Chapter 4 – The Tree of Life

They walk through the forest, feeling the sun upon their skin. All around them is the foliage of the green, the vines, tendrils and branches of a living world. Peter pointed all around them.

“Look around you. Everything you see here is part of the planet. The trees, the shrubs, the network of roots and fungus, all interconnected, all part of the same system. Human beings are a part of this system.”

She looked around, taking in the environment. It was pleasant. The birds were singing and a light breeze moved through the space. Shafts of sunlight pushed away the shadows as the trees gently swayed back and forth. After a few moments, she spoke.

“So … you’ve said that our inner world and the outer world are part of the same thing” said Calliope. “That what we consider the layers of our consciousness exists in the planet.”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that what we think of as the layers of our mind, as the conscious, the subconscious, the unconscious collective, the archetypes of consciousness and the elements of our mind are actually part of the substance of the Creation. That we are a part of the tree of life, and there are layers to the tree which correspond to our psychic states.”

“So …. what we consider our conscious mind is a part of the tree?”

“It’s a layer of the tree.”

She furrowed her brow for a moment, concentrating. “I want to understand this.” she said. “How can we and the tree be the same thing?”

“I’ll show you. In order for it to make sense, we’re going to take a journey into the tree. Into the layers of consciousness as they express themselves.”

As he spoke he opened his arms wide and gestured to the surrounding foliage.

Layer 1 – The Terrasphere – The Surface of Perception

“I call this layer the terrasphere. It’s the most basic, most obvious layer of the tree. Literally what things appear as on the surface of the world. This is how most people see the world, yet it is only the beginning of their adventure. To truly understand the treasure within, we must go deeper, into the very heart of the tree of life. Are you ready?”

She nods. In the distance, a lightning bolt cracked, connecting heaven and earth for the briefest of moments.

Peter looks up, watching it spark. “It has always been about the lightning for me” he mused. “About the connection between the heavens and the earth.”

They enter the tree, walking through a vast portal of roots and branches which moves towards a great staircase that leads downwards.

“All stories happen in the underlands” Peter said. “In the land beneath the land. In the place of stories that is the Mythica herself.”

She looked around, eyes wide. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We’re different here!”

“Different how?”

“The way we look! It’s …. we’re more mythical. Like in a storybook!”

“Yes. We’re moving from what we appear as to the outer eye towards what we appear as in the inner. This marks the movement from the conscious mind to the subconscious, from the surface of the world to the subtle. It is the gateway to what I call the mythosphere, the layer of the tree which corresponds to our individual stories. To what we identify with in a mythopoetic way.”

“I don’t understand. Is it … is it another world?”

“Yes and no.” he said. “What has to be understood is that the layers are not discrete, there are no hard lines. They blend into one another. What occurs in the mythosphere and in the layers beneath it is simultaneously happening on the surface. It just looks different depending on how you perceive it.”

“It all comes down to the tree.” said Peter. “For it is the structure upon which mortal life exists.”

“How big is it?”

“It’s vast. We stand in the roots of the world, where the words of the Creation exist in the depths of our subtle bodies.”

“All our bodies?”

“Yes.”

They walk down the staircase within the tree, itself surrounded by what seems like an endless amount of roots and branches.

“Over the years of my journey through the earth plane, I came to see that there were layers to our consciousness, and that those layers were a part of the layers of the consciousness of the planet.”

“Layers? What do you mean?”

“Well, it related to the process of healing, of the return to health and wholeness that I recognized to be the movement back to the classic ‘garden of Eden’ and to my own work in discovering the worlds within the world.”

“How so?”

“That was the thing of it.” Peter said. “As i’d made my way across the planet on my Quest, i’d seen that the people lived in many realities, in many different sets of identities and associations, all of which had their own existence, which lived in their own string of synchronicities. As they were doing this, they navigated through a set of perceptions which defined that world. Through the uniqueness of the myth and meaning which drove their life.”

“So … everyone lived in their own world.” she said, and he nodded.

She pondered this. “You’re saying that everyone lives in their own world. In a world … within the world?”

He nods again.

“Wouldn’t those worlds collide with each other?” she asked. “How do they exist in the same place?”

He smiled. “That’s the thing. They don’t exist in the same dimension. They exist along different points of space and time. On a string of synchronicities which form a line of time that is their human existence. On what they may consider the thread of their life.”

