Something I’ve observed many times is that being able to name things brings a much higher level of awareness to experiences.
When I lived in Bali, for example, I learned the Balinese names of all the common flowers there, and it completely changed my relationship to my own garden and to what I saw as I travelled around the island. Plants were no longer a blur of leaves and flowers but individual species that brought the landscape to life. To this day, I hardly know the English names for these flowers, so to me a hibiscus is still a bunga pucuk, and a frangipani is still a bunga jepun, and that’s absolutely fine. The important thing is to have some way of recognising the differences.
Since arriving back in the UK, I’ve embarked on similar awareness-raising projects. The first of these, because my husband and I were house hunting, was an exploration of British geology. Now that we’re happily settled in an area that we love, a new project I’ve taken on this year is learning the names of British trees. Again, as I do this, I’m finding that my world is transforming from a haze of branches, leaves and blossoms to an awareness of the rich array of different species. In the same way that when you buy a new car you suddenly start seeing that model everywhere you go, I’m now seeing trees in a way I never did before.
An even more intriguing aspect of naming things comes from venturing into the non-physical realms, such as the states that are experienced during meditation, the energy changes that occur during a space clearing ceremony, and the shifts that occur during clutter clearing. For this I was fortunate to discover many years ago the pioneering work of Samuel Sagan and the Clairvision School, who have compiled a reference book titled A Language To Map Consciousness. It contains over 400 terms and concepts that open out the exploration of consciousness in ways I had previously not considered, and has provided me with the terminology to describe and develop aspects of my work I previously had no names for. As the introduction to the book explains, ‘Words are power. If you don’t have words, you can’t identify states of consciousness. And if your words are vague, so will your experiences be.’
Some of the entries in this book are terms such as “chakra” and “ritual” that are already in common use in respected spiritual traditions, but the majority are new names that have resulted from years of rigorous mapping of consciousness by the Clairvision School. Among my all-time favourites are “combinessence”, which describes the merging of two or more spiritual presences, “superastrality”, which refers to levels of astrality that stand above ordinary mental consciousness, and “verticality”, which is a subtle body structure that can be developed to access superastrality and higher realms of consciousness. If you are interested to know more, the book is available as a free download at the clairvision.org website.
And why bother to develop awareness at all? Carl Jung explained this very succinctly when he said, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’
Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2014