Opening into nature

In the video that I had watched of Normandi Ellis being interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove (the main topic of yesterday’s blog), Jeffrey had asked Normandi that as she had been translating and studying hieroglyphs for decades, how had it changed her? She replied that it has made her more open to seeing the natural world as the divine world, because she said that that is the first thing that you have to pay attention to when doing the hieroglyphs i.e. the spiritual signature of the glyph that you are translating. She offered an example of when she is looking at a hieroglyph for a tree and notices the branching of the leaves and associates it with the spirit nature that goes into bifurcation that becomes the lineage of the ladder. She shares that it is as if that whole linear thought disappears and it is just the symbol at that point – the connection that her eye makes, her heart makes, a sense of sound and she somehow bypasses the mind.

The next thing she says captures my attention because I am sensing that what she is speaking of is an attribute of perception that is capable of both embodying and transcending time. She says that if she has a hieroglyph of a dung beetle, everyone might say ‘yes that’s a scarab, they were put on the heart of dead people’ but the beetle meant ‘to become, to create, to be something, to initiate something, to begin’. She gives an Egyptian sentence which sounds like multiple dung beetles being repeated over or of several translations of just one beetle and is essentially ‘in the beginning I became the becoming being what I created'.

Even as I begin to express that sentence, I can sense how it is working (and perhaps this is a glimmer of how ancient Egyptians viewed magic, as in capable of transforming or shifting a level of awareness) to collapse and rebuild my concept of the linear and of structure of things. How often do we think in terms of and are able to describe a chain of events and through viewing it in an abstract way, seem to detach both it and ourselves from the integrity of an inherent and creative process, that of life? As we do, it is as if we are speaking with a dead tongue and of a dead place and yet it is simply a mode of perception - but what is the effect of our thinking in a life-denying way when it comes to our heart’s desire of experiencing ourselves in the midst of a unity of creation and how does it shape our actions?

Back to the video and Jeffrey Mishlove returns to the metaphor of a ladder and how it is related to a process of ascension and the connection to sacred realms. He says that what Normandi evokes is that every symbol is a different way of connecting with the sacred. Normandi points out that when you see the Sufi dancers (swirling dervishes), the sound and the movement is taking them into a spiral and they are in the midst of an ecstatic experience. She says that that is how hieroglyphs are for her – the dance of the sound, the language, the meaning, as if she is taking from one edge of a sky, then another, then another and is weaving something from that – to other people it might just be a word, but to her it is ‘the sound of God’. A potency. She says that when you start thinking hieroglyphically, you start seeing the whole world as an ‘illuminated’ text.

As she says this, my thoughts move to how sacred manuscripts of some our most cherished beliefs about the world of nature and of the divine were always so exquisitely illustrated. It was not just about conveying the words or the thoughts alone but a feeling and a sense of beauty, that of reverence, which went along with them. Gradually, the scripts were changed and instead of being filled with images, it became perhaps just one image at the start of a chapter or even of a stylised letter, to give but a taste of any message of what the subsequent text would contain.

Something was undeniably lost in that, some essence, some sense of wonder of the natural world and of the beauty of the divine combined. When that embodiment of life is lost, there would inevitably be little more than a husk remaining, a small flame which people would either have to rekindle in their own heart in order for their being and actions to be authentic in the world - or they would move into a less enlivened realm of contrast and of judgment, one of duality as they lost touch with the sacred.

I know from experience that an essence of that flame remains in the midst of the coldest of landscapes. To move into a glimpse of this, Jeffrey points out the very video that he and Normandi are recording is like a hieroglyph. Normandi agrees and says that you could turn the sound off and watch just the gestures of the hands and they do something that creates meaning, as do the faces and the gestures and even the proximity of their bodies.

I am sensing that our capability of remaining open to whatever is present and of being willing for it to convey its story to us adds depth and texture to our comprehension of the world. An essence of communication is inclusive of a relationship between the transmitter and the receiver - the one who listens - which as the relationship deepens is both. It is as we digest or process such information (both consciously and subconsciously) and become more in tune with our own being, that we are aware of an enlivening sense of purpose, meaning and the presence of unity in the world.

To return to what I had said earlier about an essence of a flame remaining in the midst of the coldest of landscapes. What I am thinking about in this instance is the consumerist way of thinking that has taken hold throughout many of our cultures and is to do with ‘I want or need more and I do not have enough’ – a deadening and looping dissatisfaction with people, the world and with our own life experience itself, which can create a sense of isolation in an individual and despair.

