April | 2013 | Complete Constructive Change

Soundtrack: 2Pac – “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”

So let’s get back into the Tree of Life. In our last piece here, we dug into the first sphere on the Tree of Life which is Sphere 0, known as Amen. Amen deals with the state of God/Humanity in “the beginning”, our qualities of being unconditioned, unprogrammed, undifferentiated, and having unshakeable inner peace. Spheres 1 through 3 describe God’s attributes of being all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present (Ausar, Tehuti, and Sekert). The explanation of these spheres shows how humanity taps into these attributes. It’s immeasurably important to understand that human beings are the vehicle through which God experiences him/her/itself. There is no separation between God and human beings. The only thing that prevents us from being able to use the powers of God is the separation that we imagine to exist between God and ourselves. It is a false belief that prevents us from being fully human, which means to be fully divine.

Spheres 4 and 5 on the Tree of Life are called Maat and Herukhuti. Maat refers to the laws of nature. A major principle expressed by Maat is that everything in the universe is connected to everything else in the universe. “No man is an island” so to speak. To be in accordance with Maat is to understand how your thoughts, words, and actions are going to affect everything else that you are connected to. When we don’t understand our interconnectedness then we attempt to solve problems in ways that create new problems.

In the 20^th century, the largest producers of food sought to develop ways to produce more food, at lower prices, in order to keep up with the demands of growing populations and increase their profits. Their solution was to popularize food processing. Benefits of food processing include toxin removal, preservation, easing marketing and distribution tasks, and increasing food consistency. In addition, it increases yearly availability of many foods, enables transportation of delicate perishable foods across long distances and makes many kinds of foods safe to eat by de-activating spoilage and pathogenic micro-organisms. Modern supermarkets would not exist without modern food processing techniques, long voyages would not be possible and military campaigns would be significantly more difficult and costly to execute.

There are downfalls to this phenomenon of food processing. Processed foods provide lots of calories with little nutrition, they are addictive, and they contain dangerous additives. There is a direct correlation between the rise in the amount of processed foods and the rate of obesity and diseases that are closely related to obesity. These foods are literally killing people. I don’t know if the scientists and corporate executives who originally created food processing were aware of the possible fallout from what they created but I doubt that most people would’ve agreed to adopt the new Standard American Diet (SAD) if they had fully understood the ramifications. This is what we run into when we don’t properly respect Maat.

Maat reminds us that everything is connected and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Actions have consequences. When we ignore Maat then we are forced to deal with Herukhuti. Sphere 5 of the Tree represents that aspect of Spirit from which Divine/Natural Law is “enforced.” The wrath of God (punishment) is exercised through this faculty, as is the love of God in its protective aspect. There is a balancing logic at work here. There is no law without means of enforcement; therefore Herukhuti is needed to complement Maat.

These deities are not beings up in the skies somewhere that control the fate of us lowly humans. These are faculties within us and within nature that are always at work in our lives and our success or failure is determined by how cognizant we are of the existence of these principles. Herukhuti represents the natural consequences of our actions. If you put a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere then you will destroy the ozone layer and allow more of the sun’s ultraviolet rays to penetrate our bodies. That is especially troublesome for people who don’t have darkly pigmented skin. If you respond to polluted drinking water by consuming countless numbers of plastic water bottles and then having no way to get rid of the plastic then you have fixed one pollution issue by creating another. Maat and Herukhuti are on the Tree of Life to remind us to consider all the different consequences of our intended actions.

This leads me to a somewhat controversial point that I must make: there is no such thing as “right” and “wrong”. Right and Wrong are concepts that assume the existence of a (paternal) deity who has a strict agenda and punishes us for going against His wishes. This type of deity doesn’t exist in reality. The Universe doesn’t have preferences. Again, Amen represents unconditioned, unprogrammed, total darkness. Amen simply wants to experience the potential of what is within the darkness. There is no preconceived agenda of how things are supposed to go. Anyone who properly understands the laws of success can achieve their goals whether they aim to feed the hungry or make a billion dollars or enslave a whole nation of people. These things are all within the realm of possibility.

Right and wrong are relative to your goals. If you decide that your goal is to gain ten pounds of muscle, then inherent within the goal there are things that you should do and things that you shouldn’t do. You should do some strength training, you should eat small meals to keep your metabolism high, and you shouldn’t eat a lot of sugary and fatty foods. But if you decide that your goal is to learn how to levitate then you are going to have a completely different set of rules to live by. And the goal is different for every single person on the planet because we are all born with a different life path, based on the unique talents and gifts that we are born with. What is right for one person is not necessarily going to be right for another person. One size does not fit all.

In our pursuit of success in life, it is incumbent on us to first define what success means for us. That includes figuring out what our goals are. Whatever means we use to figure out our path be it oracle readings or personality tests or the advice of our loved ones, we have to decide on a goal. Once we know the goal then we can study what the interconnected parts are of the goal. If I desire to become a professional basketball player then that goal includes repercussions for what kind of diet I eat, what my daily schedule is, who I choose to be friends with, where I go to school, and many other things. Only a person who understands my goal of being a professional basketball player is qualified to tell me what is right or wrong for me. So we have to be careful who we listen to and what ideas we choose to accept about morals and ethics. If we neglect to fully honor Maat (understand the consequences of our actions) then Herukhuti will soon come to punish us for our lack of reverence…

PEACE

Soundtrack: KRS-ONE – “I Got Next” (full album)

The word cosmogony means: “a theory of the origin of the universe, the study of the origin and development of the universe or of a particular system in the universe, such as the solar system”. Among all the different nations, tribes, languages, and cultures of the people of Africa, the traditional African religions have a shared cosmogony. One of the reasons that this is so is because there is a priesthood that has members among all the different African tribes, that dates back to a priest of Isis (Auset) during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the 3rd dynasty (3900 BCE) builder of the Great Pyramid in Egypt (Kemet).

