Is It Time To Go Inside?
And the voice said, “It’s time for people to quit bullying, harassing, and forcing others into playing their game by their rules so that they can feel powerful. It’s time to courageously go inside to find a world that is whole, complete, and lacking nothing.”
“Inside the Green Dragon in Hobbiton” by Trey Ratcliff is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
As part of a spiritual inquiry, I decided to try a technique suggested by Janet Conner in her Writing Down Your Soul. I sat down with my notebook and asked: What’s the message you have for me? What’s my purpose? I surrender to your will.” And then I wrote in a voice from beyond my ego a bit of wisdom that may be for more than just myself. The voice said:
“It’s more like you are surrendering to your purpose, not “my will.” I don’t lay out a step-by-step plan for your life.
First, know this: you’ve done well so far. You’ve learned a lot. You have been so open to learning, curious, willing to experiment, willing to be wrong and to be dissatisfied with being right. For you, being right was never enough. There was never a “perfect rightness.”
Your experience of life thus far has prepared you for the next part of your journey. It has all been good; there is nothing to regret. Be proud of that, embrace that, don’t be condescending or ashamed of the you who did any of the things you have done…even the things that you have felt guilty about: the obsessions and addictions, flirting with running away, fantasizing of a different life – somewhere else, doing something else. It’s all ok!
All that has been just a part of what it means to be a human traveler – a creator – a Big Bang in a fleshy body.
Here’s a message for you and all those traveling with you.
Humans are a unique imagineering species on this planet. They can imagine and turn their dreams, what they see or hear or taste in their minds, into material reality.
It might be more accurate to say that as individuals, humans strive to do so and as a collective – organizing ourselves into communities, societies, or civilizations bent toward the same goal, we get really close turning our collection of visions into a collective vision and from there into a complex of physical realities.
Historians teach us that perfect creations without problematic unintended consequences do not emerge from attempts to turn our utopian dreams into full sized, material reality.
The aboriginal shamans had/have it right. The dream state is where we need to turn ideas into reality in the vast majority of cases.
It is time to learn how to build out dreams, visions, and ideas entirely on the mental plane. There is no need to burden the planet, the other species of creation, with involuntarily serving our attempts conform the planet to our imagined reality.
The humans of earth need to understand this, they need to become aware of this: they mistake their dreams and their desires to create with a call to organize matter and energy in ways that externally memorialize a moment of fantasy. There are way too many creatures depending on the life support systems of the planet for this to work at the scale that humans feel compelled to work. There isn’t enough matter and energy for each person to create the world they dream of outside the mind.
It’s like 30 people attempting to paint a picture on one 2’x3’ canvas. Each with his and her own brushes and paints.
It just won’t do to have 9-11 million people try to direct the planet and all its myriad life forms to be and do what each person would have it be and do.
But, what a wonderful thing the human mind is. The mind is a world mostly untapped. There is so much totally unexplored space there, so much potential build there without needing to engage in the heavy lift required to extract and organize the material of the planet.
The human mind is like what developers of Second Life or Minecraft were playing at, but the mind has far more amazing tools and the vast power of the human brain supersedes the capacity of all the software and hardware that ever could be on the planet.
It’s time for a transformation of life and work on earth. It’s time to develop our ability to focus, memorialize, iterate, wholly, or almost so, within our minds and to communicate what’s in there with others without having to create it full scale externally.
That we’ve created all these external objects and systems to date is OK. It’s been a necessary (?) part of the journey. At least it has provided us with opportunities to to see and experience many ideas put into motion physically. We can see, to some degree, how they have turned out.
The consequences have been for better and worse, good and evil, positive and negative. Within that awareness, we have an opportunity. With a sense of what has been done, we can build on that to create within our minds new creations and solve old problems.
It’s now time for humans to take this knowledge of their work in the physical realm to the inside. To create new things and solve the problems of the world within the inner world of the mind. Building out one’s imagined reality internally, with no need to externalize it, to be content with generating the new heaven and the new earth within oneself.
It is quite enough to do this.
Rather than making a physical thing to show others what is in your mind, it’s time to develop and use the amazing communication tools humans are blessed with – language – speech and writing.
If we do this, there will be plenty of food and shelter to sustain the inhabitants of the planet. The resources for life will be plentiful. There is no need for all the distraction and struggle required to acquire the matter necessary to physically manifest everything we can imagine – the massive architecture, all the various gizmos and gadgets, the war machines, and all the stuff out of which to form them.
We’ve mastered the technology of providing for the needs of the body, which provides a home for the mind. There is no need to go much beyond that in the external material world. The real work is within.
Like Leonardo, it is quite enough, when words won’t do, to externalize most of our ideas as sketches on a page, or paintings, or as a model, why anything more?
It’s time to quit bullying, harassing, and forcing others into playing our game by our rules so that we can feel powerful.
It’s time to go inside where we are whole, complete, and lacking nothing. If this message resonates, namaste.