The following originally appeared on satyogainstitute.org.
Many are under the illusion that our current world crisis is simply a matter of global financial meltdown, worldwide political/military power struggles, and planetary climate change. But the situation is actually of vastly greater import than that. The entropic avalanche of disintegration is producing new protoplasmic and pneumatic pools of possibility, nuanced noetic niches that can withstand the nuisance of annihilation.
We are, among other levels of analysis, in the midst of an extraordinary evolutionary mega-mutation. Humans are evolving into a new species — and not just a slightly improved animal; an almost inconceivably different variety of non-carbon-based life forms.
Many people talk about our becoming transhuman, but there is a great deal of pedestrian confusion and cyber-infatuated wishful thinking as to what that implies. Our transmutation is so radical that our current level of consciousness cannot grasp the nature of the quantum leapfrogs some of us are now becoming.
As in any critical evolutionary situation, only a few of us are risking the high jumps into the vortex of transmutational dynamics that Nature is selecting us for. The old religious premise, "Many are called, few are chosen," operates precisely in the realm of evolutionary action. Being chosen means choosing one's own destiny. But the ability to want to make that choice is beyond the range of our free will. That is why the concept of karma is still relevant. Many different kinds of choices are possible, but not all will prove to be accurately adapted to the coming new conditions of the Real.
Those who are choosing to adapt to the changing requirements for conscious salvation are working intensively to bring about the subtle, yet profound shifts in the functioning and Self-realization of the psyche and its Source that must precede the manifestation of structural transmutation. Not that it is really work, but the seductively beautiful act of yogis stripping naked at an orgy of purity, exulting in the peeling away of every layer of lack, crying crocodile tears as the onion of unfinished wanting wanes and the union with emptiness is consummated in the ecstasy of formless and timeless communion.
There are some who believe that the transhuman will be some integration of animal and machine; human minds completely hooked up to cybernetic supplementation, with bionic bodies advancing into brave new worlds of terminators and terra-formers, living in oases of virtual reality, wet dream software heavens to override the hellish real of soulless mechanisms conquering barren far-flung planets, having desolated our own.
The mainline evolutionary novelty that is underway is not of that sort, however. Neither is it primarily a matter of DNA mutation, although genetic alterations will result from the evolutionary reset of our clockwork consciousness, birthing the spontaneous emergence of ever more levels, extensions, and powers of our unfathomable implicate order. The Real may be revealed as but one facet of an infinite coalescent crystal, and that we have only arrived at an edge, from which our complex multipolar consciousness may seem to fracture into a multiplex of planar bardos, as the rotating cosmo-googolplex of transfinite desire offers ever new spaces in which every archetype of attitude and dissipative structure may spawn to script its cinematic signature into the cosmos.
The current crisis is not a product of failure of physical adaptation, but of the imperative need to adapt our consciousness to the challenge of survival in a world gone mad, to emit our own surrealistic psychic pseudopodia into the neverlandish noetic fields of Gaia's supramental strata, and to discover in the akashic internet new genres of perception, feeling, understanding, intelligence, relationality, power, integrity, insight, and most critically of all, attunement to the precession of the paranormal parameters of the spiraling spheres of hyper-reality through which we seem now to accelerate.
We are evolving not into a single new species but into a myriad of intergalactic and inter-dimensional beings of infinite mental capacity and freefalling freedom from the limitations of all gravitational fields, of space and time and the last illusion of credible objective identity. Piercing through the terror of those losses of stability as ego dissolves into light yields the divine right of passage through the dark evolutionary night. We are the foam on the cresting quantum wave of time about to crash against the rocks of the ultimate real.
While this impossible revolutionary explosion of vitality, in the very midst of exhaustion and mass extinction, is overtly darwinistically unprecedented, even in pre-Cambrian terms, it has been prefigured in all of the world's mythologies, religions, mystery schools, and shamanic paths into altered states of cosmic consciousness. In this mindmelting shift of the quantum wave, science surrenders its reductionist drive and spirituality its dogmatic demand and the two are at last integrated into a single whole. To the marriage of true minds let us not admit impediment. But the conceptual translation of our reality is only the beginning, and those on this sacred life path must not stop there.
The translation phase of the work entails the insight that the universe is consciousness itself; the inner is the outer; the phenomenal the noumenal; the Self is All. This translation of experience into a higher key, the key of non-duality, opens the way to recognize the hidden wormholes in the sluicing registers of protean cognition, flickering awareness introducing us to the potentials of the hyper-real in which we now operate, and to move at will from the outer realms of experience to the inner realms of imperience, of lucid dreaming, precognitive visions, and the sudden flight of light bodies into the etheric planes; and even deeper, to the supreme abode of the Self, in which all potentiality manifests at will; the realm of the miraculous, in which, as the Buddha declared, samsara is nirvana: the phenomenal world the pure reflection of the Absolute.
But translation must be realized through transformation, through renunciation of limited ego consciousness, with all its attachments, depressive and narcissistic pathologies, idealizing and defiling identifications, desires and fears, hyperactive manias and paralyzing anxieties.
