City Of The Sun In The East

It would be dishonest for me to tell anyone that I have all the answers, or that what I say is the truth absolute.  It would even be more dishonest for me to tell you that I have been perfected, or that I am “enlightened” in the common understanding of that word.  In the physical domain there really is no such reality as “enlightenment”.  As long as a being is drawing breath they have not fully transcended their physical humanity.  Anyone that makes that claim, and many have, is not telling you the truth.  We are either undergoing a healing process or we are falling further into our suffering without realizing it.  If we are undergoing a healing it means that in some way we are not yet whole.  As long as we are separated from the part of us that knows why we are here, we remain in dire need of being healed. 

A few weeks ago I began to correspond with a well known Buddhist scholar in the UK.  There are quite a few people that I correspond with that have written books and are considered authorities on subjects dealing with the human soul.  Admittedly, and not to come off as arrogant, none of these individuals have really impressed me that much.  Peter Kingsley was probably the exception to that.  While I don’t agree with him in all areas, I think he lives and thinks like a Philosopher in the most classic sense of that word.  But getting back to the Buddhist fellow.  If there really was such a thing as “enlightenment” I suspect that this man comes quite close to that.  He has put a great deal of his own inward demons to rest and is naturally very kind and compassionate to a fault.  However, he was unable to answer a question I posed to him, a question that really gets to the bottom of all other questions about the mystery of humanity.  My question as always was very simple.  I will paraphrase: If we are to believe that at the most fundamental level we are all Tathagata then what is the difference between compassion and violence?  In other words, if the only damage we can do to one another is merely damage to the “oneself” what does anything in this life matter? 

I followed this up by giving him my honest opinion of Mahayana in that it sought to extinguish the fire of life, which to me is an abomination.  I would much rather live a life that was a diverse mixture of compassion and violence than seek to extinguish life in this world altogether and in the process extinguishing the lives of all those that I sincerely love and care for.  The yearning I have for the real world, the Pleroma, is piqued during the most memorable and profound moments of  life.  It is at these times of violence and compassion that meaning reveals itself to me in very amazing ways.  By violence I don’t mean violence to others, but the normal traumas of human life that build our character.  Needless to say this man never answered me because most likely he had no answer that would reveal his humanity, which he has largely sworn off for the sake of life-denying asceticism that I do not understand.  The Buddha himself remained silent when asked these kinds of questions.  I can’t fault the man for sticking to his tradition.

I admit that I need to be healed, both inwardly and outwardly as most people do. I am not talking about a new age healing full of abstract sentimentalism mixed with empty promises of love and light.  I want something that is real and lasting, something that allows me to cut through the dross ugliness that remains in my soul to this day.  The healing I am referring to is really not of this world at all.  In fact, the healing I am referring to is beyond the physical domain altogether..

Some years ago I had what I would call my first very potent visionary experience. It was so potent in fact, that when I came to I was weeping.  In this experience I was in what appeared to be a dimly lit hospital.  I have been in this place on numerous occasions, usually at times when I was undergoing some kind of inner conflict.  I laid on a bed in this hospital and was being attended to by very kind women dressed in something similar to an old nurses uniform  As I laid there, I felt a lot of pain and loss which was purely internal.  I was feeling the emotions that a person would feel having died and left their children behind.  I entered this place spontaneously while I slept. The longer I spent there, the more I was awakening and becoming lucid within this dream or vision.  At some point I got up from the bed I was laying on and told very kindly and softly that I had to leave.  I was either given a cellphone or had a cellphone on my person.  I was told to “walk home” because “nobody was going to pick me up.”  I remember trying to make a phone call to my wife.  When I put the phone to my ear, however,  I could hear her crying and telling me how much she missed me and how big our son was getting.  It had dawned on me only then that I was in a bardo world, and that I was experiencing the inner emotional process of death. Through the cellphone I was hearing my wife’s thoughts and her sorrow at the prospect of having a dead husband.  I was utterly devastated and horrified by what was unfolding.  So vivid was this visionary experience that I really thought I had died.

As this visionary experience unfolded, I was attempting to make contact with people who were still living.  No matter what I said to people, nobody could hear me or respond–just like in movies when the dead try to speak to the living.  I soon noticed a man staring at me in the distance.  He had a very humorous look on his face as though he was getting a kick out of what I was attempting to do.  Finally he yelled something to the effect, “Why do you speak to people that cannot speak back to you?”   I took this to mean that my time for sentimentality and belly aching was over.  I had to begin to “walk home” as I was told to do.  Surprised that this man could see me, I ran to him and realized that whoever this person was, he was the best friend I had ever had.  While not among the living, and while I had never laid my human eyes on him before, I simply knew him and had known him for forever.  That is truly difficult to relate to fallen human beings who have not yet learned to think like the beings that exist above us because they are not united to their missing half to any large degree.

This event was the first time I realized that the beings who exist in the Pleroma know us as well as we know ourselves.  In this regard these friendships “there” are far more meaningful because we hide nothing from one another.  Everything we are is revealed by our very presence.  We do not have physical  bodies to protect our thoughts or deeds from others.  In those domains the Soul or Mind of the individual becomes their body and presence.  This is why purifying oneself is so utterly important in this life.  If you pass from this world harboring all of these dark and terrible things, they will follow you and will determine your postmortem state and presence.  The Zoroastrians understood this very well and that is why good thoughts and actions were so important to them.  By being good and thinking good, one would return to the real world from which they descended.  For me this has always been the goal of a human being.  To purify and become reunited with the fullness of their humanity that remains hidden from them in the Pleroma for reasons we can only understand when we cross the threshold of death and return to the very source of that unknown reason.  For if a part of the human being was not already in the Pleroma at this very moment and for eternity, the human being could never return there to begin with.  To put this in the proper perspective:

Purification of the soul and gaining ones full memory are identical.

That first experience of healing in a dimly lit hospital before “walking home” was quite dark.  My inward nature at that time determined the dim landscape.   I felt very confused throughout the entire event.  Having spent many years now attempting to clean out my closet, these landscapes have turned into cohesive places of extreme beauty and clarity.  My inner life has become very vivid and meaningful and this has only caused my outer life to be more joyous and at ease.  While I do not like the currents of this age or seeing the direction this world is headed, I also understand that nothing is out of the control of the divine.  Because I didn’t understand this before, I would often hold on to my disgust and anger and this lead to a cantankerous inner life full of confusion, anger, shadows, and much worse.

A couple nights ago I found myself in a much more vivid experience walking in what I thought was my old neighborhood.  I thought this was my old neighborhood because I felt inwardly very similar to how I felt as a young child before my demons began to dig into me.  It was bright outside and calm, it had just rained and the water smelled absolutely pure.  I felt very well and the concern of death and dying had passed from me completely.  When the concern of death is absolutely gone from a person, time no longer has any affect on them. This is why people who have NDEs often say that the experience was timeless or that time simply didn’t matter anymore.  It is because they have already crossed the threshold of death.  Only in the physical domain where death has the final say does time have any real significance.  In the physical world death is really the only clock there is.  This clock is the only thing that stands between us and the final confrontation between ourselves and the dark within us.  As these visionary experiences become more and more vivid, and as I get more and more healing from them, time even in the physical world has begun to mean less to me.  This is because death no longer had the effect on me it once did.  While I certainly do not want to die any time soon, my fear of it hasn’t the firm grip it used to have.

I walked near a small hospital where there were young women helping people who seemed to be healing from what I can only say was fear and inner turmoil.  This place was most certainly a landscape for those who had largely been healed and were about to “return home.”   I laid down on a stoop outside (because it felt so natural to do) and a blond haired woman attended to me.  She was very kind and gave me a thin, tall glass of milk to drink.  She then said to me, “We’ve come so far H*********”.  The name she called me sounded so very familiar–so much so that I asked her to repeat it.  “I said H********* that’s your name isn’t it?”  I remember feeling very close to this woman and said, “Yes, that’s my name.”  To which she responded and laughed. “Of course it is!” 

She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. She walked a short distance with me until we were standing at the edge of a steep cliff.  Finally she pointed to the east. (I say east because that is where the sun always sits)  When I looked up I saw something that was so amazing that  my physical heart rate had almost pulled me out of the experience.  I literally heard the blood flushing through my head during the experience.  “Over there the sun rises and sets in the east”  she said.  What I saw was a city that appeared endless.  The sun in the distance was alive and hanging over a vast expanse of pure blue sky.  The feeling within me that accompanied this was that of being a child again.  There was a feeling of eternal newness there, of utter joyousness.  I could feel it even from the distance I stood from this magnificent golden city.  Within moments a breeze hit my body and I flew into a strange kind of ecstatic state that lasted only a few moments.  When the breeze hit me, there was this sense of endless space in every direction.   When I looked at the young lady she said, “it’s not much further now”.  The name she called me was perhaps my real name.  Perhaps a mere artifact of the experience.  One thing was certain, the vision of this city in the east was most definitely the Celestial domain or Pleroma.  I have no doubt about that.  It was not only a literal place with a paradisaical landscape, but it was also an inner state of approaching eternity–which can only fully be reached when the physical body is finally surrendered.  The centerpiece of that city is the Sun, but it is not the sun as we know it here, over there, the sun is clearly alive and is the Godhead.

There are a few things I learned from this experience a couple nights ago.  First, these noetic worlds and landscapes are intuitive.  They exist within us, but there is a point when the very idea of within and without become meaningless. At this point states of mind and inner noetic landscapes become identical.  The people that are most like you will inhabit the same worlds you find yourself in. The more intuitive a person becomes, and the more ”inward travelling” they do, the more these worlds begin to open up and present themselves. First in dreams and then in vivid visionary experiences.  While I am not a fan of Emmanuel Swedenborg, there have been things he has written that lead me to believe that much of what he was seeing is what I am seeing.

Now a word of caution.  I do not believe that we must turn our backs on this world in a neo-gnostic fashion.  The celestial domain is disguised in this world, just as we are disguised within it. At the most meaningful moments of life here, one can often see the Pleroma shining through.  At first this comes on sudden, and when you are more apt to spot it, it becomes absolutely obvious.  So I am not attempting to promote the idea that we must give up all care of the physical domain and seek only after the divine world.  Not at all.  What happens in the physical domain seems to largely play into how close or far we will come in touching the Pleroma or Celestial Domain.