I’ve been meaning to share this jewel of insight from my friend Cliff for a month, but I needed to get past the summer doldrums and re-engage with my blog. I’m taking a week off to refresh my thinking in the Shenandoah, but when I get back I’ll be ready to jump back into Berggruen and California eugenics. Next week I hope to visit several institutions in Virginia that played important roles in scaling forced sterilization – the Buck versus Bell case. Stay tuned.
Until then, soak up the teachings of a dear friend and enjoy the charming animated short he commissioned to share tools from his toolbox with the rest of the world.
You can find more insights from Cliff on his Youtube channel here.
“Maybe we don’t walk off the stage and leave the world and life behind when our body dies. The framing of the story generally believed in now claims the world we see is an independent reality. It says we’re separate from it and each other. It says we live brief lives and then die. It says an individual life is of no great consequence to life itself. Adopting that frame and consequently experiencing our life through that lens is a choice we’re responsible for making and we can change our minds. We’re capable of letting go of the belief that our life is of no consequence and that bodily death is the end. We can consciously choose to live our lives from within a different frame in mind.
I’ve chosen to live in a different story, and my choice didn’t arise from nothing. It’s drawn from the contents of my experience. My experience is the only truth I claim, and my experience showed me the world isn’t what I imagined it to be.
Everything I imagined as a separate world, an independent reality, I see now as a reflective surface where ideas representing life appear. Seen newly, I understand the world to be intimately connected to me because, after the rendering an idea in mind, an image of myself is reflected on the surface commonly called the world. My body is an image of me, a reflection on the surface that the world is, the reflection of an idea in my listening, the idea of my identity.
What I imagine as myself and the world is influenced. I didn’t dream the story up alone and without the influence of something else in mind. In mind at large, you don’t get something from nothing as you do in the story of the Big Bang. Children don’t magically appear from nowhere; a stork doesn’t bring them; they’re the result of combining information, of one person sharing their story with another. Your story of the world arrived in your listening, so it’s worth paying attention and noticing what it is you’re listening to. Your listening is always under the influence because you’re not alone in an empty universe making something from nothing. For the sake of your experience of life, it’s worth noticing what it is that’s influencing you.
If you’re unhappy with the image of yourself you see in the mirror and the conditions you see in the world, address it in mind, where what influenced the picture of yourself and the world exists, rather than pretending your appearance or the appearance of the world is whatever you interpret it to be. Rather than attempt to force others to agree with your interpretation, take responsibility for your listening and the influences in mind that, together with you, produced the biological art that represents yourself and the world. Living in an interpretation of what you see on a surface that only reflects ideas held in mind compounds a mistake that lead you away from your creative power in the first place.
Maybe we don’t ever leave the world because it’s not a place, but is instead the influenced reflection of ideas in mind. We can begin to address the deception we find here, one of the influences in mind, by taking the stand that we’re responsible for the area of mind at large where our local signal arrives, the attachment point to mind at large where we notice it coming, the place where what we think of as the thoughts we have arrive.
Before trying to effect a change in the collective signal that informs the shared space of the cultural mind, we should familiarize ourselves with learning to manage our reception at our access point, our unique IP address, and our internal antenna settings there. I don’t think we ever wake up and leave, but instead wake up and expand by gaining bandwidth, by sending our listening out to a previously unknown horizon while simultaneously diving further into the depths of our hearts.
There’s a place to communicate from beyond the babel that world culture has on offer, a place where you can strike a clear tone of intention that will penetrate our current cultural mind like an earthquake. You can offer something there that becomes visible art, a communication that transmits comprehension without the need for language such that any
aspect or lineage of life, of being itself, can understand it.
From intention, sound can rise into art that shakes the ground of unconscious consensus and individual misunderstanding. Through such communication, you can topple what were assumed to be permanent structures of deception. With a clear and heartfelt tone rising up that all can see, you can wreak havoc on the very foundations of the lie from which all iterations of it are derived.
Be still once awake and help build a listening path that others might follow to a place for communication from which what you share is heard by all. The narrow band of listening most people inhabit now, and the misconceptions that drive its limitations, can be swept gently aside in the presence of the art of love. Qualities of being can become sound, can become clean, comprehensible tones that rise up as art and bypass the language center and all its chaos. These deep heartfelt tones don’t require a language system of comprehension to dissolve the signal attachment of the temporarily deceived.
In listening, there’s a way to commune with and internalize the soft heart tones of any beautiful mind. You can set them free to be amplified and empowered at the broadcast point on that distant horizon, a place that has an umbilical connection to the center of the universe, to the community still point of life itself that exists in every heart. Don’t exit what you think of as life behind a story influenced by something unkind. Instead, step out of an unkind story and into an empowered one. You’ll hear it if you listen for it. Find your way to a place of empowered communication that gives you access to the center of the living universe where it exists in every heart, and say something beautiful and kind.
If one day soon you hear something that sounds like soft birdsong slowly building into a universe-spanning hurricane of vibrational music that rises as visible art and remakes DNA in its passing, be unafraid as your vision blurs. The world shimmers before appearing again anew.
When you come to your senses and realize you can see auras, smell lies, and taste deceit as easily as you can tell mint from cinnamon, be at ease because you’ve been upgraded courtesy of communication worthy of being shared into the heart of the matter, information that makes it possible to change one’s mind and so alters the surface reflection of ideas in mind that appear as the world we see with our eyes.
If you’re calm and still and listen, you’ll hear the soft beginnings of a distant symphony of such communication that’s already begun and is making its way inward to the center of the universe, which has always been at home at the still point inside you. Surrender as it approaches in awareness, relax and let it in.”
Gorgeous writing and sentiments.
Very interesting insights that remind me of Henry David Thoreau:
‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts’.
Thanks Cliff!