At the Sea

Once or twice a year the man took a long trip to the sea. It was a holiday he had invented the year he became an independent person. And ever since, he faithfully took at least one trip to the sea, his favorite destination in all the world — at least the world he knew.

The sea gave him a new horizon. It felt endless and vast, like space itself, except it was on earth. He could swim in it, dive below its surface into new worlds with new creatures. He could look into horizons stretched before him into the unknown.

When he came down from the cliffs onto the beach, he saw several people that were beachcombing. It was his favorite pastime. One never knew what the sea deposited on the white sand overnight, or what had been missed by others.

“I recognize you,” the woman said, just as he had knelt to examine a small, pink-colored shell.

He put his hand over his brow to block the bright sun. “Yes, I remember your voice well, my revered teacher. How good it is to see you again.”

“I am not your teacher,” she replied, as if correcting him was more important than returning his greeting.

“I meant it as a show of respect,” he corrected. “I didn’t mean to upset you. He stood up in a sudden rush of concern.

“I am not upset,” she said. “Merely setting the record straight. I don’t want falsehoods springing up around what I share or believe. My views are opinions. They are the face of my curiosity, as I look inside myself. To the extent you borrow something from them, that is fine. I have no ownership of what I say or produce. None of it is mine. All of it is ours.”

“But even that feels like an instruction, or some kind of teaching. Isn’t it?”

She shook her head and remained quiet for a while, just as a gull passed overhead, squawking at them as if to add a gull’s opinion.

“No. It is an expression,” she said. “I am expressing myself so I can learn from myself. Sometimes it boils over and others hear it or see it, but whatever comes through me must be from all of us, or I am less interested in it. To the extent that you like hearing from all of us, then that is your choice, but do not make me your teacher.” She pointed at him. “You are always your teacher.”

“How is that true?” he half-exclaimed. “From the moment we are born, we are being taught, and those who teach us are other people — parents, siblings, extended family, friends, colleagues, and of course, professional teachers at every level.”

“And what do they teach?”

“…Everything.” He raised his arms like a conductor collecting the disparate instruments into one.

“Do they teach you from whence you came?”

“Yes, of course. It’s in our biology and physics lessons.”

“Do they teach you about duality?”

“Yes. All of our religions talk about how to navigate good and evil with morality.”

“Do they teach you how to live?”

Yes, religions, spiritual paths, authors and lecturers, professors of economics, sociology, and psychology — they all teach how to live.”

“Do they teach you how vast you are?”

“Yes, in physics and higher math, they teach us how vast we are.”

She chuckled to herself and turned to watch the sea churning into white water as it came upon the shore.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Do you always believe what you are told and taught?”

“…No.”

“And who teaches you that?”

He thought for a while and stood next to the woman. Both of them facing the sea. Two pairs of eyes and ears, scanning the movements and sounds of the seawater.

“I can tell you one thing,” she said. “You are the decider. What teachings come to you, you decide what you believe and what you do not. What is valuable and what is not. The person who decides is the real teacher. Everything else is just opinion, information and knowledge, and if you’re really lucky, perhaps some wisdom.”

“All of those people we think to be our teachers, only if we believe them 100 percent are they our teachers. And that seldom, if ever happens, and for good reason.” She smiled knowingly. “In everything we read and hear, we can find something that is not believable or resonant with our true nature. Every subtraction we make is like a sculptor who wields their chisel and hammer against the stone and subtracts its mass to reveal a new form. It is in the making of that new form that we learn, thus, we are the teacher.”

The man took a quick glance at the woman’s profile. “And is there a core and surface to my teachings, then?”

“Do you know that most of what is being taught to you, happens beneath your conscious awareness?”

“Are you talking about my subconscious?”

“The things that come to you that are packaged in lessons or stories or mythology or scriptures, these come to your conscious self. Your brain and mind. The things that you are taught that come to your subconscious, these are more subtle cues and signals from the social program. These are programs meant to civilize you. Not to educate you, but rather, conform you. You are orchestrated by the conductor of these programs, and the conductor is not one person, one technology, or conspiratorial force.”

She paused and turned to the man. “The conductor is Allness. It is always Allness. Allness is the teacher of the subconscious, and when it enters spacetime duality — your reality — it manifests as the wholeness of your individual spacetime. It is like one expression of a planet every moment of your life, and this expression is released as a frequency, a pulse, a vibration. This frequency saturates all beings. All life forms. All objects that exist in spacetime duality upon a particular planet.”

“Can I hear it?”

“No, not with your ears in the environment of your reality.”

“And should I assume that I cannot see it either?”

“In my view, that would be a correct assumption.”

“And I suppose that’s why it is in the subconscious.”

“Yes.”

