Acknowledging All of Existence

If you read the earliest articles in this blog from five or six years ago, you will notice some posts that deal with fairly esoteric stuff. During that time period, around 2008, I was trying to work out some of the leftover trappings of my juvenile and young adult years, when I was what Ken Wilber would describe as embedded in a Red or Magic Stage of thinking. Even into my time at the next Stage, which is Blue, I clung to many of the items described here, and it was not until my major crisis that took me to the Stage after that, Orange, which I divorced myself from all matters esoteric. I swore by what could be seen and determined scientifically.

It was a healthy separation. My life was not good in the days when I paid attention to esoteric matters. It improved several-fold once I just denied everything in those "realms" and simply existed in the Now. I put a much-needed separation between me and those things. I understood that some people still needed them, but they were at a different place, albeit an equally valid one. That was my Green Stage.

It was this article by Ken Wilber that recently hit me. It's one of those things that you've read a hundred times, but you never actually "see" it until you are ready. In this article, Wilber talks about the stages of meditation that are experienced when people practice regularly. The overall theme is that in open meditation you observe and take into account all of existence at once, and then you detach from your identity and witness everything. Well what struck me this time is that the Subtle level of existence, where all your garden variety ghosts and ghouls reside, is part of that totality of existence! If you separate yourself from it, or deny that part of existence, you are denying a real part of it.

The interesting thing is that as I come back around to this again, I am seeing it differently. No longer am I embedded in the horrors of that Subtle world. Instead, I see it as part of me. I AM that world, just as when I look up at the sky and the clouds drifting lazily by, I am that too. How can you be all of the physical things in the "real" world and not also all of the things in the "dream" world? The witnessing presence encompasses everything. Oneness includes everything, and nothing.