humpty dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Are you doing the seeking dance and then you trap and limit yourself in someone else's conception of life, religion, or the universe and then you frustrate yourself trying to find the carrot they are talking about? Welcome to the fun world of spirituality with so many paths to choose from. I’m going on a trip to find unity by striving to transcend the self and dissolve into the ocean of consciousness thus feeling within the inseparability of all. I picked up the pieces of self, my own personal Humpty Dumpty, and tried to put the pieces back together but was unsuccessful. My search for unity was like trying to put the egg man back together again! It's true you came from unity and to unity you will return but to try and recapture unity before its time is asking for chronic frustration. I went on that trip. I first discovered the route to unity went through the heart and then I realized unity through a shiny black piece of obsidian that reflected myself and my surroundings back at me. I had this startling realization that I cannot separate myself from my environment, which is totality, and through this I sensed the unity for which I longed. Even while the egg man was shattered, I discovered that in pieces I still go with everything else in a giant universal ecological system. Trying to realize complete unity in this lifetime is the myth of Humpty Dumpty. You can't put the pieces back together but if you let it be it will dissolve into the all and through death and renewal is how you will experience unity and then cyclically once again the self.

A path of seeking can branch off in all directions. All cultures set up an accepted path for those who get this call or have the inclination to take up the spiritual path. The seeker is a wild card, with the potential to cause havoc and upset within society. When psychedelics were rediscovered last century it was an unfettered gong show! All these hippies running around talking peace and love and not working for a living. Sticking it to the man! That lasted a decade and then the agents of consciousness were criminalized by the establishment as the serfs were running amok! The use of these catalysts for change went underground and were resigned to the fringe. It's been in the last fifteen years or so that the next wave has returned, in part driven by the awareness of shamanism practiced in third world countries which use time tested plant remedies as a way to heal the ill. It's a holistic approach treating the mental state of the patient as the underlying cause of the manifestation of the physical disease and it's quite an enlightened way of thinking as compared to our western approach where we react to the physical manifestation. Within this healing modality is the key to change consciousness and discover a spiritual world which had been hidden from view. There are the world's great religious traditions and then there is shamanism. The great religious traditions have beliefs and if you want to identify with them you need to accept those beliefs. Shamans aren’t priests. Shamans don’t tell you what you should believe. Shamanism points you to the door of knowledge and you decide what to do from that point. Through an experiential modality you "see" and how you then want to spin that knowledge is up to you. There’s no requirement to believe anything or anyone nor do you need to get or attain anything.

Love is the light which will illuminate the left hand path in order to get back to unity. We will all eventually get there but those with love in their hearts will find the way quicker in this lifetime. They will help the shattered pieces find happiness, love, sharing, and caring. The right hand path will further separate the shattered self from unity and eventually the forgetfulness will reach a point where you no longer recognize that you once were the complete egg man. Lost on the path, eventually you reach the end of the road and there's nothing there. You are just whistling in the wind. At that point all roads turn left and it's Nascar all the way home. LoL!

The right hand path leads to the pinnacle of self which is realized by competing with others to get to the top of the mountain and becoming self-actualized. There is a misconception that taking a spiritual path automatically means you are doing it for the greater good and some altruistic purpose. It sure seems that way though as your enlightenment will help humankind achieve greatness. Actually, the spiritual path has the tendency to devolve into every other human pursuit which is self glorification through power, fame, wealth, and worship because we are all tempted with that and it’s a pretty good sales pitch. At least with the greed impulse within us it rings true and we aren’t fooling anyone; those in search of wealth are brutally honest in that regard. The spiritual game played by those on the right hand path used for gain is the worst because of the dishonesty within it and the taking advantage of people who do have a sense of altruism at heart.

Our roots as a species go back to a primal survival of the fittest dominated by fear, anxiety, and mistrust. Civilization is the march towards an understanding that we are all in this together and leads to a social pact between us such as the family unit, community, caring for others, sharing and so on; however, this conflicts with the economic and political basis of the society we have created. We left behind the savage survival of the fittest paradigm within the confines of an untamed world; however, now that we have tamed that aspect we have transferred our savagery onto advanced forms of the game because it seems that is our underlying nature. We now recreate our primal instincts of survival through our business and politics and try to hold off the encroachment of socialism upon our "free" enterprise. Of course, there is much to be said for this as history has shown the socialist is usually just a power monger wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing on the lookout for power or enrichment on the backs of the genuine who do seek to make the world a better place. I was reading up on survival skills needed in the event of a major catastrophe to hit the earth and the one thing that really struck me was that in the event something like this happens you are going to need a gun to protect yourself. When we revert back to survival mode, your neighbour is going to be desperate and come and take what you have and kill you. I realized that there is some truth to this though I’d like to think we have progressed beyond this behaviour; however, you see it whenever law and order breaks down and the looting commences. So, I got to thinking that maybe this earth game is an exercise in learning cooperation and from that we will evolve into a civilization who is one big family. Humanity would be the trajectory of walking a left hand path.

I do believe the advancement of civilization should and will lead to caring social structures encompassing the planet. It does seem undeniable that eventually we will get there though it may be quite painful. And I don’t know if we currently are going to get to the ideal without a major catalyst or catastrophe which would require us to come together. Disasters and global change tend not to respect political borders; so, the impetus to transcend boundaries and unify would become paramount. Perhaps Humpty Dumpty is trying to teach us that we are looking myopically at the self and trying to put that together again. Instead, the key to put the egg man back together resides in the unification of humankind.