Aliyah Marr: Faith, Hope, and Insomnia

I awaken before dawn, unable to return to sleep. It is the longest night of the year, cold to the core. I think about ancient people and how they knew to track the path of the sun and the seasons; they celebrated the winter solstice through the evergreen tree. Did they long for the heat of the summer in the depths of the cold and dark? Or did they have such a connection to nature that they could simply sense things in their bones and act accordingly?

I tend to believe that ancient people were less rational, so belief to them wasn't merely a mental construct of memory, forecasting and social conditioning, as it is today. I think that they had reasoning capacity, but they didn’t need to use it — perhaps it was an auxiliary or even a potential tool, something that they didn’t need to use ordinarily. Instead they knew things the way that animals know when to store food, to hibernate or the way a flock of birds can pivot instantaneously in mid flight, turning as if with one mind.

One day, at the lake I was in a state of inner silence, watching everything around me: it seemed that I was watching a single being; more than that, I was inside this being, observing it. The rain came from the top of this being, drizzling on another part of the being — the water below. Everything was functioning in harmony with everything else like cells in a huge body or consciousness. The flying geese were following a channel inside this being to land on the water: they intended themselves forward through the air.

They could fly, not so much because they have the wings to do so, but because the intent of flying is a groove of behavior in this huge earth-consciousness. From this standpoint, it is easy to believe that there is a meta-consciousness dreaming the world and all the creatures therein.

Our modern outsider status vis-à-vis this meta-dream is beautifully illustrated in the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. The humans in this story "fall" from the earth dream; they experience isolation because they have developed individual consciousness. That peculiar bent of mind, the reason, is what keeps the human out of the paradise of the meta-consiousness, and has relegated us to the position in nature of exploiter or observer.

It is why we are all on an eternal search for our lost connection with nature, with the collective (non-human) dream of the earth. Anyone who has tried to "go back to Nature" quickly realizes the futility of the task. Modern man lives in an artificial world, a construct of a collective human dream. In a way, we are like bees in a hive, any one of us who is outside the social collective cannot live for long.

The Western ideal of the individual and our romantic ideas about nature quickly fade when faced with the huge task of surviving alone outside human society. It is not a matter of being suddenly without the comforts of civilization; rather it is that the human has been shaped somehow by the collective human dream; and we cannot now live outside its structure.

Yet if we are to finally connect again with nature we have to do it with our full selves, and that means that we cannot go back to a pre-Fall state; we have to take Reason with us. From the standpoint of Reason, it seems an impossible task, but from another, more intuitive point, it is the easiest thing in the world. One just relaxes into a channel of intent, and intends oneself forward. This is what I call Faith.

Of course the hardest part of this process is that for us to do this, we have to give up our cherished sense of superiority. One cannot be part of the meta-consciousness while feeling superior to any other part of the whole.

I propose that our fear of death might actually be a fear of losing control and individuality. For most of us it seems a shattering idea that our individual selves — our egos — might actually disappear. Why do we preserve the body when we die? What if instead, we had the custom of allowing the body to naturally disintegrate into the earth, feeding with our matter the matter that fed us during our lifetime; how would our general consciousness be different? Would we be able to better feel our connection to nature, our debt and appreciation to the life and consciousness that sustains us?

I once read a marvelous book, The Holographic Universe (by Michael Talbot), that seemed to make this connection to an implied meta-consiousness through science. The book used the hologram as a model for the way the universe works. A hologram is a film that contains an apparent 3D image. The image is projected into space when light is passed through the film. The mystery is that if the film is cut into little pieces, each piece will still project the whole image.

One of the things I love about this concept is how it confounds my reason, but it makes absolute sense to my non-rational self. I intuit the truth of this; it sounds right to me. That same self knows already that a particle of matter can exist in two places at once, one of the core mysteries of quantum physics.

That paragon of linear thinking — science — has finally come full circle, and is parting the veil of the mystery, to find another puzzle, a paradox, a koan, underneath. This connection with the Meta-Consciousness was once branded as a kind of paganism by religious leaders who had a fear of the power of right-brained thinking, but it is what their own mystics were experiencing as God.

Aliyah Marr is a multimedia artist, interactive designer, published author, teacher, transformative coach, personal trainer, and motivational speaker. She is the author / artist of the Transformational Tarot.

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