Teachings
Alice, Wonderland and the Seamlessness of Creation
In Alice and Wonderland, Alice follows a rabbit through a long bunny hole and ends up in another world, where she meets all sorts of strange characters, witnesses very odd events, and changes size from little to big and back again, as she tries to become the right shape to enter through a door to a Garden.
Alice and Wonderland is actually a Sufi tale, the rabbit she follows is a mendicant, and the teaching it gives is about the seamlessness of creation, and the nature of the pictures, or veils, that human beings make...
In the world of the Unity, there are no seams, or breaks between the worlds. I am not speaking metaphorically. What I mean quite literally is that you can enter or exit from a single point into the whole of Creation. When you look up into the sky, and you see the stars, and the planets, and the Milky Way galaxy, all of that is accessible within you.
It is accessible within you, because you are not what you appear to be. From the Mercy of the Divine, we appear to be solid. All matter—human bodies, animal bodies, trees, and tables and walls appear to be solid. But science tells us that we are almost entirely empty space. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a child, learning to orient yourself in this physical world if you accurately perceived everything around you as mostly empty space? If you looked down at your forearm and you saw the Milky Way and beyond? That is why I say it is from the Mercy of the Divine that we see matter as solid.
It is also part of the Mercy of the Divine that our consciousness is veiled. As we deepen in our consciousness, we shed the veils. You live in progressively deeper and subtler worlds, what the Sufis call: the worlds of the self (nafs) and then the worlds of the heart, and as you continue to shed the veils, the worlds of the soul and then the secret. When you live in the stations of the secret, you receive the Kiss of the Beloved, the secret that animates life. If these worlds were to open up to any of us all at once, and we did not have the container of a spiritual tradition or teacher, which helps us to learn about the Law, it would be too much energy pouring in, and we could not carry it.
So it is from the Mercy of the Divine that we are veiled, so that we may become unveiled.
What this means is that the worlds people are able to experience consciously are different. The parts of the Creation that a person occupies are conditioned by their veils. Let’s say that I’m in my personality all of the time. I live in my lower nafs (my lower personality, corresponding to the worlds of the self) and the Divine has veiled the rest of the Creation from me. That means, that if I come into contact with one of you, who may have access to the higher worlds, all I will be able to taste with you and share with you is contained within the world of the nafs.
I will not be able to experience anything else, because I do not have access to anything further. I will go through my day, and my weeks, and my months, and everything in life that I experience will be within the world of the nafs. The rest of the Creation will be cut off from me, because my consciousness, my choice, is locked into pictures from the personality.
Take the example of waking up with a stomachache. I wake up, and I say: My stomach hurts. I go pee. And I think some more: my stomach aches. It is time for breakfast, but I’m afraid to eat, because my stomach aches. I see my husband and don’t say hello, because of my stomach. I get my doctor on gmail, and I tell her about my stomach, and she gives me a remedy, and I tell myself: my stomach aches, I bet this remedy won’t work. And I take the remedy, and it doesn’t work, and then she emails me 6 hours later, to find out if the remedy works, and I tell her my stomach aches, the remedy didn’t work, and she gives me another.
My whole day has been occupied by my stomach. I missed all the other possibilities for joy, and creativity, and intimacy; noticing the bird song, and saying hello to my husband, and going shopping for some beautiful new napkins, because my attention was wrapped up in my stomach hurting.
Now contrast that with what happens if I don’t make a picture out of my stomach hurting. I wake up, and I feel that my stomach hurts. I go pee. I notice the birds. I see my husband and say hello. Every time my stomach twinges, and starts to pull my attention to it, I choose to turn my consciousness somewhere else. I make myself breakfast. I email my doctor. She gives me a remedy. I take it. I go to exercise. I go buy napkins. Six hours later, she emails me to find out how it is, and there’s a 99% chance that it will be gone. I won’t even remember that I had a stomachache in the first place! Or, if there is a problem with the stomach, I rediscover it, I tell her the symptoms as they are now, and she gives me another remedy.
