I find myself standing, watching many people line up, some of them talking to each other. I suddenly hear a disruptive sound and vehicle comes, crossing my view. In its wake, the street is soon empty. Beyond it, the pedestrians are trying to get somewhere, hurried, distracted, some of them frantically entering the building on the left. I raise my gaze and see a rainbow in the newly cleaned sky. I look for its beginning and its end and I find them. It is a rainbow with two ends kissing the horizon.

I feel an emotion in my chest that rises like small waves towards my throat, towards my jaw, towards my eyes. The humidity in the environment feels warm. A passerby stops next to me and looks in the same direction. However, he quickly resumes his conversation on the cell phone and leaves. I am immersed in something, a kind of fountain of energy where everything vibrates, bustles, swarms, and lives: the busy people, the erratic cars, the nearby buildings, the trees, the man with the cell phone, the rainbow.  Even the gray asphalt underneath my feet, everything here is in the same fountain of energy including my skin, my sight, my smell, the emotion that tries to reach my eyes, and my ephemeral thoughts.

I am here and now. Everything around me is also here and now.  We are always immersed in this fountain of energy and life. Sometimes I don’t know. But this time I do know.

P.D. Ouspensky: I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality.

 Reality is not something we perceive, but something we interact with.  Placing myself at a central or marginal point of the present moment, in order to witness it, produces in me the phenomenon of judgment. As a witness to this moment, I usually have an opinion about it.  You could find it beautiful, sublime; or on the contrary difficult, somber, or uncertain.  Each of these judgments that sneak into my being with subtle subterfuges are like colored glasses. They prevent me from being able to understand, to be part of, and to create reality moment by moment.

 By immersing myself in the fountain of present life, however, I can simply be one more element of everything that exists now. I can be one more dancer in this play that reveals itself at every moment. This occasions an emotional perplexity within those parts of me that are more open and receptive.  Objective reality takes me and disintegrates me, turning what I usually perceive as “I” into a dance of molecules moving to the sound of the inevitable.

Plotinus: Our question lies with the ideal reality that exists behind appearances.

William Blake: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

We are taught that reality exists outside of us. It is the world of objects, of tables and chairs. People say “hard, cold reality”. Esoteric science teaches that the invisible worlds are reality. In Fourth Way terminology, reality is worlds 12 and 6, 3 and 1. These worlds have a far greater component of energy than of matter. They are perceptible to our higher centers. We can only echo such experiences with words. They create a special kind of memory. All the great teachings say that we exist inside of reality, and that it exists inside of us.

In these teachings, things that we can see are usually taken as illusion, and things we cannot see are taken as real. We cannot perceive reality due to the wall of imagination, the endless turning of thoughts in our mind. To connect with reality, we need to change our state of consciousness. This is a long process that requires a special kind of “outside help.” By developing and prolonging consciousness, we become co-creators of the reality described above in this article.

When I find myself in a subjective state, dazed by my own colored glasses and unable to interact with the reality of my surroundings, I try to remember the nature of my contribution to the present moment. This is to be nothing more than an excited child, sitting on her knees in one of the audience chairs, about to create with her own laughter and joy, at the most exquisite moment just when the magician finally reveals what is in the hat.

R.M.Rilke: Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so painfully and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again “invisibly.” We are the bees of the Invisible. We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible. The Duino Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.) 

David Tuttle and Elisa Edner are long-time Fourth Way students. For other recent articles from David for FourthWayToday.org, see here: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/david/ and from Elisa: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/elisa-eidner/ and jointly at: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/david-tuttle-and-elisa-eidner/.

For more on the Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duino_Elegies.