The Other World

Our waking existence is like a golden city.  It has high-rises and slums, theaters and grocery stores, museums and malls.  It has beauty, sadness, and not a little terror.  But it is, above all else, artificial.  It is a paradise and hell that we have constructed using various materials, various technologies, over countless generations.  Or rather, it has been built for us; a world into which we are born, but to which we may yet contribute. 

But our cities do not stand on nothing.  There is a much greater and richer wilderness, within which, and out of which our cities have been built.  We import food, building materials, and songs from the territories without.  And if nothing else, we take the wilderness with us wherever we live.  The diversity and complexity of the wilderness lives on in our guts, our neurons, our passions.  We ourselves are islands of wilderness within any constructed environment.  We are what make the city worth building, worth visiting, worth preserving. 

Just so, conscious existence is a raft built upon, and constructed out of, a hidden sacred world of loving chaos.  That wilderness is what many have described as The Other World. 

It is a busy place.  Countless spritely characters flit in and out of being, the vast majority of which last no longer than instant.  They are like fish who joyfully fling themselves out of the water, flying through the atmosphere of existence just for a moment, before falling back into the ocean of nothingness.  This continual flickering of infinite beings forms a kind of white noise, a cosmic background vibration, that certain mystics say they can hear: the Universal Note, Ohm. 

Yet this is only the beginning.  If these instants form the soil, there are entire kingdoms of life-forms that grow out of it.  There are nature spirits, angels and demons, archetypal personages, and the various souls who were once, or one day will be, enfleshed as mortal actors.  They have their own laws and traditions, their own plans and purposes.  And yet, they are never separate, never truly independent from that Universal Spirit, that coherent cosmic consciousness, the one-who-is-many, who uses the canvas of space-time to transform that original single note into a symphony. 

What I described just now?  The Otherworld?  There are two things that must constantly be kept in mind by any would-be explorer of unseen realms.  The first is that the Otherworld is real.  This hardly needs to be said, usually.  The second is that the Otherworld is, in fact, this world.  This Sacred World.