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Heads weaving back and forth, they arrow directly toward us. Out of the blue, they come, examining us with their onboard ultrasonic probes. The infant female dolphin wriggles as she approaches, flowing up and down in the slipstream of her mother and father. Struck by a wave of subtle power, I am thrust backward into memories of an earlier era in my life...
I am standing in the scorching desert of the American southwest, red sand and eroded castle-like canyons surrounding me. I have endured much to arrive at this moment, this culminating moment in my vision quest. It is the dawn of the Summer Solstice and the fires of spirit are calling me.
I lie down on the edge of the precipice. An eagle rises out of the canyon below. My eyes follow, my mind catches fire, and I rise into my Solar Self.
As I feel the scales of my mental and emotional armouring loosen, tear free, and shear off in the whirling, accelerating cyclone that gathers around me, I grin. It is a fierce grin, one of bared teeth and squinting eyes.
I am being stripped bare, prepared to enter the furnace of creation. I confront the raw truth of the many limitations of my forms and vehicles, so inadequate for such a voyage. The whole of my outer, planet-bound being must be left behind. I am diving into the Sun.
While I am there, my body-self seems less than normal. I am prone, still, my heartbeat nearly imperceptible, my breathing slow and shallow. My eyes do not move behind my eyelids. Inside my brain, somewhere among the synaptic pathways in the moist bio-electric web, there is a portal. Into that white hole I pour my liquid mind. The pressure is enormous, the tension unbearable, until every particle of me that has not reached superluminal speed drops away.
In my radiant vehicle, I am drawn inexorably deeper, into the Inner Sun, the shining fount of life hiding beyond the disk in the sky--the Inner Sun--source of brilliance, origin of essence, where streaming originates. I am braving the Paradox. I go upstream, diving down into the drain at the bottom of the sky, disappearing into light.
There, in the measureless halls of the Centre, I am met. Two Beings come to greet me, to embrace me with their immense compassion, their limitless wisdom. I am enfolded in their protection.
We stand before the doors to the Hall of Loving Wisdom. I must open them, and I do. I am consecrated to this task, and flood them, from my heart, with the purified will to open.
We enter, moving through another membrane of the concentric rings leading inward. The Hall is immense, round, filled with sounds beyond human hearing, colours no eyes have ever seen. In the centre is the One.
I know it as The Throne. It is occupied. On it is a presence I cannot directly view. The Two who accompany me must shield me from the singularity of this Logoic Being, as not even my refined solar body can withstand It´s refulgence.
I am welcomed, wings of light extended toward me, embracing my tiny soul. What I am and am not is revealed-- I am one who comes in search of Service. I have come to seek wisdom and blessing for my work, my mission in life. I am drawn into the central ring, and once inside, I am on my own.
The One who resides here absorbs me and encourages me to mount the three final steps. I hesitate, gazing at swirling galaxies of life and light, and the Two who shield me standing in their brilliance. They disappear for the moment. I sit.
The central axis of my being, my spinal core, is lit from below, then from within. I am absorbed in the rising flood that pours endlessly from the axial fount of the Throne. I have reached the place from which all creation is being eternally remade in each instant. Here one sees directly that "what one thinks becomes what is". From this pivot of creation, all is recreated each microsecond, replacing what was with what is. In frictionless becoming is eternal Being.
I have entered the Now. I am at one with the Creator.
Not the smallest fraction of time is between my awareness and the events by which I am surrounded. Instead, I am in the moment of creation. I am not reacting to what has just happened. I am "a priori", before that, in the time of original occurrence. I am one with the creation.
Exulting in this Fountain of Life, I see my perfect nature. My radiant Self is fully present, enabling this most auspicious act.
I do not bend the stream of life to my own ends. I know as I float in this perfect stream of creation that I am incapable of improving on life, as it is so perfect in its symmetry. I am here to refresh, to bathe, to be renewed.
As a student of life and nature, I have been learning the language of pattern and form, the enduring schemes out of which everything is woven. And here, on the Throne, I see and feel the shape of the flood of life, and discern the role of inherent patterns.
