sages come into is direct and unmediated by words, etc. But it too must be communicated to people who haven’t had the original spiritual experience of a Jesus or a Buddha.
And when it is, metaphors are again used. “I am the door. No one enters in but through me.” (Paraphrase) Even the “me” there is metaphorical, because it isn’t that we enter in through the “me” that was Jesus but through the “me” that is the soul, Atman, Self or Christ.
You can see how complicated it can become to explore a new field. One cannot avoid using metaphors in order to communicate. And these metaphors will approximate, filter things out, ignore some features of the situation, etc.
One has to simply trust that, in the course of things, the most robust understanding will emerge from the to-and-fro of discussion.
If that understanding at least clears the brush away and creates a space in which realization can arise, that may be the most that can be hoped for.
Truth itself lies beyond words and cannot be captured by them.
Footnotes
(1) “I Love; Therefore I Am” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/10/05/i-love-therefore-i-am-2/.