What we experienced as the process of our transformation over time was happening simultaneously across all the layers of the tree. What we saw as our movement through the surface of the world was also a movement through the subtle.

Layer 2 – The Mythosphere – The Subconscious Realm

“What layer is this?”

“The one immediately beneath the surface. In terms of the human mind it correlates to the subconscious.”

“What’s it called?”

“I call it the mythosphere, the atmosphere of myths and stories that is closer to the song of the soul than what things appear to be on the surface of the self. You can think of it as the forest of the Gods.”

Mist surrounded them as they descended the staircase from the tree, casting the forest in a pale glow.

“It’s misty. Unclear.” she said.

He nodded. “Such is the nature of manifesting dreams.”

“Which gods?”

“Any of them. All of them. It doesn’t matter. The mythosphere is where the ideas of pantheons and personalities exist. It is the place of our subconscious and mythical embodiment, closer to where our truer self resides. It is the place of our stories, the place of our myths and living legends. It is the layer of the Mythica.”

As they walk through the forest all manner of sounds can be heard, the rustling of the trees mixed with the howls of animals, the crackle of campfires just out of sight and the beat of hands upon drums echoing across the canopy. The air is heavy with mist, yet somehow luminant, as if lit by many sources of light.

The landscape changes as they continue down the path, moving through long stretches filled with totems and statues of forgotten gods. Runes and symbols dot the forest as they walk onward. Calliope pauses then and looks back at him. Seeing the question in her eyes, Peter speaks.

“Memories.” he says, trailing his hand across one of the statues. “These are the impressions of forgotten gods, of cultures and beliefs that no longer exist in the modern world yet whose echoes remain still here in the mythosphere, deep within the subconscious layers of the human mind.”

“It’s all about identity.” says Peter. “About the karmic impressions that make up the substance of the self and it’s story. In the mythosphere, what we appear as on the surface of the world takes on another significance, one where we are the embodiments of differnet Goddesses and Gods, of the creatures of myth and legend, endlessly shifting from one archetype to another.”

“Does it show on the surface of the world?”

“Yes. Such is the nature of the Mythica, that she exists on all the planes of existence at once.”

They pass a running stream, and as they do, filaments of prismatic energy float past, threads of color which reflect in his cloak and on the water.

“What’s this?” she asks, bending down to drink.

“It’s the river of myth.” he says. “The view of our many stories and mythologies as a thing of water and color. Everything in the forests of the mythosphere is fed by it, much as the forests of the surface forest are themselves sustained by water and light.”

Calliope looks deeply into the water, seeing her face reflected in it’s rippling form. She rises her head and considers the vastness surrounding them, at the massive roots moving throughout the space, and turns to face him, water dripping from her fingers.

“The roots, the branches … it’s all a metaphor for human existence? For the layers of consciousness that exist within the self?”

“Both.” he said. “What we consider our human body is a part of the Tree of Life. It is only the illusion of separation that defines the dimmer octaves of perception that obscures this. We are a part of the planet, part of her rhythms, her cycles, made from her very substance.”

“Is this what you meant by the golem?”

“Yes. What we experience as our human form is made from karmic impressions that are housed in the roots and branches of our nervous system. As we explore the layers of our consciousness we discover those impressions sitting within. They are the components of our self and it’s structure, the substance within our story that gives rise to what we consider our current self and it’s lineage, all existing within the cycles of the tree itself.”

They continue onward, through the forests of the mythosphere. Gradually, the many gods and goddesses start to disappear, and they find themselves near yet another portal – this one show a human face held in a weave of roots and branches acting as a gateway into a downward passage.

“Where are we headed now?” asks Calliope.

“Deeper.” Peter says. “Past the world of subconscious impressions that defines our personal mythology and into what lay beneath, towards the mnemosphere of the Tree of Life.”

Layer 4 – The Mnemosphere – Collective Consciousness

“The mnemosphere relates to the deep unconscious, the place where the ego-identity dissolves even further into the wash of collective consciousness. Here we have moved away from the sense of the little ‘i’ and closer to the ‘we’ that is our larger nature, much like an individual cell is part of a larger organ within the framework of a body.”

“It’s so different here …” she exclaimed, looking over the many faces and interwoven roots. “It’s like .. like they’re all blended together!”

“Yes.” he said. “That’s how things look at the level of the mnemosphere. It’s where the lineages and other more enduring karmic structures of identity exist within the tree of life.”

Layer 4 – The Akasphere – Archetypes of Consciousness

“Where are we now?”

“We are at the very edges of humans concept of themselves, in the threadwork of patterns and synchronicities which bleed back into the Akasha from whence they came.”

“Here, at this layer of the tree, self-identity itself dissolves, distilling into the primal geometries that make up it’s substance. It is the layer of the aka, the karmic constellations formed by the intersection of the threads of cause and effect, one step closer to the formlessness that gives rise to all things.”

“What’s that down below?”

“The akasphere. The layer of the tree of life which corresponds to the archetypes of consciousness, where even the shape of the tree fades into the sand.”

“As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without.” Peter says. “What we experience on all the layers of the mind and land are wrought around the singularity of the self. Around the axis mundi of our spine and nervous system which is itself a subset of the roots and branches of nervous system of the planet.”

“In essence, every human life is a mixture of the lightning and the tree, of the electromagnetic marriage between the stars and the soil. We are light encased in a body, a soul incarnate through a body made from the very soil of the tree of life.”

“Wait … I thought we were at the roots of the tree. Why are we looking at the stars?”

“They’re the same” Peter said. “The constellations of aka that make up our souls purposing exist both above and below the middle earth that is our incarnation. It’s all a matter of perspective. What is above is below, what is within is without, all radiant around the singularity of the self and it’s purpose within the ecosystem of the Tree of Life.”

“It looks like a desert.”

“It’s actually a part of the tree, yet far more formless than the other aspects.”

“For me the akasphere plays out as the sands of time” Peter said. “As a vast and shifting plane of sculpted forms which rise and fall like breath. It leads to the ether sea, where form has dissolved past the castles and civlizations of temporary shape and has returned to the liquidity that is the essence of change itself.”

Calliope looked around at the endless desert and the twinkling constellations of light overhead. She turned to Peter and spoke. “But .. it’s just sand and those shapes in the sky. How can this be the foundation for meaning?”

He pointed up to one of the constellations. “See those? I call them aka. You can think of them as karmic constellations, arrangements of the basic elements of life into forms that have meaning to the human condition.”

“They’re beautiful …” she said, “but how do they create forms?”

“Aka are really the foundation for understanding the landscapes of one’s legend.” he said. “They’re the base form beneath the forms, beneath the clusters of conditions which exist in someone’s path and what we are divining along the way.”

“In my investigations into the nature of our Stories I saw many forms, many cultures and traditions. Many shapes. While they all had their own cultural significance and sense of identity, there was something I could sense underneath. Something that was more constant than their personal myth or the collective impressions that made up their culture or tradition. There was a form beneath the forms, a distilled quality I could feel in the ethers of the space. Over time, I was led to call these forms ‘aka’, made from the very threads of cause and effect that moved through the Akasha.”

“So they’re … meanings?”

“Yes. The smallest units of meaning. I tend to think of them in terms of music, as music is the most obviously vibrational language of the universe. It’s the closest form to the reality that all things are made of sound and which exist only as long as that sound is echoing through the space. Just like singular notes come together into chords, I consider aka the chords of consciousness, the architecture of archetypes which exist beneath the many different spheres and realms of manifestation itself.”

“It’s not just that.” Peter said. “Our mythos can be seen here, the line of our myth and meaning embodied as a structure of aka repeating in our lives like a melody.”

“A mythos?”

“Yes. All souls have a mythos, a reason-for-being. Something that plays out repeatedly on their path and which informs them as to their true desire. It’s something that took me years to see, and only came about through the rigorous documentation of my Quest.”

The Aethersphere – The Elements of Consciousness

“Is it an ocean?”

“It is the ether sea. It’s as much of an ocean as the akasphere is a desert.” he replied.

“What do you mean?”

“In my experience the Ether Sea lay at the very edge of form itself. It is the liquidity of formlessness with the barest of mass, and is made of the shifting vibrational tones of the five primary elements. It’s the place where identity just completely dissolves, where the singularity of the ego surrenders it’s last entanglements and returns to the ocean of possibility from whence it came. It’s as close to the formless as one can get while still having a semblance of form.”