The rural dark fell down around me. I let go of the music. We are the mirror of awakeness and our own face in it. What is is the mystery that is infinitely aware and all that is in awareness. Extra-sensory perception (ESP) can be explained in terms of mind or mental forces. However, there do not seem to be sufficient grounds for inferring that the unknown entities or forces responsible for ESP are mental. There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea. The reason for postulating a collective unconscious may be either to suggest that one person’s experience can directly influence those of another, because all experiences are really contents of one all-embracing Mind, or to suggest that one person’s experience can affect another’s indirectly, via modifications in substratum called common unconscious. Our nonseparate being is the Nothing that excludes nothing. When we are not separating ourselves from what we are by our thoughts of being separate, this bare nothingmess feels very intimate. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

The swamp seemed the most savage and devouring place, with no pastoral symmetry or harmony to it. Each person is at each moment potentially aware of all concurrent events and of all one’s past experiences and that to prevent one from being overwhelmed by useless knowledge the brain suppresses all information except that which is relevant to one’s present practical needs, which leads to normal memory and perception. It is a short step to equating with ESP the knowledge suppressed by the brain. It seems extravagant, however, to explain a few people’s sporadic exercise of ESP by supposing that potentially we are all almost omniscient. This seeing focuses like an automatic zoom lens, moving in deeper and deeper to the truth of the moment. Without denying nor refusing anything, it moves through the words, through the story, through the thoughts, through the feelings, through the energy body to the pure innocence of what we truly are. When a person exercises clairvoyance one’s mind is being influenced by or is influencing physical things outside one’s body in the same way as one’s mind normally interacts with one’s own brain. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

What thrived here was a ravenous and battling to the death, and would never find a safe haven for itself—a landscape eating itself alive. Dualism is taken for granted, but dualism involves notorious problems concerning mind-body interaction which the proposed account of clairvoyance does not seem to render more intelligible. Where was my lust? The blood tempest that sweeps into its vortex all desire to know, to absorb, to abide, to possess, to kill, to love? It was a drenching storm inside of me. However, I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another, you do not strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it with my prudent soul. This potential to transcend the limitations of the human condition is certainly a most essential human capacity. The human realm is one of six domains that we know of and it happens to be the most fortunate real to be born in. The dualistic mind is prehumen, or subhuman because it opens up a larger expanse of being presence that is free from our ordinary, personal involvement in immediate existential situations. This path leads from the bondage of the conditioned mind to the liberation of true awareness. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

So let them shine over the vast pastureland to my right, over the distant clusters of evergreen trees, over the warmly lighted houses far behind me. ESP provides evidence for dualism. It already involves telepathy (true awareness) and our perceptual experiences are caused directly by volitions of the divine mind. The phenomena of clairvoyance would also have to be attributed to telepathy, with God as the agent, since material objects, when unobserved by human minds, consist, in ideas or archetypes of God’s mind. One can readily agree that the World as we experience it is better adapted to be a vale of soul-making than a hedonistic holiday camp. Yet there are difficulties about even the soul-making view. Some human suffering (the unmerited suffering of young children, for instance) cannot always be treated plausibly as developing moral fiber, or as realizing any other moral value. The natural environment can figure as the destroyer of moral personality as well as its preserver and nourisher. Fully inhabiting our humanness involves a willingness to open fully to the rawness of creaturely existence, and feel what it is like to be subject to hurt, limitation, conditioning, and death. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

Transcending our humanness means gaining access to the larger domain of pure being and limitless awareness that is not bound by conditioned existence at all. Centuries ago, I had been dumped for dead in the swamp by my fledglings; and I, a hideous and grasping thing, had survived in those stagnant, polluted waters, survived to come back and take my battered and shapeless revenge, sharpened to a fatal point by others. I do not care about that. I do not know how long I walked. I took my time. The night sounds were at once particular and at the same time a deep hum of the warm breeze, and the Moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the swamp that only revealed its jagged hateful chaos more harshly. Now and then I stopped. I looked at the scattered stars—so cunningly bright in the country night. And I hated them, as usual. What comfort was it to be lost in the endless Universe, a simpleton on a tiny speck of revolving dust, whose forefathers had read patters and meaning into these countless unknowable points of cold white fire, which only mocked us by their unchanging indifference? My soul was in the swamp tonight. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5