The exquisite torture of being on the Throne, where perfection is dynamically folded upon itself to create the flood of creation, must end for the limited being that I am. I cannot sustain it. I rise, and move off the Throne, descending to the floor and the protective embrace of my Sponsors.
We leave the Hall. I am anointed, blessed. I say my farewells, and depart, winging back to my earthly bodies. I am raw, heated in fires beyond white, yet cool in my clarity of mind. I have been to the Centre. I have been remade.
Evolution? What is that? Is it the documented changes in the colours of a moth, the shape of a bird´s beak? Does the fierce process of pursuit, capture, and eating of others, over time, select those most capable of bloody conquest--and avoidance? Is nature best described as "red in tooth and claw"? Is the Darwinian model truly resilient, capable of withstanding every onslaught unleashed upon it by the sceptical mind?
Or is this only the surface, the outer layer of life as seen by creatures embedded within its dynamic process? Is there another, wider view, a meta-view?
For many philosophers, the battle between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, is self-evident. Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Indian traditions, the Gnostic teachings, plus the later texts of the Abrahamic Triad--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--all depict in one way or another a dualism in Universe. Forces of light and life contend with forces of stolen authority and darkness.
And there are those who see and know something more, something from different experience and awareness. For them, the dualism that produces the endless war of earth-bound life is a limited condition, limited to the world of linear time and measurable space.
For these mystics, ours is a world of friction, where the dynamic--and spiritually sustained--tensions of life contending with death are contained within a ring, a quantum state of being. There are other states, other planes of existence where this dynamic does not hold sway.
Those who hold this view know the next quantum ring, where Universe is known as process-- endless unfolding of an ever-constant Now, unformed by time. Process and patterns providing the elements of what seems to be change. They see a unitary perfection, a hypersphere of precise and absolute completion encompassing all of timespace.
And they see a titanic awareness that holds the hypersphere in dynamic tension, artfully stressing it, holding its perfection in a state of what looks like slight separation. This split in the circle, this fracture, this gap in the circular flow is sustained by Will. And it is this Will, and this separation, that gives us the sense of duality--because it is across this gap that every energy-state must attempt to reconcile itself with itself, seeking the stasis of perfect wholeness.
The energy that lives in this gap we call love. The attractive force that binds us to our wholeness, endlessly calling the disparate parts to return to wholeness, that draws us powerfully forward into the next moment and the next, is love.
For those who see thusly, the fires of friction--the rising energies that come from each instant of apparent change--burnishing, evolving--are welcome. The substance of Being endlessly flows through itself, giving off sparks of awareness as change is sensed. Consciousness registers the changes and sees time, sees evolution (time, as expressed here, is simply the consciousness of change). Yet beyond all apparent separation, the Throne exists, from which everything is renewed in the endless Now.
Reconciling these truths has, ever since that dawn in the desert, occupied my mind. I have visited the perfection of Now, and I live and work in the world of change. Universe has reformed my life, and now my work is among dolphins. They easily resolve the paradox, and swim gracefully through the worlds of friction and change, embodying the Joy of Now.
The three dolphins who approach suddenly elude us. They bend their heads down, stretch their tails toward the surface, then execute a spiral twisting turn around each other that defies description, ending with them sliding away from our group the way we have come, upside down, gliding motionless into the hazy blue distance.
Our guests squeal with delight, their hearts expanding, their need to pursue, to find and touch the dolphins is dissolving, as they relax into the Way of the Dolphin.
My partner and I grin, as once again, the dolphins, exemplars of a climax of biological evolution, demonstrate the magic of Now. By simply being Present--in wise group consciousness--they have caused a resonant bell to ring in the minds and hearts of our guests. Rather than walking the Path, they now begin to see the Way. So simple, so pure, so joyous--perfected Being, beyond evolution.
Scott Taylor and his partner, Amanda Hain, lead dolphin encounters in many parts of the world. For information about their school, "The Way of the Dolphin", opening in the near future, or to join them among the dolphins, visit www.dolphintale.com or write to: dolphin@dolphintale.com
(First published in BE Magazine, Byron Bay, Australia, Feb 2006)