indivisible oneness

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even know that it exists." - Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

I have no interest in reading books from cover to cover any longer although I'll flip through a few pages to catch what sparkles through as gems, but mostly they seem to float at an edge of a surface realm, unwilling to plumb or dive. They bore me, rather than boring into depths. For most part, I've turned to children's books, which feel more honest - plus fun - just checked out today from the Alvar St. Library: Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest and Wynton Marsalis' poetic Jazz A-B-Z.

There is only one book that I did read cover to cover in one sitting lately: The Dark Places of Wisdom, by Peter Kinsgley.

"All through school and University I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps." - E .F. Schumacher (also author of the classic, Small is Beautiful)

Today marks the start of the Chinese New Year. Often Eastern mysticism is considered just that - Eastern, and of no relation or revelance to Western civilization. In one of my favorite excerpts from the book, (and it asks more questions than it answers) you begin to see that there were many-to-many influences throughout the ancient world. And these earliest Greek philosophers (lovers of truth/wisdom/sophia) were not afraid to be as gods: being-awareness:

"A iatromantis was concerned with indivisible oneness. His concern was very practical. What for us are impossible barriers were, for him, just places to put his feet. When you become familiar with a world beyond the senses, space and time don't hold much reality any more.

For the Greeks the god of this state of awareness was Apollo. In his consciousness space and time mean nothing. He can see or be anywhere; past and future are as present as the present is for us. And so he was a god of ecstasy, trance, cataleptic states - of states that take you somewhere. There was a single word in Greek to express this; it meant 'taken by Apollo'.

Apollo's ecstasy was different than the ecstasy of Dionysus. There was nothing wild or disturbing about it. It was intensely private, for the individual and the individual alone. And it happened in such stillness that anyone else might hardly notice it or could easily mistake it for something else. But in this total stillness there was total freedom at another level.

On that other level the freedom from space and time is simply a fact. Doubting it doesn't affect it in the slightest, and neither does believing it: beliefs or doubts don't touch here. To convey a sense of this freedom, one name given to those priests of Apollo was 'skywalker' - a term used as far east as Tibet ['skydancer'] and Mongolia in just the same way.

Because the state of consciousness they knew is beyond time and space isn't to say that it's separate from time and space: by its very nature it's separate from separation. This has become so difficult to appreciate. Either we deny the existence of other states of awareness, or else we put them in a hierarchy somewhere out of reach. And yet the separation is only in our own minds.

These people didn't exist independent of the physical world, and their freedom showed through at every level of their existence. It's no accident that they came from the towns and areas of Greece most famous for daring and adventure, for contacts with foreigners, for long-distance travel. What's also significant is the way all of them either lived on the eastern edges of the Greek world - the Black Sea, Anatolia, Crete - or were born into families that had emigrated from there.

And so many things about them are so close to the shamanic traditions of Central Asia or Siberia that the similarities have been noticed time and time again. Nowadays this tends to create a problem. Most historians have their particular field of interest, are afraid of what lies outside. They like to say the Iatromantis is a purely Greek phenomenon and dismiss the similarities as a coincidence. But they're not a coincidence at all.

The particular kind of techniques used by magical healers in Crete simply confirms what was already discovered long ago: the closeness of Crete's contacts with Babylonians and Mesopotamia. And even more significant are the earliest Greek reports about Iatromantis figures - reports about how they'd travel up to and down from regions far to the north and east of Greece, how they'd pass through areas inhabited by Iranian tribes that were shamanic cultures in their own right adn then on into Siberia and Central Asia.

Just a few traces survive of the poetry those people wrote describing their own journeys. But those traces ae informative enough. They contain clear evidence of familiarity with Iranian languages as well as with the myths of Central Asia, Mongolia, Tibet. And that's only a part of the picture. Objects and inscriptions have also been found that show a continuity of shamanic traditions stretching all the way from the boundaries of Greece across Asia to the Himalayas and Tibet, Nepal and India.

We think now of East and West. But then there were no real lines to be drawn. The oneness experienced by the Iatromantis on another level of awareness left its mark in the physical world. Even to talk about influence is to limit the reality of what was one vast network of nomads, of travellers, of individuals who lived in time and space but also were in touch with something else.

The way so many stories and practices associated with the Iatromantis in Greece have their exact parallels among shamans, and the way they keep occuring in the traditions of Indian yoga as well: this is more than a coincidence. What would soon be covered over and rationalized in Greece was preserved and developed in India. What in the West had been an aspect of mystery, of initiation, became classified and formalized in the East. And there the state glimpsed or experienced by Greeks - the state that could be called a dream but isn't an ordinary dream, that's like being awake but isn't being awake, that's like being asleep but isn't - had its own names. Sometimes it was simply referred to as the 'fourth', turiya. It became better known by the title of samadhi.

Nothing would be easier than to think these traditions never took root in the West, or to believe that even if they did they were never of any importance for the history of Western culture. But that's not the case. Just one of the people whose poetry has repeatedly been mentioned over the past century - without anyone quite understanding the why or how - as an example of shamanic poetry in the West is Parmenides."

Paramenides is often called the father of philosophy.

"Always we want to learn from outside, from absorbing other people's knowledge. It's safer that way. The trouble is that it's always other people's knowledge. We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and stars inside." - Peter Kingsley, The Dark Places of Wisdom

Art credits Flame of Love by Brenda Clews via her blog, Rubies in Crystal. http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2006/08/flame-of-love.html

Comments

[Romy]

“Do not place the words of gurus, ministers, priests, scientists, psychologists, friends – or my words – higher than the feeling of your own being. You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself. Your own consciousness is embarked upon a reality that basically can be experienced by no other, that is unique and untranslatable, with its own meaning, following its own paths of becoming” – Seth/Jane Roberts (The Nature of Personal Reality)

Seth, by the way, identifies the mystics with one of the nine families of intent/consciousness. Mysticism as a family of consciousness is a worldcentric phenomenon and is not the privilege of any race, creed, or ideology. http://www.newworldview.com/library/Helfrich_P_Seth_Jane_Concept_Overview.html#Who. Much less of the east or the west, as Peter Kingsley says.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Romy, Thanks for sharing. I particularly loved "the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself."