The Elysium Visions

Honor the sacred.
Honor the Earth, our Mother.
Honor the Elders.
Honor all with whom we share the Earth:-
Four-leggeds, two-leggeds, winged ones,
Swimmers, crawlers, plant and rock people.
Walk in balance and beauty.

~Native American Saying

I don't understand everything that happened here, I am learning what happened over time. So essentially I am just sharing with you what happened, for you to make of what you will. It appears to me that the first vision was a vision of the whole thing without close regard for how people figure into it, and the second seemed more directed towards how people, or to be specific myself, should put lessons from this vision into practice. Of course the idea of having visionary experiences of any sort may be alien to a great many people, and so you might be inclined to think of this as something that has no further application outside my own rather strange mental processes. Personally, I begin to see extensions of this vision extruding into my life on an ongoing basis, so that I can no longer make a sharp and clear distinction between the visions and what I experience. It is a Logos, if you will, that is creeping in through the edges of my life like little plants growing up through a city sidewalk.

The first vision happened shortly after dedicating my home shrine. In a trance, the shrine seemed, not visibly but... okay, I don't know the words for exactly what senses those are. It seemed to open up on another place, which I took to calling Elysium.

"Heaven and Earth would come together
And gentle rain fall.
Men would need no more instruction and all things would take their course."
-Daodejing #32

Elysium seemed to be like Earth, but an Earth in which everything was taking a middle and harmonious path. The air was full of sweet smells of flowering things and fragrant leaves and earth, a moist cool breeze blew. It was also much more than this, but I cannot exactly express what this "more" was. All I knew for certain was that it made me inexpressibly glad and if I could have just jumped right through to the other side, I surely would have. If there was a place I could go after death, I would want it to be Elysium. I don't believe Elysium exists in our "known" visible world anywhere, I think it is a place in the Dreaming.

I've touched on the idea of the Dreaming in previous posts, but just briefly, there is no true past or future but rather levels of concealment in the present. So that the future for instance exists in the present, but in the form of the habits, actions, motion, thoughts, wishes and dreams of all things. The past also exists in the present. Time is not a series of sequential hash marks ticking off on a line graph, but the future overtakes the present, from the present, in the present: forms in the present move into a concealed part of the present - the past. This present is much more expansive than normally understood, a motion not a stasis. In other words, sequential time does not truly exist, but rather there is a continual motion, a continual becoming and passing away, in the same present. The future enters view from the Dreaming, but this is not necessarily all that the Dreaming is. Myths, maybe even completely forgotten myths, lie waiting in it, and more things perhaps than we can know: exactly what lies within it is unknown until it becomes uncovered, unveiled, manifest in some way in the visible (to us) parts of the present, or in this case in visions.

The second vision happened as I was communicating with a live oak tree. I was struggling with tobacco addiction as I still am, and so I brought my problems to the tree. Again, for most people, this is not a relatable experience and I completely understand that. Relatively few people I think "talk" to trees and expect a real response from them. Their loss, I think. They are wonderful beings, trees. Anyway, what I got as a response is a direct experience of a post-addiction state of mind, as if it were already behind me, but also a sort of indication of "this is the direction you need to go." So a moral lesson of sorts but expressed as a real and present state of mind that I was directly exposed to.

It was more than just advice on my addiction however. Saturated through this experience was another experience of Elysium as practically expressed in this world and to human beings. In other words, Elysium not just as a state in the Dreaming or in a vision but a mode of a better human life in this visible world. Or expressed differently, Elysium is a state in the Dreaming that wants to get out, wants to be expressed here, and there is guidance for the state of mind that facilitates that. My original experience of Elysium did not appear to involve human beings unless you include me, it was a vision of a whole environment. So this experience was of an ethos, a moral direction if you like, but expressed as a whole state of mind rather than in particular dictums. The tree did not utter some sort of directives like "cut down a little at a time" or "go cold turkey and chew a lot of gum," but exposed me directly to a state of being.

If I were to try to write down a literal expression of what this state of mind was telling me, it was: "build up all life in love, be real in the moment, and respect all beings and things." However, again, this was not a position statement, it wasn't writing a white paper here. It is a state of being that transcends concise verbal expression. It is the state of mind that results in "building up all life in love and respecting all beings and things." A state of living active reverence in some sense.

Now, where does all this come from? It seems rather peculiar that the beings that I normally relate to would have some sort of concise plan in mind for how humans are supposed to fit into the scheme of things. One potential answer would be that they don't themselves have any such plan, but rather that they embody their own form of Elysium within themselves and it just sort of exuded out onto me. It is not that live oak trees spend a lot of time thinking about the right way for human beings to live, but rather that the Logos of Elysium is already in them and it just osmosed out onto me. Logos, a "living word," (not a dead static word) or in other words a state of mind and being. Elysium seems to be this too, both a "place" of sorts and a Logos, a seed of a living unfolding holy state of mind. It is also quite possible that Elysium as a state or place in the Dreaming is continually trying to be expressed in the visible world, as it is perhaps already expressed in the lives of living things like my friend the live oak.

I am just sort of realizing stuff as I write things, things sort of become clearer in the act of trying to explain them.

So here it is, what I experienced. I do not want you to believe in my experience. Your secondhand belief is useless. I want you to get out there and find your own live oak tree, or some other tree that seems to beckon to you to come over, and see what she says. I can't give you Elysium on a blog page. If it is to be found, you have to find it. Something has to osmose it to you directly. Your state of mind has to recognize Elysium in some sense and in some being, and become aligned with it. Words cannot directly give you a state of mind, as this was given to me.