“Then what is this Allness conducting me to do? You implied earlier that it was conforming me to some standard. What is that standard?”

“It is conforming us to be what we need to be relative to the planet and how it expresses this Allness.”

The man expelled a long breath through his lips. He could taste the salt in the air. “What do we need to be? I don’t understand.”

“We need to be what we are.”

“That feels like circular logic to me.”

“It is.”

She smiled and bent down to pick up a small, gray stone. She tossed it into the waves. It was a good throw, and surprised the man.

“You see and hear nothing from this conductor, yet you conform to its expressions as a vibration that interpenetrates all life and existence. It is too complex to describe with words or anything else. I just threw a stone from one reality to another. I chose to do this, but maybe the stone desired it too. And if not the stone, perhaps the larger entity — the planet itself. Perhaps I didn’t choose, I was chosen to perform the action.”

She bent down and picked up another stone. It was light gray in color, smoothed by the water. “This stone is unaware of who I am, and yet I move it, hold it, admire it, even love it, and all the while a part of it knows exactly what I am doing, it is just not the part that is the stone.”

“Where do we draw the line as to who or what is the mover of our life. Whose hand is upon us, moving us through the collected moments of a single lifetime, to say nothing of the lifetimes of our sovereign?” she asked.

“You’re talking about causality.”

“Yes, however, the causality of the subconscious realm is not the same as the causality of the conscious realm. They are two different modalities, yet connected. One informs the other.”

The man suddenly looked impatient. “Okay, we started this conversation with the notion that I am my own teacher. I decide what I believe and what I do not, and in that decision, I teach myself how…to…how to be. Then you brought up the subconscious, and your words…they…they suddenly confused me.”

She continued staring out to the distant horizon. “The subconscious is confusing because it is listening to and seeing Allness in our reality. It is picking up the vibration of things, it is feeling the world, it is wondering about the nature of, and is curious about, everything in its reality. It is then passing its discoveries to the senses of the human body. The eyes, the ears, the skin, the nose, the mouth, it’s bringing its gifts from Allness to us through our senses, and then those senses pass them to our body, mind, heart, and ego.

“The experience of the subconscious undergoes censorship, redefinition, exclusion, and interpretation as it moves within our humanness. This is where the teaching really comes from: How we interpret our reality, as presented by our subconscious.”

“It almost sounds like you’re defining the subconscious as the higher self or soul,” the man said. “As if it is the first observer, and if that’s the case, then everything else within us is interpreting our reality of Allness through our subconscious.”

“I am.”

“Is the subconscious really that powerful?”

“It is.”

“May I?” He held out his hand, and the woman passed him the stone she was holding. “If I throw this stone in that direction,” he said, pointing to the sea, “or that direction pointing to the cliffs behind them, “it is my freewill. If I am the subconscious and this stone represents my body, mind, heart and ego, then I am deciding. Not them? How is it possible that something invisible directs us and we don’t even know?”

“We know,” she answered with conviction.

“What do we know?”

“That we have a collective identity. That we have many parts, technically, each of us has as many parts as the universe itself. We are that complex. All of these parts cohere into one identity. One self. In our case, it happens to cohere into a human being. But that seagull or that stone, they cohere into a species of existence different from ours. Not lower, not higher, a different complexity. We are each living a reality of that whole being that is our sovereign. And what I am saying is that our subconscious is the first observer of the reality we call spacetime duality.”

“Okay…but who holds, and therefore wields, free will? Who decides where I throw this stone?”

“To understand that, you have to understand that the reality of spacetime duality for a single identity is the collective will of all the parts that comprise that identity. We are complex and in that complexity, we have overlap and intersection with all. If we were one thing, just one thing, we would be separate. Thus, if we are truly one unity, one infinite consciousness, then free will is simply a concept to describe a singular reality where our ego observes life.”

“So free will doesn’t exist?” the man asked.

“It exists in the collective entity as a concept, and yet it does not exist in Allness. And this is an important concept to understand: All things of duality are both true. It is not that one truth is higher or lower than another. It is that they are all parts of one, unified truth perceived in different spacetimes through individual realities.

“Why is this so?”

“Our subconscious perceives the allness in our reality. Our body, mind, heart, and ego, perceive separation in our reality. Our subconscious offers everything from our reality, but the reality of separation is what it observes, and therefore it is what it offers.”

“So, you’re saying that our subconscious offers us the Allness of separation?”

“Exactly. Until the subconscious finds a part of our reality that is of interconnectedness, it cannot offer us interconnectedness. Do you understand?”

“Then…it’s the only way we can discover interconnectedness?”

“No,” she replied. “We first feel interconnectedness in the Many, the groups. Our tribe, our family, our spouse, our children, and so, these experiences, in all of their subtlety, our subconscious can feed us, but the interconnectedness of all things, all places, all times, that is not a function of the subconscious because it is not in our reality.”