It is a sticky state of being to free oneself from, because the mind and body’s initial reactions to what it perceives as its position are of that of grasping or clinging. Not even being obedient to any invocation or lessons with regards to virtue will free the mind of what it believes to be its reality. The problems of the mind are originating from how the mind is thinking, rather than of an actual presence or indeed absence of that which it believes is necessary to complete its image of perfection. The mind resists seeing its own reflection and is unwilling to perceive its own nature.

Our perception of reality has much to do with how we comprehend and navigate through space-time. We can listen to a voice of our heart which is capable of detecting patterns and forms in reality (even as our conscious mind might be unable) and which nurtures our experience of life and gives it a deepening sense of purpose and meaning. This can sustain a sense of trust, faith and hope until such time as our mind begins to open and we are more fully able to perceive a world of unity and of ourselves as an integral part.

What allows for the mind to open is a willingness to go beyond hubris and to transcend its concept of death and of that which has given rise for it to believe that a thing is either present or not. We believe that the range of our being and of our influence is finite, that we move in a linear timeline and that once something has moved out of our reach or our sight, that it might be gone for good. We have evolved a whole philosophy of effort and for that matter, of redemption, to be of supposed service in our being able to navigate this terrain. Quantum mechanics is revealing to us that reality is much more complex than we had realised and as we are able to hold and to embed more information in our consciousness, it will transform our image and understanding of our own nature.

Normandi says that the ancient Egyptians saw architecture for example as another form of hieroglyphic thinking. The way they put the temples together was a form of hieroglyphs. She says that if you look at the images on the walls, you will find spaces between the god and the pharaoh and if you shift your focus a little bit, you will find that the spaces themselves create hieroglyphs. Even the emptiness has a voice.

Jeffrey points out to Normandi that what he further understands the world of hieroglyphs has done for her is to open up a kind of shamanic vision, where she finds herself communicating with the ‘neteru’, the ancient gods or devas of ancient Egypt and they become living forces. She agrees and believes these living forces are there for anyone to receive if they have ‘eyes and ears to see and hear them’. She said that she found this called for her to release a lot of her ideas of what she thought something meant. In the early days, she said that she would gather as much information about Egypt and hieroglyphs as she could and then literally fall asleep on top of her books. Her husband would come into the room, awaken her and she would suddenly know what something she had been reading about meant. The quiet time inside the psyche was necessary for her to ‘do the whirl’ of the Sufi – Jeffrey identified it as the hypnagogic state of consciousness – and this enabled for her to know the symbolism of what something meant instead of it being one word or hieroglyph after another.

Jeffrey pointed out that what she was saying reminded him of Erich Fromm’s book ‘The Forgotten Language’ and dream interpretation. She agreed and said that the eye itself is a prominent Egyptian image and that there are a number of ways to look at an eye in a hieroglyphic text. She said that the eye can be portrayed as slightly lidded and represents to dream or imagine. If it is wide open, particularly with eyelashes around it, to become awake or aware of something. Other times it means to envision something and particularly if the eye is shown with impressions of sounds around it. The Osiris glyph is the eye above a throne and is symbolic of his ability to see on his throne in the darkness, a hypnagogic state that he is in and of his being able to comprehend his experience of life in that way.

I would say that a recurring theme of any determinants and insights that we might have of what is the nature of reality is ‘how do we know that we know?’ Just pulling out a couple of the messages which have been conveyed through this blog:

   

~ what allows for the mind to open into deepening meaning and perception of unity is a willingness to go beyond hubris and to transcend a concept of death and of what has given rise for the mind to believe that a thing is either present or it’s not

~ a willingness to release a lot of ideas of what the mind thinks something means and of allowing space to enrich any meaning
~ a hypnagogic state

Much of our philosophy and spiritual literature relates to the pursuit and nature of sacred awakening – inner eye opening – it is also the message of the ‘dark night of the soul’ and of the ‘hero’s quest’ of being willing to descend into a primordial darkness of not knowing and of returning to the world with a gift of knowing (gnosis).

There is a response which Albert Einstein gave to the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard on being asked about Einstein’s thought processes, Einstein said: 

“The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.”

He also said: “It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins)"

The above quotations of Einstein are from "A Mathematician's Mind, Testimonial for An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques S. Hadamard, Princeton University Press, 1945”

With regards to the fulfilment of our evolutionary potential as a species, the writer and activist Duane Elgin has shared that: "I believe “that our core evolutionary potential as a species lies largely unnoticed in the scientific name that we have given to ourselves. It is well understood in the scientific literature that our name is not simply Homo sapiens or "wise humans". Rather, we are Homo sapiens sapiens or "doubly wise humans". Where animals have the capacity "to know", we humans have the capacity "to know that we know" and the ability to bring a reflective consciousness into our lives." 

To close this blog is to share an extract from T S Eliot's Little Gidding which is the last of his Four Quartets: 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one