The members of this Kemetic priesthood encapsulated their cosmogony in a diagram known as the Tree of Life (pictured above). The Tree of Life is a diagram of the process through which God creates the world, humanity, and humanity’s sojourn in the world. The Tree consists of eleven spheres, numbered from zero to 10. Sphere 0 is at the top, and is depicted as being “above” the tree. It depicts and corresponds to the state of God and of existence before the creation of the thingly, phenomenal world. In the Kemetic tradition, this aspect of God was known variously as Amen, Atum, Aten, Nu, and Nut.

In this edition of COMPLETE CONSTRUCTIVE CHANGE, I want to deal with a particular aspect of the cosmogony represented by the Tree of Life. In the Beginning, before Time and before Space and before the Big Bang, there was darkness. There were two things present within the darkness: Mind and Matter. Only 5% of the universe is composed of what we normally think of as Matter, which is physical objects that can be seen by the human eye. 95% of the universe is still composed of this Dark Matter which existed in the beginning, cannot be directly observed, but is the stuff that all observable Matter came out of. Along with the Matter in the beginning was Mind. There was a consciousness in the darkness that was aware of its own existence but wasn’t able to know anything about itself because it had nothing to compare itself to. The reason we know that there is such a thing as “tall” is because we have some experience of a thing called “short”. We know “happy” because we can compare it to “sad”. Nothing can be known without having some experience of its opposite. So this original Mind or Consciousness, which is what most people refer to as “God”, decided that it wanted to experience itself. But it was the only thing in existence. So it had to separate itself into different phenomena that could be compared to each other so that it could learn what it was made of. This original separation is what science calls The Big Bang. It was God starting the process of learning about him/her/itself.

Our Ancestors thousands of years ago knew about these things that modern science has just discovered and they explained it through their mythology. I won’t go into the mythology at this time but one aspect of it was the Tree of Life. Sphere 0 at the top of the Tree represents the Amen state of undifferentiated potential. This state is not just relegated to the beginning of the universe. It is still present at the deepest part of everything in existence. Our most basic nature, the most fundamental part of ourselves is Amen. Deepak Chopra says this in his book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success”:

The source of all creation is pure consciousness…pure potentiality seeking expression from the unmanifest to the manifest. And when we realize that our true Self is one of pure potentiality, we align with the power that manifests everything in the universe.

As human beings, we are little microcosms of the universe. We contain the same stuff that makes up everything else around us and we come into being in the same way that everything else around us does. This is why it is true that we can master the whole universe by mastering ourselves. That Mind that sought to experience itself in the beginning of existence is the same Mind that forms the basis of our existence. We are the primary vehicle by which the God experiences him/her/itself. We have a unique level of self-awareness which causes us to ponder such things as “what is the meaning of life?” and “what is my purpose?” We are the Mind of God and the Mind of God is us. At our most fundamental level, we are simply Mind and Matter. Now what practical lessons for life can we gain from this?

Mind can be separated into two basic divisions: Consciousness and Will. Consciousness represents the passive polarity, and Will the active polarity, of the same essential quality. The principle of Matter may be seen as a continuum, which may more properly be called Energy/Matter, because “matter” in the strict sense is but one extreme of that continuum, being “energy-slowed-down.” Implicit in that notion is the fact known to Western science at least since Einstein, namely that energy and matter are mutually transmutable. As reflected at Sphere 0 above the Tree, the essential quality of Mind is a state of bliss, peace, hetep, the Kemetic word for a state of unshakable inner peace. The essential quality of Matter, at Sphere 0, in the state of Amen, is that of pure Potential, which means there is as yet no motion, [Note: The Hindu word nirvana also characterizes the state of Amen, and means, literally, “no motion” (nir = “no” + vana = “motion”).] no vibration, no “things”, therefore no space, and no time. There is also no light, since light is a vibration, and there is no motion.

So, our experiences in life are perceived by our five senses which fall under the Matter side of things. Most people mistakenly believe that our minds are shaped by our experiences. However, the Tree of Life allows us to see that our basic nature is pure potential which goes along with our minds being completely unconditioned and not programmed. Our basic state is a blank slate. And we can use the faculty of Mind to choose how we want to perceive anything taken in by the material five senses. Mind and Matter are separate. There is absolutely no obligation on the Mind to feel any particular way about a material experience. And as we go further down the spheres in the Tree of Life we discover that in fact, our minds attract our material experience. The energy broadcast coming from the Mind attracts things from the Matter side to us that match the frequency of the thoughts coming from the Mind. So we create everything that we experience, and if we don’t like our experience then we can choose a different one. We can Will something different into our existence by changing the quality of our Consciousness.

Complete Constructive Change

accept your own and be yourself

Monthly Archives: April 2013

YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Mind and Matter