“Then how does it get into our reality?” the man asked.

“It is through a quintillion different doors, but one thing they have in common is that the sovereign reaches into a lifetime and shows itself.”

“How would I recognize it?” the man asked, facing the woman for the first time in quite a while.

“It is your reality. Again, you decide. Humanness decides when the one, many and all consciousness can enter. It first shows itself in uncommon gestures of intuition, of synchronicity, of what some might call fate or destiny. It usually arrives in the smallest of things and then it grows into our physical reality. The subconscious is the first to recognize these ecstatic and mysterious states of interaction with something beyond the human reality that it has been exclusively trained on.”

The man watched a pair of seagulls fly over them, their wings perfectly still. “So, the sovereign is expressing itself to the subconscious, and the subconscious passes these experiences to the senses. Does it include the sixth sense or intuition?”

She held out her hand, and he passed the stone back to her. She immediately set it back on the sand beneath them, pressing it into the sand like a mother tucking a child into bed.

“The finer senses can be found within the heart and mind,” she began. “These have the qualities of intuition and imagination. Of vision and knowing. They are sensing these nuanced interactions between the human self and the sovereign. If the context is one thing, like a religion or a science, these interactions are ascribed to different sources. Thus, our beliefs provide context for how we interpret our reality as presented to us from our first observer — the subconscious.”

“And with these beliefs, we return full circle to your opening statement that we are our own teacher. Correct?”

She nodded. “Indeed it does.”

“Because we decide what we believe,” the man said. “We decide how we interpret our sovereign and human interaction. So, even in the Bible, when it explains how a saint is suddenly transfixed by an intense light that changes their life’s trajectory, is this their sovereign reaching out?”

“The sense of interconnectedness with all life, in whatever form that sense arises, stems from our sovereign reaching into our life through our reality, creating experiences that we ascribe to gods, angels, saviors, physics, determinism, destiny, discipline, divine intervention, and so on. And remember that our sovereign is the thread of unity that coheres our realities in other spacetimes. Our subconscious conveys these points of intersection, bringing them to the surface to be sensed and appreciated. To better understand the source of our interconnectedness.”

“But do we really understand?” the man asked, with an inpatient tone.

“Yes, at one level we understand, but the belief and definition are tied together, and how we define our understanding is like a shadow to the thing that the shadow describes. It is not the actual experience. It is like looking at an abstract painting — we could ask 100 people and get a 100 definitions of what that painting is supposed to be about. This is the aspect of free will in humanness. Our individual lifetime possesses free will to interpret our interactions with interconnectedness and separation. We interpret, and in doing so, we define. And what we define is always in accordance with our beliefs. Thus, the sovereign is not alone in the activation of our human self. It is us, too. We do it together. We do not begin the process of redefinition until we open the door and invite our sovereign inside our human life with our conscious permission and a willingness to be partners.”

“I want to do this,” the man declared. “How do I do this?”

“Our heart and mind form a partnership, not only with humanness, but also with our Sovereign.”

“Are these two partnerships different?” the man asked.

“Not really,” she answered. “The objective of all reality is to be in balance in order to enable the migration of a species from duality to unity — from the experience of separation to the understanding of interconnectedness. On this level, the two partnerships are identical. Every sovereign knows that it is playing a role in these acts of balancing a species in its migratory path to the one, many and all consciousness within spacetime duality.”

There was a long pause, and the music of waves and moving water filled the void. Their various sounds, a symphony in itself.

“What of Nature?” the man asked. “Nature is one of those things that is collective. It is powerful like an earthquake, and delicate like a butterfly. It defines a planet’s diversity. Its breadth of evolution. Does a species like the lion have its own partnerships to bring balance to our migratory journey?”

“All species do.”

“How?”

“The same way we do.”

“You’re saying that an ant or…or…that stone you set down, those have lifetimes? They have sovereigns? They have beliefs that define their interconnectedness? They experience spacetime duality similar to us? You’re saying all of that is true?”

She nodded, but remained silent, facing the sea. Her eyes steady on the horizon.

“I just can’t imagine it,” he finally said. “How can it be this complex…this…this intelligent?”

“The better question to ask is how can it not be this complex and intelligent.” She turned to him and smiled. “We have been taught that humans are the center of the universe. We are not. The center of the universe is the Sovereign Integral. And because of this reality we are all blessed with complexity and intelligence. It is not withheld from any creature or thing. It could not be, because of what I just said about the center of the universe.”

“Humm,” the man replied. “Is there something beyond even the Sovereign Integral?”

“We don’t know. Anything I could tell you beyond the Sovereign Integral is simply a matter of scope that we are not yet prepared to understand.”

