Letter to the Future. III - Life Upon the Echelons

17 February 2010 Life Upon the Echelons One day, a day that will not certainly find you, a day that is not guaranteed, but one day nonetheless, you will get the notion that life has stratification, it is lived upon the echelons. Maybe around a fire, beside or holding a guitar, listening to a musician or reading an author, perhaps fathoming for a moment how much life is happening at all times around you in the setting of the natural world. Maybe none of those. I don't know how the day will find you and I don't want to - it is the precious secret of the future. But it will. And then you will know, you've lived into another echelon. You see, living is appreciated on many levels. Whatever gratitude a bacterium experiences is beyond my measuring. A rabbit appreciates the food it eats to the extent that its hunger pangs dissipate. A bug wanders toward the light, giving it some unconscious acknowledgment of importance. And then humans. Don't mistake human living as one tier amidst the strata; not even your own living happens on one plane. But instead we fall and we elevate. We ride on plumes of reverence and trip into wells of disregard. Seek out the full intimation of humaness; those tiers exist above the place you linger now and their admittance of a person cares nothing of wealth or status, only the vision of the soul, the flight and self-imposed ceiling of the spirit. An awareness of borrwoed clarity waits there, like a lucidity that makes a person mutually more in tune and further removed from existence. This point, above the others, should be wrestled with. There is not one reality; not one degree of consciousness. I do not eve know if there are finite consciousnesses, or for that matter why our very language suggests a singular consciousness, leaving no room for conscious plurality. But you'll know. Perhaps it is because most of our learning take place at a lower tier - I do not know - but one takes up a different vocabulary in these higher places. They leave behind their fascination for cheaper things, whose value can really only be weighed in that place. Don't be confused, and especially not frightened. Just know this. A realm of your existence, into which only certain pieces of yourself shall accompany the collective you, waits. It is a degree which will isolate you from some, and draw you closer still to others. It is an altitude which hardly allows you to make out the now-distant world from which you ascended, but risks to acquaint you with the vitality pulsing at such great heights. The physical world will not change, or has not for me; it is what we have. But here lies the glory, my loved ones. That world in the physical escorts and offers enticements always. Our ascent is a matter of choice, a matter of exposure. I won't tell you it is impossible with drugs, I will only insist that my journeys to these higher consciousnesses commenced at the urging of a claustrophobic mind. I was looking for space, uncharted and seldom visited. I was not fueled by consumption more than a glass of beer and the best of company. Somethings there will be understood, sure, but if you consider what we "understand" completely, those things are rarely so great. Instead, think toward the new heights of unknowing you will find there, a cohort of questions previously unasked, worthy of the asking, but till then clouded out from our wondering eyes. To be at such heights is not to impersonate genius but to behold a greater wonder. There are bluer skies than here, darker nights with stars of higher dimension, wider praires and more volatile rivers. Make no mistake, precious future, it would be unwise to assume the health of our physical world is unattached to these higher altitudes of consciousness. These are the places we come from, the heights we've managed to find over the ages. If we destroy those treasures and mysteries surrounding us physically, we risk a calamitous assault on life at all the levels of our being. Explore those heights, let them make you wiser and deeper-loving, defend them and cherish them, hold them with you and regard them as precious, life guiding, life giving. Erik in the past