We Are Waking The Sleeping Giant (A general overview - part 1) |
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We Are Waking The Sleeping Giant (A general overview - part 1) |
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When we first arrived in Liverpool it was hard to know the best way to find where the Giant was sleeping. We knew from the start that the Giant existed in more than the usual three dimensions. But how could we ever hope to see the Giant’s shape in the everyday world if the everyday world made up the shape of the Giant itself? It seemed a completely impossible task, but the more we thought and the more we dreamed, a way to proceed emerged: The Sleeping Giant is surely a part of our human lineage - its sentience is aligned to ours, though bigger of course in level and size. Humans are known to have seven chakras from root to crown; the Giant is bound to have seven as well. With this in mind we opened our hearts and walked all around throughout Liverpool until we found where the Giant’s chakras occurred. Little by little, bit by bit, the shape of the Sleeping Giant emerged. The root included a sacred spring, the crown was up on Everton Brow overlooking the whole of Liverpool. And lots of very amazing things were interspersed in between. Since the very first day when we made our way to Liverpool we weren’t at all sure where this work might lead and what in fact we’ve been called there to do. Even now almost four years later it’s still not that clear what the Giant’s impending awakening entails. But we’ve always been shown the next step to take; we’ve always known what our role must be as the opportunity itself arises. So it seems to us now it’s a very good time to write down a few initial conclusions about what we’ve discovered so far. But before we do there’s one or two things about this work to speak of first. Three actually: Story, Scale and Landscape.
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~~~~~~ Story ~~~~~~ |
So. Let’s start with Story. Initially you might well wonder why we need a story at all. Why talk about Giants about to awake when no-one has actually ever seen one in Liverpool or anywhere else? How can we possibly interact with something we can’t even see? Well that’s exactly where Story comes in. The things we want to work with here can’t be seen from the point of view of the everyday world. In order for us to be able to do anything at all we have to place something we actually can see between us and what we can’t, something that is connected to what-we-can’t-see and is also related to us. By placing the living membrane of Story in-between, we can interact with what-we-can’t-see and what-we-can’t-see has an opportunity to interact with us. Story is an excellent way to talk about something that’s usually impossible to talk about. It’s also good for remembering what we find out about what-we-can’t-see, even if initially we don’t understand what it all might mean. But Story is not a static thing, it will have an inherent tendency to change and evolve over time. As what we find out about what-we-can’t-see becomes part of the story and as the story takes in and includes what we find out, the shape and direction of the story itself begins to influence our evolving ideas about what it is we can’t see. Interestingly enough we’ve also discovered that it happens the other way around as well. As the relationship grows and matures, what-we-can’t-see begins to be more aware of us too. And what it finds out it incorporates, so the story evolves from inside out as well as from outside in. Story can also be used to put unknown things into relationship with each other. It works a bit like mathematics that way: the point is to show how the unknowns relate without solving the equation. Story is not about answers. It’s not a way to explain. When we work with Story we aren’t trying to know what the story might mean, rather we’re trying to see how the different parts of what-we-can’t-see relate to each other. Here’s another thing to consider: suppose I see something that you can’t see and I want you to see it too. If I sit down with you and tell you exactly what that something is, there’s a good chance you’ll see what I tell you to see. Or maybe not. But either way you won’t have seen what there is to see all on your own. Because you were told what there was to see you’ll just see it the way it’s described to you instead of the way that it looks to you when you see it yourself. So if I want you to see something just as it is the way you see it, it’s better for me to say that there’s something to see without telling you what it is. And that’s where Story comes in. It’s a way for me to tell you that there’s something to see without telling you what it is. Now you may end up seeing it differently than I do myself. It looks this way to you and looks that way to me. But in the end we can both agree that we’re seeing the same thing together. Now that we’ve talked in a general way about working with Story, let’s talk a bit more specifically about the Giant story itself. It starts out like this:
The first part of the story also tells us that there are only a certain number of Giants and one of them is in Liverpool. This means that the opportunity of seeing and interacting with this one is quite unique and precious - it ain’t going to happen just anywhere on any random day. The fact that the Giants are ancient refers to the fact that they exist on a completely different scale than anything we know in the everyday world. Time itself is different for them, they are older than the city of Liverpool itself, perhaps even older than our whole civilization. They are living on such a different scale, so big and so slow compared to us that we can both coexist in the very same time and space together without either of us being aware the other is even there.
This next part of the story says that it is possible to change consciousness (the Giant is dreaming of waking up). So even though the larger level of being (the Giant) is not conscious of its own true nature, it is trying to become aware of it (the Giant is starting to wake). Interestingly enough, even though this being exists on a larger level, we humans (on our more everyday level of being) are necessarily involved in its aspiration to realize full consciousness. What a curious thing! There are 400,000 people in Liverpool and it’s probably true that very few have any idea they’re an integral part of the Giant’s dreaming. And which of these few will ever suspect there might be a role for them to play in the Giant’s awakening?
There are a couple of interesting things about this part of the story. First of all we are not trying to wake up ourselves, we are not entering into the story to do anything about our own consciousness. We are waking the Giant, we are entering into the story to take part in the Giant’s awakening. Secondly, the Giant needs us to take an active role in this consciousness shift. So we who are hearing the Giant story are being called to enter into the story ourselves. And when we do it isn’t that we have to bang on pots or clang on pans to shake the Giant awake. It’s more as if we actually become the active expression of the Giant’s awakening ourselves. We are the parts that make up the whole of the Giant, and because that is true we must pursue a restructuring of ourselves in relation to the shape of the sleeping Giant as a whole. Curiously though, the very fact that we are waking the Giant (and not trying to wake up ourselves) makes our own awakening more likely to occur. When we take a role in the awakening of the next level up (the Giant), the process of our own awakening will begin and proceed on its own. It’s not that we try to awaken ourselves. It’s more that the cells within ourselves take on their role in awakening us in much the same way that we do with the Giant. Or to put it a little bit differently, it’s only possible for you to awake if the Giant awakens first. The same is true for the cells within us. And as we focus our consciousness on waking the Giant, the cells within us are more liable to do the same thing for us. Everything you do as you act out the story of the Giant’s awakening will have a huge and far-reaching effect on the inner unseeable micro-scaled forces that can act to awaken you. The small will awaken the large. You can only work on the Giant’s awakening by taking on the active role this awakening entails. And if you want to encourage an awakening within yourself on your everyday level, form the intent in much the same way that the Giant has done. The Giant is calling on all of us to help it awake - take the same tack, just don’t try to wake yourself up yourself. Work one level up or one level down. But you can’t work on waking yourself up on your own level (!). The process of waking up has to proceed on all three levels of scale concurrently. One level up sends the help. One level down does the actual work while the middle level forms the intent.
What this part of the story suggests is that even though we might choose to take a role in the Giant’s awakening, this interactive possibility is not created by us. It is a natural quality of the awakening itself. Even though we might be important vectors in the Giant’s impending consciousness shift, the will to awake arises within the Giant itself and not within us. We are called to take part, and either consciously or unconsciously we respond to that call. But from the point of view of our everyday level it’s not really our affair. To us the Giant’s awakening seems to be fated, something that comes about because of arising events on more complex levels. Before we move on to talk about Scale we should probably focus on one last thing about Story. As we said before, the Giant story is not the everyday kind, it comes to us from another level entirely. It’s a true story, something that is actually sentient and possesses consciousness. What? The Giant story is alive? This seems hard to believe! Well maybe it is and maybe it’s not, but either way let’s put that aside and decide instead to act as if the story is true and see what ensues. If we act as if the story is true we’ll begin to notice a few things more. If we pay attention when we hear the Giant Story, if we turn away from our own ideas about what we think and what we want and how we want the story to be - if we act as if the Giant story is a sentient being - we’ll notice that the story itself is aware of us listening to it. It’s waiting for us to enter in and take on a role, it’s left a place within itself for us to inhabit. So. If we act as if the Giant story is a sentient being it means we can actually have a relationship together. We suddenly have the freedom to interact with the story, and as we do the story begins to interact with us and changes the way it evolves. And as it does, then we in turn acknowledge the story as it unfolds. This mutual awareness influences the way the next stage of the story proceeds. The interaction evolves and grows. In a relationship between two sentient beings what essentially matters is not what they think or what they believe but what they can do together. By placing Story between the Giant and us, it allows us both to get to know each other more intimately. The Giant dreams of waking up and the story arises. The story needs us to evolve and grow. If we act as if we are part of the story, if we act as if the story is true, then the story is able to continue on and the Giant begins to awake. |
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~~~~~~ Scale ~~~~~~ |
Scale is not about size exactly. Size is involved, but it’s relative size that’s the issue here: how wholes and parts on one level relate to the wholes and parts on another. How big is the Giant? How big are we? And what is our size difference relatively? Well that shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. We know where the Giant’s chakras are from the work that we did on our first two visits. We can certainly measure the distance between our own chakras too. Comparing the two could help us to see what the scale of the Giant is relatively to the scale of us. First thing to say right away is this: the Giant is big, really big. Drawing a line on Google Earth we find that the Giant measures 127,091 inches from the fire pit up in its crown to the spring down in its root - that’s a little bit over 2 miles. Secondly you have to say that we are small, really small. A 5 foot 7 inch human measures 38 inches from root to crown. That means we’re 3/10,000 the size of the Giant, a ratio of one to .0003 Which just goes to show there’s a big difference between us and the Giant in terms of Scale, so huge that it’s hard for someone our size to actually keep it in mind. Early on in this work we didn’t pay enough attention to this, we never really grasped just how much bigger the Giant really is. But now that we’ve thought it through for a while we realize why it’s hard to see the Giant initially- the Giant’s too big. And it also means that it’s probably true that the Giant can’t easily see us either - we’re much too small. To our selves we don’t seem small in the least, we’re a normal-sized size or so it seems. But what we need to understand is just how small our smallness might be from the point of view of the Giant. To know how that goes what we’ll need to do is to shrink the Giant down to our size and see how small we’d seem to be then. Now that would mean we’d have to reduce 127,091 inches down to 38, and we’d have to shrink our own selves too to keep the same relative Scale. We’d have to multiply 38 inches by .0003 - that’s .0114 inches from root to crown if we shrink ourselves down just like the Giant. And to know how tall we’d seem to be from head to toe we’d have to multiply five foot seven - 67 inches - by .0003 - that’s .0201 inches in all.So if the Giant was 5 foot 7 inches, then we would be about 1/100 of an inch from our root to crown. That’s 0.25 mm or 250 microns. From head to toe we’d be 2/100 of an inch in all. That’s 0.5 mm or 500 microns. There’s one more useful measurement that might help us get an idea of how we relate to the Giant: the size of our footprint. It’s an important thing to know because when we move through the Giant we walk - our feet are the point of contact in fact. If we take 11 inches to be the size of a human footprint and multiply that by .0003, that would give us a footprint .0033 inches long - that’s 0.08382 mm or 84 microns. Now that’s not to say our footprints are actually 84 microns long. They still measure 11 inches to us. But if there were someone inside of us working away in just the same way that we are there inside of the Giant, then that someone would be 500 microns tall, 250 microns from root to crown and their footstep would measure 84 microns. This new relative size is very important for us to grasp because we’re waking the Giant, not ourselves. So we need to know how everything looks from the Giant’s point of view, not ours. To see the Giant on the Giant’s Scale we need to shift ourselves to view the world as a much bigger place than it looks to us now in our everyday way. We usually see the cars and buses, bushes and trees, everyday things in an everyday way relative to our own human scale. But they’re a great deal smaller relatively if we take the Giant’s point of view. So instead of seeing a tree to be 1 foot wide across the trunk and 20 feet high on our everyday Scale, we need to see it as the Giant might, with a trunk about 92 microns wide and a height of almost 2 mm. At this point it is interesting to take a look inside our own selves and notice the size of what’s there. A human skin cell is 30 microns across. A red blood cell is 8. Our skin pores are 70 - 90 microns in width depending on where. And the diameter of a human hair is somewhere around 90 microns or so. Interesting! That’s the same size as the tree we shrunk down! But wait, there’s more: the size of our feet could fit into a pore of the Giant’s skin! A curious thought to say the least, but it makes you think there might be a whole new way to see if we took this Scale shift seriously. Whether or not the trees we see everyday could actually be the hairs of the Giant, they are on that Scale relatively from the Giant’s point of view. Who knows what we might be able to do if we could see the world from the Giant’s Scale instead of our own? It seems to us now that it’s definitely true that this shift of Scale is key to taking on an active role in the Giant’s awakening. But we’ve also begun to realize it isn’t only about the size: it applies to time as well. In much the same way that the Giant is vast and we are relatively small, we can probably say that the Giant is slow and we are relatively fast. How slow is the Giant? How fast are we? Using the ratio of .0003 we can figure it out. If an hour for us has 3,600 seconds, then we multiply by .0003 to see how one of our hours compares on the slower scale of the Giant. 3,600 multiplied by .0003 comes out to be 1.08 seconds. So an hour for us only seems to be a second from the Giant’s point of view. It isn’t that the length of time a second takes is more or less. It’s more about the way it seems subjectively on different Scales. A second is always a second long, an hour goes on for an hour. But when we experience an hour of time, it seems to the Giant to be only a second. It may seem a bit confusing to talk about time this way. Actually though it’s not that weird. We talked about two different experiences for the size of our foot print: 11 inches for us and 84 microns for the Giant. The footprint itself didn’t change at all, just the way it was experienced. Time works the same way as well - it is what it is - but the Giant experiences it differently because of the difference in Scale. Now we saw before when we talked about Scale in relation to size: it’s hard for the Giant to see us at all - we’re much too small. The same sort of thing appears to be true when you talk about Scale in relation to time: it’s hard for the Giant to notice us and what we do because we do it too quickly - it’s over so fast. It took us a while to realize that it wasn’t just a difference in size that made it hard to see the Giant, our sense of time was quite different as well. At the end of our first visit to Liverpool we carried a bowl of water from the Giant’s root on up to its crown, a ten hour expedition in all. It seemed at the time to be quite a big thing, surely we made an impression we thought. We actually did - much was set in motion that day. But the ten hours it took to move up through the Giant was only a ten second burst of energy from the Giant’s point of view. Because a human hour is only a second long for the Giant, it takes quite a while to make an impression. Our first visit to Liverpool was three weeks in all, the longest of the four we’ve made so far. But if a human hour is a second to the Giant, then a day only seems like 24 seconds. 21 days is 504 seconds long or 8.4 minutes in all. So from the Giant’s point of view we came and went in less than ten minutes. Even if we take the entire time we’ve spent with the Liverpool Giant so far, it isn’t really all that long from the point of view of the Giant. The first we knew of the Giant’s dream of waking up was in July 2006. Our fourth visit to Liverpool was in Mar 2008. That’s 635 days. And if a day on our scale seems like 24 seconds to the Giant, then 635 days seems like 15,240 seconds or 4.23 hours total. Understanding how the Giant’s Scale relates to our own is important if we want to know how to take on a role in the Giant’s awakening. It soon becomes clear that if we want to see the Giant as the Giant is, we need to shift our point of view to the Giant’s Scale. It took us a while to get the knack, but as we spent time exploring the Giant it became more accessible. And after a bit of practice we found that whenever we shifted to the Giant’s Scale we experienced a shift in our consciousness too. This consciousness shift that we experienced was truly amazing, even profound, something we found surprisingly easy and natural to do. We didn’t have to study how or understand the why or what. All we had to do was act as if the Giant Story was true. And when we did that we naturally changed our Scale to that of the Giant. And when we did that we were not our everyday selves any more, we lost our everyday point of view and became a point of consciousness within the Giant. We knew ourselves as not-ourselves, as a very small part in the Giant’s whole self, a very small but conscious whole within the whole of the Giant. When we shifted our Scale to that of the Giant and saw ourselves through the Giant’s eyes we could see how small our human selves were from the Giant’s point of view. And when we felt how small we were in relation to the Giant’s Scale our personal sense of self disappeared and our ego dropped away. It felt like we had disappeared and we weren’t really there anymore. Interesting, to say the least, particularly so because this dropping away of the sense of self is usually not that easy to do. The more you fight against the ego-mind the tighter its hold becomes. You can face the wall and meditate for hours and hours, years and years and still find it hard to disappear. But we didn’t have to try to do it, we merely had to walk in the Giant on the Giant’s Scale. It’s a wonderful feeling to disappear like that. You have no personal point of view so everything that you see is just what it is, not how you want it to be. This wouldn’t be so if you were waking yourself, you’d have all sorts of personal things to consider. You’d keep asking yourself are you waking up more, do you snore in your sleep, is this bad, is this good, are you doing enough, should you be doing more? But when you’re waking the Giant up it doesn’t apply to you at all and there’s nothing left for the ego to do. You’re merely a very small part in the whole, and because you’ve lost your own point of view you’re free to see things just as they are. You see things as they relate to the Giant, not as how they relate to you. When you’re not there to have an opinion it all looks quite different and new. What you begin to see now is the Landscape. |
