Human essence extends from arth to the highest heights of consciousness and power. Ultimately, it touches upon the unknowable numinous experience.
We live in the sphere where our consciousness ais anchored. When the focus of our consciousness and consequently our identification shift, we experience other layers of being and of the cosmos.
Sound constitutes the original creative force. Vibration creates and sustains form.The sound of origin is transformed and enters into increasingly concrete forms, becoming form itselfthroughout all cosmic realms. Therefore, it can be said that everything originates and is expressed from a primordial harmony However, it can also be said that the primordial consciousness that entered into form with energy is no longer awake within us Rather, we live with it as if it were a distant memory. We live in separation, even though we seek connection, harmony, and breadth. Between our current identity and primordial sound, dissonances pile up like waves coming from the wide ocean and breaking on the shore. The shore is steep, and our identity still lives primarily within the boundaries it creates.
The Instrument
Nonetheless, we are instruments in which the primordial sound can resonate, in which God can not only express himself, but
also experience the diversity that is enclosed within him. Rumi (1207-1273) states that Man is God’s astrolabe. Such an astrolabe is an astronomical navigation instrument, a star reader. In its three-dimensional formwhich resembles a globe, it shows the sky from the outside, just as the microcosmic human being has stepped out of unity as the externalization of God, so to speak. But the sky must be read so that we can orient ourselves on earth. Rumi explains it this way: Man is a sensory organ of God, a mirror that makes both man and God recognizable. Only God himself can use the astrolabe. Yet in the hands of the astronomer, the astrolabe is extremely useful since those who know themselves know their Lord. When the inner God awakens, the navigational instrument is used. Heavenly spheres are read, their powers flow transformatively into the earthly path of life. Reading the heavens then meansrecognizing one’s own position on earth anew; and understanding the divine energy fields where one’s junction point is locatedand using them for awakening without resisting.
Destruction, transformation, new creation
Are you familiar with the theory of inherent vibration? Every object has its own natural frequency. Bridges that soldiers walk across in a certain rhythm; glasses that are sung to canboth break. If an object is stimulated in its natural frequency, its vibration can become so strong that it is destroyed. This is called resonance catastrophe (at least in German). Is it death, is it liberation of the essence?
Paracelsian medicine assumes that the healing essence of a plant can only be extracted when its earthly, primary form dies through decay. The good or spiritual and the evil or material can then be separated from each other and the healing elements extracted. The first life, in which good and evil are inseparably mixed, as Paracelsus writes in his Opus Paramirum, must die so that a rebirth can take place in which the secret truths and healing powers come to light. Thus, decay is recognized as a necessary process in the cycle of life, filtering out purity and helpful properties from decomposition.
Paracelsus also speaks of the extraction of quintessence in the human being—his purest, divine essence. This does not only happen at physical death, when the quintessence helps to prepare for the next incarnation. As an alchemist, Paracelsus knows of death in life, which, through conscious work on oneself, can liberate one’s inner quintessence during one’s lifetime.
This can be either scary or uplifting when looking for harmony with your roots and end up facing mystical death as a deep transformation. The picture becomes clearer when one learns to see the aforementioned transformation process from the perspective of the identities that humans can assume, from mortal individuals to the All-One, even further to an origin that is neither being nor non-being. Our problem remains the shell of our identity which opens or breaks.
Do we leave everything behind when we embark on the path to higher states and abandon our old shell? One facet of the answer is thatwe celebrate our departure and take off. That which was and enabled us to take off has actually become internally recognizable as essence. It is a healing medicine that has become our true possession through departure and taking off. Think of something that has become so deeply anchored in you as an experience that you can never lose it. The time of the experience may seem distant, strange, even foreign, but the essence is fresh and present because it comes from a completed experience.
Vessels
We humans are like vessels contained within finer vessels. A life-giving energy resonates in all of them, more subtle orcoarse. The finer vessel is the life-giver and shapes the coarser one. Perhaps the primordial sound is already translating into an entire symphony within ourselves. Our soul life is very concrete and differentiated and it is the sum of many lives. No other person can produce the sound that resonates within us. However, the richness we can experience and embody within ourselves is so much greater when we know how to integrate ourselves into a cosmic symphony.
The symphony does not always play within us. Fears, desires, and conflicts destroy the harmony. However, they also show that we are searching for harmony with the greater vessel, for more breadthwidth—a search that cannot reach its goal by ego in the limitation of matter. This is not only about entering a higher state of vibration, but also about finding a new identity that no longer fights for what is its own: its sphere of influence, its possessions, security, and self-preservation, because it no longer seeks what is its own in the old sense. Can we expand our being so that instead of the clash of opposing energies, resonances arise? Here, an inner alchemy can begin that brings forth a new birth from the ashes of futility. Souls take the experience of seclusion with them on their journey to a different kind of individual being. First we sought to contain the sea in a drop, then we discovered that we are the sea. It touches us right from the very beginning.
The vibrating vessel always produces the sound. What changes along the way perhaps even from the very beginning? The boundary between us and “everything else” loses its fear-filled rigidity; it no longer needs to be a bulwark or a weapon, but rather becomes a flexible means of connection and exchange. We can listen to others and respond to their sound. Others respond to us. A huge orchestra is improvised together and conquers worlds of sound.
On the path to more encompassing vessels, there is silence again and again. When restlessness, conflict, searching, and thinking cease, a space of silence emerges for a few moments. Nothing else becomes audible right away. Nevertheless, this silence has qualities. It is creative, it is unifying, both inwardly and outwardly. It brings forth other movements within us, a different way of hearing, seeing, acting, encountering. The post-modern individual has passed through the eye of the needle of their self-discovery projects and their boundaries and has surrendered everything to a still unknown, larger space. They listen for their true self and find a deep-seated current they can follow. Transformation!
For us as earthly beings, what we encounter there remains hidden. Our central perspective cannot grasp the essence of the whole, but it learns to resonate with it. Man is the mystery of God. God is the mystery of man according to Abd al Qadr al Jilani, the 12th-century Sufi. God hides behind many veils, behind countless states of consciousness and vibration. And at the same time, he is all of them. Rumi, in turn, encourages his readers with these words: Stop being so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Sometimes I wonder what the purpose is of my physical vessel, which is unthinkable without boundaries. What ways of being, what experiences are only possible here? Perhaps we had to walk the path of self-discovery to this frontier, where defining ourselves as an actual limitation is possible, so that we can set out from here toward the unlimited. Nevertheless, I am convinced that even in physical form, the primordial sound can vibrate again if we let go of ourselves, if we dare to move from the fixed outline with its dark, searching center to becoming a pure-sounding instrument and a path. Then everything concrete that can manifest itself through our lives becomes a facet of the divine within us.
So advantage is had
From whatever is there;
But usefulness rises
From whatever is not.(Lao Tse, Tao Te King, Chapter 11)
