ConstructedConsciousness

Constructed Consciousness / Spiritualized Matter
by Diana McClure

Who, am I? This might just be the most asked question in the world. For some, an answer is ready made – your name, your bloodline, your city, your state, your country, your race, your gender, your religion, your politic. For others an answer is excavated through contemplation: I am love, I am a child of God, I am nothing, I am energy, I am thought formed in matter. And, yet and still for others, an answer is felt: I am sadness, I am depression, I am loneliness, I am joy, I am ambition, I am confusion. And then there are those who earn an answer: I am the champion, I am an artist, I am a lawyer, I am an entrepreneur, I am a mother. In many cases the answer is a dynamic multiplicity.

At some level we are all engaged in the process of construction. To reason, to think, to intuit and to connect sublimely are the tools of our trade. The choice to accept, construct or de-construct, internally and externally, is perhaps really, a welcoming into the fluidity of cosmic alignment. What is this experience of choice? Is it not the ability to pass through change - to navigate change – to flow with change?

“The elusive essence of Taoism is expressed in the Tao Te Ching, the only work of the great sage Lao Tzu (born c. 604 B.C.), whom legend says was persuaded by one of his disciples to write down the eighty-one sayings. The word Tao means the fathomless Source, the One, the Deep. Te is the way the Tao comes into being, growing organically like a plant from the deep ground or source of life, from within outward. Ching is the slow, patient shaping of that growth through the activity of a creative intelligence that is expressed as the organic patterning of all instinctual life, like the DNA of the universe.”

The Tao speaks to our process of construction pre-womb. We look inward at Te when we study the fertilization of egg and sperm, the development of human form inside the bodies of women, and now a test tube. We look outward and see Ching when we study the way the moon pulls the tides and attempt to understand planet earth’s relationship to the universe. We enter the world through the process of Tao Te Ching. But, what do we do once we are here?

Humanity has always been intricately involved in artistic construction. The pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the beadwork of the Masai, Batik cloth design in Indonesia, the structure of a Rumi poem, Swiss chocolate, Belgian Beer, Jazz. In some way we always attempt to reflect the essence of the universe – creation. How much of this creation began in spontaneity, experimentation, intuition – fluid alignment with the cosmic?

"Among the ancient Egyptian goddesses of greatest influence was Maat, who wore on her head the ostrich feather against which each human heart was weighed after death, balanced on the scales of justice. Maat is perhaps the origin of the figure of Divine Wisdom in the Old Testament, for she personified the equilibrium and harmony of the universe intrinsic to all life forms, even to the notes of the musical scale. She was the music of life, the principle of Divine Order, Truth and Harmony, which is embodied in Natural Law. Each goddess was an aspect of the pulse of life emanating from the hidden source of all. Together with their consorts, the gods, they gave Egypt the structure and organization and creative dynamism that were grounded in a profound feeling for the sacredness of life and the certainty that everything was ensouled with divine presence.”

Once again, through Ma’at we see the process of construction emerge into form from the Tao. And, today we are witness to this process via the Green Movement of the Global North. A post - post - modern version of what many indigenous cultures intrinsically new – it is most wise for humanity to live in harmony with the earth, and in turn the cosmos. This requires a certain trust, faith or knowing, or even, perhaps a surrender to fluid alignment with the cosmic? What are we building in our relationships, on our landscapes, inside ourselves? The process of creation is always at work.

Ancient Greece was also imbued with an awareness of the presence of the Tao and it’s evolution into structure. It is quite possible that the exponential growth of technology and the internet is humanities vastest constructed reflection of the cosmos to date. Dependent on abstractions of energies that we see manifested in circuitry, outlets, plugs, wiring and now wireless. Our desire to construct and connect to a source never escapes us.

“Gaia was the Great Mother of all life and Mother of the gods. But Gaia was more than Great Mother as source and foundation of all that is. She was also the active and dynamic consciousness guiding and structuring the ordering of creation. She was the life ensouling it and the law directing it.”

What appears to be chaos, upon closer look, often takes shape and, freedom might actually be the right to dance in tune with the cosmos.