HOW TO EXPERIENCE THE BIG BANG: INSIGHTS FROM SHAMANIC JOURNEYING

 

Let’s start with the light from your screen. Let’s start with the light that comes out of the light socket. Let’s start with the glint of the sun on water, the arc and umbra of the moon, the weave and play of gold and brown as shadow works its way across my wooden dresser in the late afternoon.

 There are lights upon lights. The light we see is only our small fractalized bounce in the great pulse of light. If it has an end, it is in the beginning. Trace it back, from when you flick the switch, and turn on your own little light bringer, all the way to the source of all light, where all lights vanish, where light dies in light. All things at source became lit, en-lightened. There is nothing in the universe that has not been lit.* If it is now occulted, yet in the distant past it was lit. It is thus known. There is nothing that has not at one stage been known.

 I am here trying to describe something that is more than metaphor but not quite an equivalence. By ‘known’ I mean illuminated or revealed. I am talking about the original revelation. There is nothing that is not known from the source of it all, from what the Kabbalists call Ein Sof, the one that made the light burst out of the singularity.

 

This is exposing. And the realization of it exposes me. The deepest earth has been lit. My inner organs, unless breached by injury, have never been outside of me, but they have been lit. The dark side of the moon has been lit. There is no true darkness here, only things that have been occulted for aeons, or a lifetime. Seen on that scale, darkness is just like putting one hand over another. Seen on another scale, there is nothing about me (or any being) that has not been seen, known, loved....and forgiven.

 

Some of us have asked what is outside of that causal reality of light. The darkness was there first after all. It is called the void, Kore in Maori, Ginunngagap in Norse cosmogony, the singularity. You could argue that there is a lot more darkness than light. In the words of Terry Pratchett: ‘Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.’ So I have held my diabolical nerve on the Darkside of spirituality. I searched for an action so pure it was free of causation, a place untouched, a totality. This is where all things can be defined only by what they are not. This is where the divine can only be defined by what it is not. In this place, the abyss looks back, and it is you it fears.

 I am now simply amazed by the onrushing flood of light in which I perpetually find myself. I bow my head to light. I bathe in it. It washes me and I am astonished.

 This is what I have experienced so far, and it does not by itself make me a better person. What insha’allah does make me better, is the knowledge that we are all in this light, that there is no one who is so bad (or so special) that they have not been lit. We are one with dancing motes of dust, and stars.

 In the search for the pure and the acausal, as I mentioned, I was beguiled by the passing of time. I found I could slice time more and more thinly, until I was seemingly in the moment. This moment – no, this one, this one, this one….it was like catching a fish in a waterfall. Fleetingly, I really could ‘be here now’.

 Now I know this. The light from Ein Sof as it has spread throughout the universe is not steady state. There is a pulse. Think of how a sound is a sine wave, and then turn it in your mind so it faces towards you. It then becomes a pulse. It is as brief as binary code, briefer. It is as long as the slow sail of galaxies. It is thus not a measurement of time. It is not to be measured but sensed. If we can sense it we can ride it. Like this: There is an outburst, like the very first outburst of light. This is breathing in, moving, spending, waking, expanding. Then there is rest, a pause, something akin to darkness. This is breathing out, resting, conserving, contracting. My hunch is that if we understand this well, we can use it for singing, for planting, for working, for grieving, and for an understanding of the great happenings of which we are a part.  

 These are Shamanic insights. They may be universal, but they have arrived in the cave of my skull by Shamanic means. There is no substitute for this type of learning. I recommend it. Go hang out with some people who can journey in this way; you can watch the Big Bang together.

 

*I am aware of the slang meanings of ‘lit’ and I mean that sort of lit as well.