~~~~~~ Landscape ~~~~~~ |
Landscape becomes accessible when you shift your consciousness. Story helps to make the shift, it tells you there’s something to see. Scale lets you know how you need to change in order to see it. So by acting as if the Story is true and by shifting your Scale to be inside it, you drop the sense of your personal whole to take on the sense of the larger whole in which your smaller whole is a part. And when you do, you realize you have always been a part of the Landscape of the Giant. But the consciousness shift didn’t bring it about, the Landscape was there all along. It’s just that you can access it now, you’ve dropped away your sense of self and can suddenly see a whole new level. Generally speaking you can always enter into a Landscape once you see that it’s there. It’s a place that you have a place in already, there’s always a role for you to play. You’re indigenous there, it’s the place that you’ve forgotten about though it’s always remembered you. You and the Landscape are one and the same, the part and the whole, and because that is true there’s an intimacy that is always available just for you. Everything about the Landscape is completely significant. Each and every single thing within the Landscape (including you) is intimately connected to each and every other thing - you continually interact with the whole through every one of its parts. Now as it turns out the Landscape of the Giant is an energy Landscape. This is particularly interesting because usually we aren’t able to see energy that easily, it operates on a different Scale than what we can see in our everyday way. But if we shift to the Giant’s Scale our relative size is small enough for us to see the effect of the energy moving through the Giant’s body. And when we see the effect of energy moving through the Landscape of the Giant’s body we see it as an event. In our everyday way of seeing things, events that occur around us just seem to be everyday activities that have to do with what people want and how their needs interact. And looking at things from the human Scale that may be true to some degree. But when we shift to the Giant’s Scale we see that there’s something passing through that has nothing to do with humans at all. When we enter into the Giant’s Landscape, the events we see there are traces of the energy that is moving through the Giant. Actually though these events are not the energy itself, the events are what arises when the energy and the Giant’s Landscape combine and interact. A lot of the physical stuff that we see in the Landscape of the Giant’s body is actually the residue that is left behind by energy that has passed through before - the streets, the buildings, the traffic signs, the trash in the alleys, even the very smallest objects are energy traces too. When we shift into the Giant’s Scale we suddenly see that everything that is going on is associated with the energy that is moving through the Giant. Now it’s true that most of the larger things like buildings and streets didn’t arise spontaneously from a single energy wave. But the energy has been moving through for a very long time and the Landscape of the Giant has been shaped and worn by the energy’s passage. A very natural phenomenon this - like the way water wears down the sides of a canyon or the wind shapes the rocks on the face of a mountain. And because this is basically an energy Landscape we were able to see and then map out the Giant’s chakras. We found the chakras to be very important designations within the Landscape, like provinces within the overall country of the Giant. There’s a great deal more to find out about the Giant’s chakras and how they work. But for now just to say in a general way: we’ve been able to see that each chakra has a role to play in creating the transformational energy the Giant needs to awake. So to review: the Giant has its own Landscape that we can enter into when we shift our consciousness. And because our relative size is so small on the Giant’s Scale, we can see the effects of the energy as it moves through and interacts with the Landscape of the Giant. Traces of how it moved through before can still be seen in the way the streets and buildings are arranged. And when new energy comes rolling through the Giant’s body we are able to see the effects of its passing in whatever events occur. Now that we’ve talked about Story, Scale and Landscape we can continue on to examine the Energy Landscape these three elements reveal. |