Twelve Crooked Steps to Fuller Consciousness

Improvement makes straight roads, 
but crooked roads are roads of genius.

W. Blake

1. For a few minutes sit beneath a tree. Remember that its roots reach down into the darkness every bit as far beneath you as its branches reach upward toward the light.
2. Consider your own more metaphysical roots: the means by which you grasp the nourishment of the intangible necessities of life (beauty, friendship, the certainty that you are loved and are worth loving). How do we come by these intangibles; how are they filtered, assimilated, perceived? 
3. Talk for a time with a friend, and talk long enough so that the conversation at some point comes to a contented lull. (It is one of the supreme proofs of a friendship--the moment when you realize that even silence feeds it). Now, within that moment of silence, think of the roots of the tree. 
4. And at least for this moment refrain from picturing yourself as a separate body; after all, you extend with your friend into the silent spaces of mutual comprehension in the same way that trees reach their roots (mutually tangling) into the earth. You overlap with other lives everywhere. Why should the body always be considered the primary phenomenon? What is the body anyway? "Matter," we say. Which is? Sets of probability-points in calculation. Energy in motion. An above-ground happening merely.
5. Find something beautiful and hand-made and take a few moments to admire it. Consider the fact that the object itself is a secondary phenomenon--just as driftwood is a secondary phenomenon of the willow that produced the branch, or just as the ripples on a pond are a secondary phenomenon of the duck taking flight. But what is the primary here, as you look at the object before you? I say consciousness itself--the maker's and yours, the admirer's. 
6. Imagine (or if you like, pretend) that the objects around you in your home all have an inner life: the jackknife smiles at a relevant pear, the hourglass whispers going going gone, and the jade plant is slowly, sorrowfully forgetting its childhood Mandarin. Indeed now that you think about it everything around you--every object--seems to leak with mystery like the radioactive water from the tanks at Fukushima. 
7. What you are experiencing is powerful and dangerous. It is the fire that fuels the cypresses of Van Gogh. It is Jehovah speaking to Moses from the burning bush. It is the unutterable archangel clothed in your neurology a billion years in the developing that holds in its metaphorical right hand Time and in its metaphorical left hand Space, and brings them together continually to form the critical mass of subjective experience. Boom. Blaze. Now transcendence. Now possession. Now the poetry of a fuller life, if we would only see. Don't laugh. Believe. So much in regard to humanity's survival is riding on how well we manage to entertain ourselves without burning up the obvious, material stuff; the oil, the trees, our enemies, ourselves. Yet we love the sensation of risk. So let's be firebugs of the metaphysical, like Moses and Van Gogh.
8. Reflect on the fact that what we directly see is merely the present arrangement of an infinite pattern forever receding into itself. Behind and within the duck-in-flight is a duck swimming on the lake moments before. Behind and within the gray driftwood branch is a willow branch once green and flexible. Behind and within the young man headed off to college on a train is maybe a little boy delightfully voicing the letters on his alphabet blocks.
9. Consider a nine-volt battery cell, and the many ways in which its power can be converted into something that might almost be described as a skill. For instance in the context of a smoke detector, the power of the nine-volt can sniff out burning toast. Or in the context of a weather radio, the nine volts of a nine-volt can deliver the weather forecast.
10. Consider the human systems that we humans have created: the nation state, the global economy, our schools and our many venues of work. Into what, by means of the algorithmic gears of these systems, is the power of our human consciousness converted? Whose benefit do these conversions serve?
11. Think over your daily routine. Ask yourself: is this a vibrant and purposeful routine--one that (say) like the hydrologic cycle, beautifully, perpetually, feeds itself? Or as a total sum of striving does it seem more purposeless and empty--a mouse forced with shocks to remain on a treadmill, or a car spinning its wheels in deepening snow? 
12. How much needs changing? Where must that change begin?

Until Saturday the 5th!

HB