A Very Special Task

You are the Master of the Dream, and you are here for a very special task: to reanimate the world with wonder.

Until now, awareness has been the background of your waking life, and thought was the foreground. Awareness as pure space was so obscured by the chatter of your thoughts, that you were not even aware of awareness!

Now there is a foreground-background shift. Presence solidifies. Pure awareness emerges as the primary substance of your experience, as your mind, with all its anxious thinking, all its images of past and future, subsides into background noise, and finally fades into silence.

Those who allow this shift to happen find that their time has come. They lead the world into a new intuitive lifestyle. They function not from the field of mind, but from the field of intuition, which is the spontaneous guidance of the heart. And they teach humanity to make peace through simple Presence. For them, Being predominates over Doing.

Our civilization will no longer be dominated by mind, with its insatiable desires, appetites, obsessions, and fears, its need to own and consume, its addiction to never-ending arguments and conflict.

Humanity's economic and political problems will be solved very directly, not by engaging in economic and political activism, but by DIS-engaging in the behaviors that were causing injustice. Humans will simply rest in the heart as radiant consciousness. And this rest will bring so much fulfillment, such waves of love, that self-destructive behaviors like greed, lust and violent competition will not arise.

All this transformation of our ethical life will happen as a result of merely seeing the real nature of the world. The transformation will not come on the level of religion, ethics, or government, but through the physics of consciousness.

Every proton of solid "matter" is made of subtler quarks and anti-quarks, who themselves are made of mesons, baryons and gluons, which are no-thing but waves of pure space with no actual location. Each apparent "particle" is not a particle at all, but an excitation of the entire vacuum of empty space.

Therefor the most solid material object is composed not of any stuff that we can call "matter" at all. What then is it made of? Waves of the all-pervading void, or what physicists call "fluctuations of the vacuum."

If the content is empty, then what of its form? The form of the object is a ghost of akashic memory, a repeating tremor of space. This form is ceaselessly filled and emptied by the vibrations of emptiness which are, in the final analysis, the only particles of the world. Nothing is solid or permanent. All instantaneously appears and dissolves. As the Medieval mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck wrote, "The world is re-created each moment out of nothing."

Yet emptiness is ineluctable joy. This was the teaching of the Buddha, and it will be the ultimate message of physics. The nature of the vacuum is not mere abstraction, but consciousness. Space is awake. And when we awaken to our true nature, we see that, just as particle-waves interpenetrate one another in the vacuum, as non-localized waves of wholeness, so you are happening in the space of me, and I am happening in the space of you.

Pure consciousness is a diverse community! It interacts with itself as other-ness, in love, for the sake of love. We love our neighbor AS our Self, because our neighbor IS our Self.

So let us not be deluded by the myth of materialism. It is time to deepen our perception, until the background emerges as foreground, and spirit outshines matter. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world."

His kingdom is the vibrant field of awakened space, the silence of the vacuum singing and resonating in its own emptiness. When he said, "I have overcome the world," he did not mean that there was a conflict, but that Christ-consciousness irradiates the earth, illuminating every body. New wine bursts the old wineskin. We no longer behold a material world, but a world transfigured in the glory of being merely what it is, the vibrancy of consciousness.

Even the blow of a hammer is emptiness striking emptiness. The world does not have to be overcome; it simply dissolves into its actual Being, a marvelous mirage, shimmering in the clarity of the awakened Self.

When you realize this primordial empty wisdom, you have nothing to prove, nothing to regret, and nothing to attain. You flow like a river, rest like a cloud, and hold the mountain like a feather in your sky.



Photo: Mt. Rainier, taken by my brother David on our recent hike.