Names, Consciousness and Djwal Khul
Cows have feelings too
It was front page news recently in a local Japanese newspaper that cows who receive and are called by, a name produce more milk. Is it pink that they feel cared for? Do they have a (yellow) sense of self that responds to attention? Mooooving on to a related theme …
His Dark Materials
This is a prize-winning trilogy of three books by Phillip Pullman that addresses a host of cosmological questions in the form a children’s adventure. A vital subject in the adventure is what the author calls “Dust” A kind of golden energy, invisible to the naked eye, which surround anything that has consciousness invested in it. There is a lot of Dust around people for example, but it also clusters around human-made objects, since they have received conscious attention.
A Blackbird
These two pieces of information come together when I consider an insight I had during a pre-class walk one sunny Tokyo morning. As I returned to the hotel, I noticed a bird fluttering in a bush beside the road. I also noticed my mentally naming it – “Blackbird” and the fact that I was turning my consciousness towards it. In that moment I understood that our seeing the world with consciousness bestows consciousness upon the world. This fits Pullman’s idea of the presence of Dust that is so vital to all the worlds in his books.
Djwal Khul
I remember that I associated this realisation with Djwal Khul. I think because with DK we talk about “Objective seeing” - seeing things objectively, just as they are
without bringing any need, expectation or interpretation to them. It is a way of seeing which will give maximum support for all things to unfold just as they wish.
In this context it is interesting to note that since the early days of Aura-Soma DK has been connected to the gold as well as the Emerald Green. Perhaps it is for this reason …
And so
The importance of names, the gift of consciousness, the freedom to unfold truly …
My latest course, Equilibrium Journey, draws on many ways of looking as it seeks to understand the bigger story revealed through the Equilibrium sequence. Along with colour and number, names play an important role. It has caused me to wonder about the names of the bottles. No doubt they are all perfect, but I wonder if they are an outer name, and that perhaps there may also be inner names for each bottle which have yet to be revealed …
Tags: consciousness, djwal khul, his dark materials, pullman
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