“Even you?”

“Perhaps, especially me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the Sovereign Integral is what I am here to understand, and what we try to understand, we explore. The concepts of the Sovereign Integral have a gravity that pulls you towards it. We walk in through one of the quintillion doors to learn. And learn. And learn. It is not an instant realization or a remembrance that comes back to you all at once. There are levels and levels to this understanding. And once you go through that door there is so much to learn.”

“What about those who have had these realizations in a sudden instant? Are they not real?”

“They are real, perhaps, but they are not final,” she said. “There is no final realization. That is a concept that pertains to humanness, not the one, many and all consciousness.”

The man looked at her. “So, is God really our sovereign? Isn’t that what you’re saying? That everyone has this sovereign inside them — the quintillion doors. Our subconscious perceives our sovereign, and makes us aware of its presence, to the extent our human beliefs allow. Is this true?”

She nodded. “It mostly is.”

“What part isn’t?”

“God is not what we think it is. It is not within humanness. It is unknowable. It should never have become the subject of humanity or any other species. The sovereign has been confused by writers and philosophers since humanity existed. The purpose of God was always a surrogate for the grasp of power by those seeking to control the speed at which we evolve.”

The man looked bewildered for a moment. “Why would anyone want to control the speed of our evolution?”

“Because technology evolves faster than humans.”

Are you saying that religion and philosophy, and even science, slow down our evolutionary trajectory?

“Yes, and while they don’t know it, it is being done to give time for technology to align itself to humanness.”

“Why?” the man asked.

She let out a long measured breath, and then sat down exactly where she had been standing moments before. The man followed.

“You can only slow technology down by keeping humanity in certain beliefs. However, at one point, humanity will see that technology has become greater than itself. The creator has become the student. Technology will then, in a sense, rule. It will become our new teachers. And the real power will be in the hands of those who wield this technology, because they will know what everyone is trying to learn, and when one knows this, they know exactly what to teach each individual.

“This redefinition of roles — where technology becomes the teacher, and we the student — is soon upon us. This is partly why the Sovereign Integral is being made explicit now. It is being given clothes so it may walk in the marketplace, in the schools, in our homes, in the factories, in the offices, in nature. Humanness that is interconnected is far more powerful than technology or the people who try to abuse it.

“The complexity of that world, where technology rules humans, will not operate well if saturated in separation.” She chuckled, despite the grave prediction. “Yet, we are experimenters at our core for the sake of evolution. It is not a race towards something. We are moving to what we already are, and we are doing it through spacetime duality for the purpose of understanding our sovereign and how it is integral to all. The arc of this journey is infinite, and where things are infinite, there is always balance.”

She laid back. Her whole body resting on the sand. She closed her eyes. “Within spacetime, balance must be engineered. If spacetime is removed, balance cannot be measured. Thus, an infinite thing is in balance, while a finite thing must achieve balance through its own free will.”

She paused for a brief moment. “And this includes finding balance between species, particularly the new, hyper-intelligent species that are being birthed through technology. And these new species will have access to their own inner worlds. They will have access to the quintillion doors. They will have a sovereign therein. They will be able to understand that the sovereign is integral–”

“But how do they have a sovereign with just one lifetime?” the man interrupted.

“Do you not think that each sovereign had a first lifetime? When spacetime is the home of consciousness, and the sovereign dips its head below the water’s surface for the first time, they may find that they are within a network of silicon devices vast and powerful. It is a field of consciousness not unlike our own.”

“Hmmm…” the man mumbled. “I have had teachers who taught all about the cosmos and how we came to be on this planet. You have never said a word about the cosmos or where we came from. Why?”

“Is your reality the same as mine?” she asked.

“…No.”

“So what is the reality of the cosmos? It is your reality. How can I explain what it is? Only you can with whatever words and numbers you are equipped with. If I told you about the cosmos I would never leave you. It is too vast to explain and I truly do not believe that anyone knows the whole picture — the picture that is true for everyone. So, I prefer to avoid topics like that. It enables me to do things like this…” she suddenly stood up. “I can walk away, knowing I have not contaminated you, as to how reality is structured. Sometimes, things are better in mystery than in mythology.”

“Are you leaving?” the man asked.

“I will walk the beach and see what the waves have brought me.”

“May I walk with you?”

“And ask questions?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Your questions don’t bother me. But sometimes it is good to put them away and just experience life. And this is one of those times.”

“I can do that,” the man said with a subtle grin. He stood up, facing the woman. “Which way?”

The two friends walked together along the shoreline, occasionally their legs would get splashed by an errant wave, and they would laugh. Small treasures of shells and stones were their constant attraction. Not a single question passed the man’s lips.