What The Tree Told Me-The Three Phases of the Self

Part 4-The Deeper Self

As I mentioned, the tree had a crook in it, where the two branches that were amputated joined to the trunk. It took a while for the tree to draw my attention away from the cut stumps to notice the trunk where they were joined to. When I did, I realised that the branches were dependent on the trunk. Right! All trees have a trunk that comes before the rest. Self-evident Jay. Wakey wakey. It’s funny that when we are so caught up with our pain, we often miss the obvious health that is still there. The allegory went on.

As I look at it to write this now, I realise that it never stops going on, deeper and deeper. The Life Force that feeds the tree, feeds me. No matter what has been amputated from me in my life, the core of me continues on. Now I have to ask myself ‘what is that core’? Back to the tree. Is it the trunk that gives life to the branches? Is it my body that gives me the energy of life? Well no. Not really. Just like the tree draws off the roots, maybe the beginning of my energy came from those that spawned me. But then, others spawned them too. This is beginning to feel like jumping down Alices rabbit hole.

Where’d the seed come from that began the journey that our tree is on? Another tree. An Ancestor tree. I have done a lot of work reclaiming my ancestors from the archives in which they were kept, breathing life into their conceptual bodies so that I could get to know myself through them. Does the tree feel its predecessors though its roots? Some might doubt it feels at all, but I know it does, deep inside me. I know its feelings for us, my neighbours and I, drew us to it in our times of need.

What is this thing that connects us one to another, across the road and across species? Something does. Where does this something come from? Is it transitory or does it always exist, allowing us to tap into it when we are willing. When we open ourselves up past the hypnotic occurrences in our domestic lives. Maybe its only when those domestic lives shatter a bit that we open up to what else is around us, in the same way that I didn’t notice the trunk of the tree until it screamed at me “look deeper”. So, we do, because we have to. We are dependent on those unseen connections that seem to turn up when we most need them.

My ancestors believed in a web of life. Many ancestors seemed to, no matter where they were from. They left us stories of the Weaver, weaving the web of life, Spider Woman, Indira’s Net. These stories are everywhere. There is truth there. The tree has a deep network of mycelium connecting it to other trees, sending messages down its fungal tracks to each other. We call it the Wood Wide Web now we humans have discovered it, likening it to our own Internet. The concept is there if we will but see where its pointing. Everything is connected to everything else.

And still I come back to: what is this thing that connects us all? I was so relieved when Living Systems Theory told me it was Life with a capital L. That Life has definable parameters. It is self-organising, it is creative, it is self-regenerating, and it is intelligent. WooW! I was right in my shamanic teaching that “everything is alive, conscious and intelligent”. So relieved….for about a minute. Because it also taught me that life created itself by pulling together elements within the construct of the planet’s early existence. It enabled its existence through the balance of heat, moisture, gases, and other elements. Interestingly, this is exactly what my Māori mentor told me about their creation stories, couched in the terms of gods. It maintains itself through continued adjustments of these ingredients, as we try our best to disrupt its efforts.

So, Life wasn’t always there. It doesn’t exist on all planets. We are not sure if it exists anywhere else, though we are searching far and wide. It may not exist on Earth for that much longer. Who knows? And that is the point for me. If life, as we know it, didn’t exist, that does not mean that ‘nothing’ does. All those other planets, all those stars, galaxies, universes. Where the hell did they come from? What connects them, because something does? They are not floating around in nothing. It’s impossible to float at all if there is nothing. This reminds me of William Blakes poem The Tyger;” What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Makes me wonder much like he did: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Now hang on a minute, I don’t believe in a male god looking down from a white cloud throwing thunderbolt. But something’s going on. I know full well that something led me to that tree, as it did my neighbours. I know so many times, when just as I was needing a helping hand, they appeared in all sorts of different guises. I know, and I now trust, that if I am looking for something, it’s also looking for me. So about here I’m going to reference myself. When I was teaching Psychosynthesis I came up with this concept. I arrived in class with a ball of clay. The clay was to represent what I then called the Universe. Showing it to my students, I told them a story of a Universal everything. Some call it The One. But it got bored because, as one, it couldn’t do anything else but be one. So, it decided to break itself up into two pieces, and for the first time, it saw itself. The experiment with duality had begun. It was such fun that it kept dividing itselves because it/they realised now that it/theyWhat the Tree Told Me-The Three Phases of the Self, The Deeper Self, Part 4 could.

At this point I have broken up the clay, scattering the pieces all over the floor, declaring that it represented you and me, along with all the other beings that the Universe is having fun creating. It has also found out it has potential. It can become anything it wants. In fact, everyone can become anything we want because we are it. Is this the point? Yes and no. While we are being anything we want, individually and collectively, we are having experiences that we would never have had as One. We are learning how to create. Then we are learning what it feels like to be that which we have created.

Will this go on forever? Who knows. But if Steven Hawkins was right, we will keep splitting up and expanding until we can no longer do it anymore, and then we will begin the process of shrinking back. The Big Bang will become The Big Crunch, as we come back together again into One. What’s the point of it all then? Each of us has had a unique experience of learning that, when combined back into a Whole, will have made the Whole grow in knowledge of itself. To sort of quote T S. Elliot “It knows itself for the first time.”

My experience with the tree has helped me to understand so much about myself that I didn’t know I knew before. It has helped me to grow in understanding of the Bigger Picture through the relationship with another being. Looking at it now, I see that I have many such relationships. I am in relationship with my dog, and indeed many dogs in the hood. I have my connection to plants in my garden, birds the sit on my birdbath, the house I live in, and created. What about people? Oh yes, many. Close as my skin, and so far away that I need a phone to reach them. But these are the obvious connections. We observe these relationships easily and daily. The trick is to look deeper, look farther, and know that we are all One.