Dreaming at the Feet of Hades

A conversation between Imeut and Durga

Imeut: Yeah so we were discussing the idea that everybody needs to experience different things and know different things in order for reality to “work”.

Durga: Right.

Imeut: because if everyone knew the same thing, or the experienced the same things, they wouldn’t be individuals.

Durga: Yeah they would be just ONE.

Imeut: And therefore reality, the play of life would not exist.

Durga: No. Because you need multiple players on a stage to make a play. You need multiple actors and actresses, it wouldn’t fun if it was just one person on a stage.

Imeut: right, it wouldn’t be an experience. But then the same point too is how meditation is intentionally becoming aware of that One awareness that’s behind them all. Well, not all meditation, but the meditation that we do.

Imeut: And about perfect love, with perfect love there would be no cause or reason to exercise perfect love unless people suffered. It’s the duality again. There is no recognition of suffering or alleviating of suffering without suffering itself being present. So you wouldn’t be able to have compassion for others if they weren’t suffering. So once again, reality would not work without compassion, without connection, without feeling for others. All of these individualized consciousnesses would just evaporate into nothingness, into the One.

Durga: Exactly, how could you have suffering or compassion if you didn’t have more than one “self” to teach you and give you examples of how to do it? Each one of us has a mother, who has given birth to us, and whose role in most mythologies or belief systems is to be the caregiver, to be the one that teaches you those things about yourself. You can’t have yourself without having another. You always come from somebody else who then hopefully takes care of you and loves you and teaches you about the ”self”. You couldn’t have just one “self” teaching “themselves” about “themselves” because it doesn’t work that way.

Imeut: Yeah! There would be no experience to learn from and nothing to learn! But that’s what the mother Goddess is doing at all times through the play of reality, she is teaching us compassion through er way of raising us all individually through ALL phenomena we experience constantly. It’s (experience) always a teaching leading us towards compassion. And so that brings you to the cycle of remembering and forgetting, remembering, and forgetting. Because for someone to learn compassion for suffering, someone needs to suffer. For someone to have remembered, they need to have forgotten. So without these terrible things that you wish you could alleviate and eliminate from the human experience, the fact is that if you eliminated them (suffering, lack of learning, forgetfulness of the nature of awareness) you would eliminate the nature of all awareness and phenomena themselves.

Durga: There would be nothing to experience, nothing to care about, nothing to love, nothing to feel compassion for, nothing to feel.

Imeut: There wouldn’t be feeling at all. Because feeling is just a concept.

Durga: You need an experience to have all of the things that we always think we are, which is our feelings, our body, our sensations, the noises around us, whatever. If there was no experience, we literally would just be that which we already are, what we explore in meditation. It would just remove all of the outer shells that we experience.

Imeut: And even that experience itself relies on there being experience to have. So even THAT removal of shells wouldn’t be there, because removing the shells would require a reference point. Once again, there is a duality-based reference point. Forgetting and remembering, suffering and non-suffering

Durga: Existing and not existing.

Imeut: Meditating on either awareness or objects of awareness. And these are all dualities. But remember, together they make the perfect harmony. All dualities do. So what does that mean for this cosmology of experience and consciousness we have just described and built? What do we know about duality? It’s false, it’s empty, it’s an illusion. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. So that means within this giant cosmology of remembering and forgetting, you actually never forget. Because you are that Oneness, are that experience at the center of this operative cosmology, you are the perfect harmony. There is no such thing as remembering and forgetting. As long as you’re there, you’re present, you are remembering and forgetting at the exact same time. You’re operating in the cycle as a consciousness, to play in and carry out the cycle for consciousness to exist. There is no point to be at. And there is no point to go to or come from. You’re simultaneously at every point at the same time in every moment of waking awareness. This isn’t like “Oh I was there, oh I’ll be there, oh I understood that then, I experienced that then,” no because it’s not even an experience! It just is the fact that you are.

Durga: And that’s why it’s the fact that you already are perfect and holy and whole.

Imeut & Durga at the same time: Everything is perfect and holy and whole.

Imeut: Everything (that can be identified) is just a tiny speck in this cosmology of the cycle of suffering, rebirth, remembering, death, forgetting.

Durga: But the fact that some gods and goddesses have become so- it’s because of duality that’s really the same thing- but you tend to have these people that are either really attracted to learning about wisdom traditions, or so opposite that they just are like “No, fuck you, and we’re going to create all of these things in society to condition you to forget and actively combat remembrance” and make you feel like you’re worthless, and you need to work for worth, and all that crap. That needs to exist in order for…

Imeut: For the other side of the duality to exist! Exactly! It’s a spectrum. There are two extremes of remember and forgetting, and things can exist at any point on that spectrum. It’s not two states, it’s a spectrum of One whole. You can’t have a spectrum or a duality without the perceived SHITTY part! Hahahaha!

Durga: Hahaha nooo! And that’s so shitty! That’s the shitty part!

Imeut: But it’s also beautiful!

Durga: It is beautiful in that like, you know the big picture perspective, and I can appreciate that. But I think that in the “micro” if you will, it’s not that great. It’s like the point you were making earlier, like we as humans are almost fighting ourselves all the time. We want this perfect beautiful universe, and we hate all the things that make it so ugly and horrible at times, but without those things you wouldn’t have the beautiful things either. You wouldn’t have anything at all.

Imeut: Right, and without that desire to address the negative things, you wouldn’t do good deeds. So you wouldn’t even be working towards, and as a part of the cosmology, moving that cycle or suffering and the alleviation of suffering. It wouldn’t be moving at all.

Durga: I know, and part of me feels kind of shitty about that because it’s frustrating. But at the same time it’s beautiful. But I don’t know how to balance that feeling. It’s frustrating and beautiful at the same time.

Imeut: Perfect trust. Nothing is really happening.

Durga: Yeah. I think where I’m coming from is more perfect love, like I’m angry for all those that are suffering and I want to help and change that.

Imeut: Well that’s very appropriate, especially in this conversation, because you are the goddess and I am the god. I’m emptiness, I know it’s all bullshit. And you’re the goddess, and you’re love, and you’re “Oh my GOD! All this suffering!” You’re pushing the wheel of the play of consciousness, causing people to remember and forget. And I’m just like, at the center of that wheel like “Yeah, okay! 😊” And that creates the movement of reality. Without the difference between the goddess and the god, there wouldn’t be a cycle of play. Once again, it’s part of the cosmology of awareness. This is another example of that duality that is empty, and really is just the One perfect harmony. The wheel doesn’t exist. The god and the goddess don’t exist. There is just the Oneness of the perfect harmony.

Durga: Right. Anything that separates anything is empty.

Imeut: Right, and if you wanna watch this black blob move, you need to make different parts move at different times to create patterns and the illusion of movement. And that’s why there needs to be a breakdown of the One perfect harmony, a split into the god and the goddess. There needs to be a part that can push another part. And then that goes and multiplies infinitely into more gods and goddesses, into people, into groupminds, into cities, into countries, planets, solar systems, galaxies. It’s all a microscopic magnification of that original splitting into duality from the One perfect harmony, of the god and the goddess. But what is doing the looking through that magnifying glass?

Durga: *laughs*

Imeut: You are. In every waking moment of reality. You don’t even have to do it, it just happens. It is happening. It is you. *laughs*