Do you see the difference!
In the one example, I fixed a picture with my consciousness about my stomach, and it ruined my whole day. And in the other example, I used my consciousness to keep moving from thought to thought to thought and experience to experience to experience. I consciously became ADD (attention deficit disorder). I kept my attention moving, from the birds, to saying hello to my husband, to the gift of eating food, to the exercise, and so on, so I would not be pulled into worrying about my stomach.
The problem is not having a thought or a feeling in the first place. The problem is when we return it to the second time (and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth…etc…). This is a key. It is not that we must not have pictures. Pictures and thoughts and feelings come from the Divine. It is about: not stopping with the pictures.
When you stop with the picture, you create a seam in the seamlessness of creation. You create a veil, you weave a boundary into the fabric of your consciousness, and then you cannot leave that seam, until something happens to make you aware of it, and you cut the veil. No teacher can break the veil for you. Not even the Divine can cut the veil for you. The Divine is patient, and the Divine is extremely polite. It follows from the gift of free will, that nothing you create for yourself can be discarded by another. You have to make the choice to cut it, to leave the history.
The seams are not even taken by death. In every tradition, there is a version of purgatory. The Buddhists call it going through the Bardos. For the Muslims, it is Judgment. For the Christians and the Jews it is purgatory, the interim place a soul travels before it goes to the next world. And in purgatory what you encounter are the seams. You are faced with the seams in the fabric of consciousness you have made, and these have to be cleaned and left.
Seams are made when we do not trust. The first time you have the thought: I do not like this job, I would like something else, you make a prayer. The second time you make it, it is an expression of distrust. God will hear you the first time, so then go about doing your job the best you can, loving the people around you, experiencing the joy of life, even when it is hard. If you keep returning to the thought, you are focusing on the problem, not the solution; your whole world starts to revolve around the problem, the veil, and then you cannot receive the possibility for something different that comes from another place.
This life is difficult. We will lose jobs, we will get sick, loved ones will pass into the next world. The role of a spiritual teacher, or a guide in many of our traditions, is to be a conscious friend, as the Order of life unfolds. The gift of spending time with a conscious friend is that as the love and the trust deepen, then the one body is made; you get to experience the Creation unveiled; and then you see where you stopped with the pictures and can choose to cut them.
As the whole of the universe is contained within each of us, and as a conscious person can consciously experience that, and since it is the Order of the teacher, or guide, to care for the people who are given to them, then wouldn’t it make sense that the guide knows what happens for their beloveds? Teachers and guides know the pictures and the veils of those they care for. They even dream their dreams.
Each of you will also know the pictures and the veils and dream the dreams of the people who you care for. When you do so in surrender to the Divine, in accordance with the Order for your life as it has been given, then you will be dispensed medicine for your Beloveds, and you will be contained. If you stop with the picture, however—whether it was yours or theirs—you will open the door to all the thought forms, experiences, and energies that belong to all the people throughout history who have ever held that picture.
That is why our lives can become so difficulty when we stop with pictures. Every picture is connected to whole worlds: anger, irritability and fear are all worlds. So are love, patience, and the One Body.
The last thing I want to write about is picking up rocks. Last week, I had a very deep experience with some people in my life picking up rocks. For an entire afternoon, we picked up little rocks, placing them within the garden.
It is in joining together, doing the simple things like that, that the love and the consciousness are actually passed. This is why I always lived with my teachers. This is why at the monastery the Abbot is out in the gardens raking the leaves and the stones; why he or she eats at the table with the monks and the nuns. This is why when people take retreat with me, we go shopping together, or we scrub floors, or we cook together. We make one body, and in making the one body, we move past the experience of the veils, and we travel together into the worlds and the galaxies. The One Body is really the Whole of Creation itself. And this is how all of us learn to live a conscious life.