Inner transformation culminates in the core fusion of being and nothingness that cascades into manifest conscious evolution. But it still only sets the stage for the emergence of the new species capable of flight beyond the cage of planetary plasm and even the subtlest phenomenal form. It lies still within a weird transpersonal paradigm, a hybrid of earthbound archetypal metamorph of some lost process of surreal entheo-psychoanalysis merged with parabhakti prostrations to the primal purity of our Buddha Nature, Cosmic Christ-mind, and the Tao of our Trinitarian Avatar/Paramatman/Brahman Ultimate Non-Arising Godhead Self.
All this can only be surmounted in the blissful beatitude of no-mind that melts into trans-oceanic presencing, leaving an ever widening wake of fragrant laughter on its sweet nectarean journey through ultra-etheric waves of boundless love. This is a trip that no entheogenic substance need enhance or time can limit or chemically wear off. We celebrate our endless voyage, both deathless and joyous, of adoration of beauty appearing everywhere all ways. We need only surrender to each astonishing synchronicity, all the awesomely un-pre-conceivable synergy, and every flowering of our miraculous upwelling symbiotic syntropy.
The transformation of our sense of being leads through the sun door of immanent transcendence, transcendence of the very concept of transcendence, and dissolution of the logic of worlds. The unsettling of set theory, the melting of the very myth of mathematics, the simultaneity of the ordinal, the ultimate paradox of infinite being as absolute nothingness, leads us to the zero-point of the laws of nature. All prior patterns are annulled in the immaculate conception of noumenal Natura Naturans, the virginal matrix of all cosmophallic potency, hooded in her hymenic hymnal vibratory womb that delivers numberless membrane multiverses, in eternal cosmophilic coitus with the Shiva Lingam of unsurpassable creative intelligence, panspermatically seeding the Emptiness in one big bang after another.
They spread the Net of Indra to catch their falling angels as they morph into the stars and into their satanic siblings, massive black holes, refusing to blast out into the generosity of radiance, titanic death drives sucking them back into their inmost nuclei, those cosmic hungry ghosts that shall swallow us into the maw of the all-devouring Mother at the end of every dance of time.
Transcendence embraces all of it, both birth and death of universes, heavens of irresistibly gorgeous goddesses and stalwart guardian gods inevitably morphing into the twilight zones of unbearable decay and deformation, and the infinite theatrical procession of living characters plotting and playing on the pinhead planetary platforms in which we play out all our petty devolutionary operettas. We must now remain unmoved by the thunderous music of existence, the channeled chaos of creation and destruction, forever stationed in the all-encompassing still presence of non-existing noesis.
And yet at some point in the final act of every planetary play, the vital denouement of auto-revelation must arise as an emergent property of that world's self-awareness in the form of a species that gives birth to its original formlessness, just at the moment it wields the death-blow to its own future, shattering its egoic evolutionary form and function.
The only species capable of destroying itself and all life on its home planet, and the only one capable of transcending itself and returning to its full primordial potential at the very moment of its suicidal extinction — such is our tragic fated moment of lost hope and redemptive transfiguration. It has been prefigured in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. After blinding himself in self-punishment for his sin of patricide and marriage with his mother, the hero can at last see it all with his third eye, and can fully swallow his agony and accept his fate. "Am I made man at the moment of my annihilation?" he cries out in awed and anguished laughter at God's inhuman sense of humor. Must this tragic reckoning now be the fate of all humanity?
Transfiguration brings transvaluation. What do we value more: Truth or duking it out with the dukkha-pleasures of the illusion of existence? Do we want eternal stillness and Self-knowledge of the Center or ignorant hacking and slashing through the outback of time? Is continuity of physical manifestation so important?
Yet there is always compromise in this endless bickering between Shiva and Shakti. What if we are not limited to mortal existence; what if there is something higher, nobler, and finer that awaits us now? Can we not enjoy more refined scenarios, without the too-gross real of blood and excrement? What if we have not only bodies of apparent matter, but within those, lie subtler bodies of supernal light, of which most of us have been unaware? What if we had been locked into our five phenomenal senses and had locked ourselves out of our truer sense potentials as beings of Spirit? What if we are angels who had forgotten our real nature, in order to have a human experience on the wondrous wheel of karma, and now we have no choice but to remember? What if this universe is only a theme park, and our vacation is over; now it is time to go home?
And if the next phase of our journey homeward leads through the intergalactic wonderland of an unimaginable variety of different species of beings, another calculus of probabilities, another spectrum of event horizons, are you willing to book your ticket on that cosmic ship of fools? This is the question we are being asked. We sit beneath the Kalpa Vriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree that is the axis mundi. Will we eat of the newly-falling fruits, adapt to the new conditions, and not look back, like the woman who was saved from the divine wrath that destroyed Sodom, but who could not keep from gazing nostalgically at her lost world, and met her doom as a pillar of salt? Will we have the strength to let go of the past, and all our salty histories, our tears, attachments, prayers, narratives, loyalties, our dying motherworld, and flow fearlessly into the vast unknown?
Transmutation leads finally to transfinitization. Our consciousness must now shed its last shell, its perspectival perception, and live in the love that makes us one with all the beings of all worlds, and yet in the wisdom of the singular aloneness of non-arising solitude. This is the knowledge that has no knower. This is the Transfinite Self that has never been, but who is us all, and no one at all, and Who dreams and drinks every last drop of this amrita, this immortal delirium that is our supreme delight.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
Image by TANAKA, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
