Shall I bring this back down to earth a bit more?
The particles that make up your body seem to have come together after having previously been entirely disconnected. I suggest that this is inaccurate. Instead, you as an individual object arose as a process of “budding”, an overlapping of fields and resonances, that gives the appearance of being a new object like 3D glasses give the impression of depth at a movie. You existed before the apparent body. In an earlier stage of your development you existed in the collective unconscious, an “underworld” to this surface of middle world.
Just as you don’t have to volunteer to eat or breath, it’s not a conscious choice, not the initial engagement. Your body also encoded a set of expressive tendencies that were every bit as organic as your need to survive. These tendencies go all the way down to the genetic substrate, even the epigenetic substrate. Your body remembers what the species remembers, and this memory is not conscious. Your body remembers also what your gut flora remember, what your bacterial host colonies remember. There is a bacteria they have found in the soil that has the ability to send calming signals to a human host. You may think your mating predilections are entirely a matter of personal choice, but your biological drives and moods emerge largely from a collective. Even expressed as pattern of physics, too much heat or cold, distress, puts a serious curb in species reproduction. My point is, reproduction happens through you, not because of you.
How this relates to the world tree… Your body is the world tree. Your brain is the upper world formulating elaborate metaphysical plans. Your gut is the underworld. The bacteria being the dirty but genius Dwarves that make the high minded goals of the gods possible, and your heart would be the middle world, the centre of communication between the two. But this is just one level of the world tree, the networking goes much farther.
It’s a fractal pattern? Reoccurring on different levels? Exactly. The Bodhi tree in India. They could show you where it is. Imagine the Buddha sitting beneath it, and in all the turmoil created by his extreme acts of asceticism, his mind so exhausted and still, it began to resonate with everything around it. That tree became omnipresent. That moment in time eternal.
In the observer mind of Gautama, the Buddha mind, the single inner unified light, is the observer effect expressed to its utmost degree. The world tree is that state of resonance. It is also the blind eye of Odin as he hung under the world ash Yggdrasil.
A tuning fork? Yes. The ultimate physical branch. Odin was only able to return from his state of transcendence with the aid of his two allies symbolized as ravens. You know those birds that notoriously ate peoples eyes from time to time, Hugin and Munin, thought and memory? Odin would be a Norse Bodhisattva, a returner, but that is still the path no matter what locus / nexus of the world tree you happen to connect with.
There are many who express a desire to just drown in the world tree, remain suspended indefinitely. That ultimately works only for a finite span. The attendants remain on hand to help those who really wake up to return to the multiverse. The Norse called them Valkyries, the Greeks called them Furies. People here have gotten things a bit backwards, but perhaps I am getting a bit too cosmic. Nirvana is the bardo. They are one and the same.
What is the bardo? The between state of the dead. The realm between incarnations. It’s true that it is possible to discover a way to stay in that existence, but that is not by itself virtuous. Even the sleep of Merlin is guided by a vision. Nimue’s tree is the world tree. The Valkyries and the shining ones of Celtic myth are the same beings.
That explains why the Buddhists say that successfully navigating the bardo stages at death are an opportunity for big advancement. If you can’t maintain any focus in bardo, you’re immediately spit back out in another incarnation? Which is basically everyone. Not immediately as time isn’t relevant. Your period of suspension can seem like an eternity, but yes, you are midwifed back into a new incarnation. There are those who tend the tree. It’s mistaken though to call them the deciders of fate.
Is the bardo like the sap in the tree? Yes. That sap being the same as the waters of the river Lethe. Some describe it as a river of forgetting, but it’s actually a stream of collective memory, the memory left by your physical actions right now. Well, no information is lost. You have changed the resonance of everything you have had any contact with here, and that echoes on to shake the tree.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~