Saturday, July 31, 2010

THE LIVING TEMPLE: A Global Sacred Place

Each day, billions of people visit sacred places. These settings offer profound peace and inspiration. Yet, they can also be places of intense conflict. With this paradox in mind, I traveled to sacred sites around the globe. Moving from culture to culture, I saw global communication offering a new way of experiencing sacred places. The countless structures that had been separated by geography and belief for thousands of years could now be seen as many doorways to a common storehouse of human experience. Here is a vision of what I encountered in the world treasury of knowledge and wonder.

Something compels us to draw designs. It carries us out of the world we know to a place where darkness contains a pulsating seed of light. The pulsating light breaks into stars. The stars gather into a hub of radiance and a wheel of time. The hub and wheel become a wondrous dwelling place where consciousness and energy stream into the world.

This combination of awareness and forces shape the world in subtle and mysterious ways. I want to understand what these these powers are and how they work. So I search for places that reveal the secrets of energy and matter.

I encountered a stone gateway set against the sky. Through this gateway, I saw consciousness and energy rolling through an ocean of raw forces. They teemed with possibilities and primal power. These elemental forces rose through human beings. They animated our relationships and endeavors. Some people warned that contact with primal power was dangerous. They cautioned that expressing it too opening brought rejection and shame. Yet, battling elemental forces led to struggle and madness.

Another gateway revealed new insights about the primal powers. When they appeared to be destroying, they were providing unseen protection. When they looked as though they were causing chaos, they were organizing wise designs. When primal powers appeared to be separate from us, they were flowing through every cell of our being.

Because they provided knowledge and energy, I called the primal powers Wisdom Currents. Wherever human lived, they built structures to honor and protect the alchemy of these forces. Some honored the Wisdom Currents too tightly. They developed an obsession to posses them and trap the Wisdom Currents' flowing wonder in fixed objects.

Yet, the forces of life used this obsession to control life to take us deeper into life. It moved ancient designers to draw Wisdom Currents into circles. Builders passed these arcs into stone and filled it with life. They widened the arcs, tracing the expansion of Wisdom Currents from seeds of form into multidimensional circuits of regenerating energy. The regenerating cycles morphed into spirals. Spirals whirled into labyrinths. The winding path led deeper into the twist and turns of matter and energy.

When the path straightened, it pierced the physical world and passed through spiritual realms of shadow and light, contraction and expansion and other pairs of opposites. On their way, the Wisdom Currents charged physical spaces with vitality.

The charged passages led to places where the varied qualities of the Wisdom Currents took the forms of plants, animals and humans. The myriad personalities of the Wisdom Currents found sanctuary beneath vast domes of all-encompassing space. Within the all-encompassing spaces, the Wisdom Currents were born as individual being. Each being passed through archetypal stages of gaining identity.

Strangely, individual beings dreamed the Wisdom Currents into a maze of limitations, fear and violence. Caught within this self-created nightmare, they looked for a way out. They sacrificed all they had, imploring Life for release them. With nothing left to offer, they feared decay and death.

Instead, each being found that he or she was not alone, but connected to all beings in the past, present and future. Each personality discovered her or his role in weaving threads of life into the whole. The interweaving pattens they generated rose into magnificent architecture, unfolding possibility after possibility of the play between energy and matter. The beauty and mystery they created moved them to bow in gratitude.

Now the Wisdom Currents shimmer through digital screens. Ancient holy places shine through monitors around the globe. The sacred places, separated by geography and belief for thousands of years, can now be seen as many doorways to one living temple of shared human experience.

The Wisdom Currents that flowed through ancient builders to create the Living Temple also flows through our time. It will flow into the future, reshaping the Living Temple in new and unexpected ways. As it did in the beginning, darkness will contain a seed of pulsating light. The pulsating light will carry us into an unknown world. Something within us, will compel us to draw designs.


1 comment:

  1. Beautiful and descriptive writing, Tony. Your ability to capture creative qualities of abstractions like energy is quite poetic.

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