We Are Off to See the Wizard!

Most of us live ‘out there’. We see and feel our skin as the join between us and ‘that’; whatever ‘that’ is. For more and more people, the outside world is being discovered to be ‘not what it seems’ or in common parlance ‘fake’.

Films like The Matrix trilogy highlight the idea that what we look at is no more than some sort of construction. But who is making this illusory world?

In medieval times, before psychiatry and psychoanalysis, it was a widely held hypothesis that a being called God made the world and us. God therefore, had to be responsible for the running of human and if that gave you a problem you had an option to pray. Prayer was the only way humans were able to feel they had a say in the matter or else they abandoned themselves to kismet or fate. Both are soft options and unrealised humans, like soft options.

Mystics however held a different view, from times well before the Essenes and their Star pupil, Jesus the Christ. Mystics never believed in the story of an all controlling, Commander in Chief, deity. Instead they experienced directly a love of ‘God within’. As beings made ‘in the image of God’ (the literal consequence of what we now call fractal geometry) we are indeed God or as the poet and mystic Rumi said, a fragment of the mirror of God that shattered into countless pieces. We are, in other words, a shell within which energy and Mind (which is not us) are facilitated.

Picture a movie projector plugged into the electric wall socket and a light shining within the magic box. Out of the eye of this box are projected moving images in a most compelling way.

Because of a certain suseptability within the human mind, our attention becomes fixed on the world ‘out there’. Our attention moves from ‘here’ and ‘this’ (Self), to outside ourselves and we are transported to wherever and whatever (ego). So ‘ordinary life’ revolves around us in a merry go round that we call ‘experience’. Indeed it is because of our growing addiction to this series of dream sequences, that life can become a blur. In modern times the spinning world appears faster than ever and in a way and as a consequence, many feel overwhelmed by a lack of clarity and control. But there is a mechanism by which we can halt the confusion.

The ancient Greeks had an interesting take on how the human eye works. Whilst today we describe the eye as a camera or receiver of light, the ancient Greeks understood it as a projector. They thought the eye projected light, but perhaps they were describing how the process of mental projection works? Could it be that they intuited the idea that we create everything we see?

Quantum physics tells us that we are able to affect what we see by being an observer. The conundrum of Schroedinger’s cat imagines two realities present at the same time. Until the human observer makes a choice, the cat is both alive and dead.

When Jesus the Christ preached, ‘you are the light of the world’ he meant that we hold the power within ourselves to be not only our own light (God), but able to illuminate the whole universe. We hold tremendous power and he demonstrated this with miracles. Moses did the same when one of his followers walked into the rising tide of the Red Sea to certain death…except instead reality shifted and the waters receded. Parting waters was one of the many spectacular ‘tricks’ in ancient Egyptian magic.

We know that in Ancient Egypt the so called ‘Emerald Tablets’ of the demi-god Thoth or Djbuti instructed all beings to ‘seek light’. This is not as simple a process as it sounds of course. The illusion of reality is strong and shadows and false figures have to be ruthlessly eliminated in what mystics call ‘the hero’s journey’. The archetype of the hero as a warrior on the physical plane is nothing compared to the life long war of mystics and seers for understanding of themselves or enlightenment. This inner battle is the true and only meaning of the Islamic ‘Jihad’, whereby the veils that cover the inner light are tantalisingly removed, represented by the dance of the seven veils and the tantalising feeling of the hidden essence.

It is important to understand how all of this can apply to our own modern lives. One of the great ‘inhibitors’ to the removal of the veils is, ironically, religion. I shall not name and shame any particular religion because they are probably all guilty in my view.

How religion interrupts and corrupts the ‘hero’s journey’, is by promoting the description of the world as being ‘out there’. Most distracting of all is the notion that the saints and the angels and the Divine are all ‘out there’.

We might smile at the Renaissance painting of an old man sitting on a cloud today, as the archetypal God, but such a distortion of reality is still widely believed. Prayers are offered ‘to God’ as if such a being has both the time and interest in our self obsession. ‘You get on with it!’ one might hear a Divine voice command dismissively. Certainly in Christianity, humans were given ‘freewill’ at the beginning in the Garden of Eden, as a punishment rather than a gift. This Divine curse means we are always ‘on our own’.

If it sounds like heresy that God may not listen to prayers, then you are probably missing the point. Prayer was never intended to benefit a Universal Mind because God is by definition, complete in every way. Prayer is a mechanical process whereby a human mind can open paths to the human Soul, using those words that are not of one’s ego. Muslims are compelled to pray five times a day because it stops the ego in it’s tracks and can send our concentration inward. The body is bent in submission and the forehead (brow chakra) touches the ground. The arrogance of the ego is positioned (in Sajda) lower than the heart chakra, where Soul resides.

This process of ‘submission’ is found in most gnostic practises as a way of overcoming the constant demands of the lesser self (ego) and becoming aligned with the higher self (Self).

The words of the prophets to ‘know thyself’ are a hint to what today we might call ‘therapy’ or ‘psychoanalysis’. But these will not take you to a destination. They are principally an unveiling of an archetypal journey which is to travel inward to one’s higher Self, with skip in your step.