The Gated I
Omniscience, Memory and Co-Authoring with the Light
Hello friends,
Sending love from the Kalispell airport after a deep time with family, land, animals, and the big sky. This morning we completed our fall courses, and I’m en route to Mexico City for a Wake Down women’s event, and a gathering in the vibrant town of Tepoztlán, and then home to Hawaiʻi for our November immersions.
Gathering in-person matters more than ever. Face to face, off the devices, meeting the actual people we share the planet with. It takes effort to do it, to choose experience instead of entertainment, to grow our capacity for relating, to feel the body in its full sensory range, exchange energy, share rituals, meals, labor, play, milestones. To read the book of life through one another. I have found it to be the antidote to othering.
As it seems to happen in every election season, the public screamers, bots and manipulation algorithms grow louder attempt to divide us. Don’t let it pull you from your core direct knowing. This world and society is ours to vision and cocreate. Please hold the vision of your own heaven on earth, maybe it includes mutual respect, equitable economics, clean air and water, healthy food supplies, creativity, magic, enchantment. When the pull toward othering arises, let your own deepest desire birth the future, through your unique vision, your lens of beauty.
News: This Sunday, 10/11, I’m co-hosting an online listening party for the launch of Adam’s album, Life and Death. Please pre-order Wake Down here. We will send you a print copy in time for holiday gifting, plus there are some bonuses for pre-orders.
All we have is downstream of what we have been given by the natural world, and our job is stewardship, upliftment and co-creation.
Grateful for you, for your presence and support in this work.
XO,
Christine
The Gated I
I. Memory
Memory doesn’t live in the person. It lives in a vast field of knowing.
We hold pointers in the brain and call it memory, which is a gated, truncated slice of reality, with low resolution, line loss, malleability. A flawed compression algorithm.
Yet every human experience we’ve ever had, every emotion, activity, veiling and unveiling, is out there in the ether in high resolution.
It comes through our sensorial inputs at the edge of experience, finds its way up from the intake center ingesting everything in the world of form—not yet filtered or gated by the mind—through the layers of meaning-making, which is the special magic of the individual I, and commutes that knowing to the field.
Nothing essential is ever erased. It’s just no longer locally cached. Lived experience exists in high resolution elsewhere, while what we call memory is truncated, gated, degraded by narrative and identity maintenance.
This is the seat of siddhis, the mystics, seers, shamans, channelers, clairvoyants: all accessing what can be known in the oneness.
II. Omniscience
I think this is the foundation of the religious idea that God is omniscient. A know-it-all.
But this intuition of omniscience was married to duality and anthropomorphic narcissism, to the dichotomy of good and bad, of make-wrong and shame. A Santa Claus god, list-making, sneaking around to find out who is naughty or nice. God as policeman instead of the spontaneous imagineer of all that exists. A surveillance god, instead of the generative one.
Omniscience in the multidimensional game carries no judgment. Things just are.
Omniscience as nonjudging saturation: everything known, everything included. No shame is possible there, because shame requires exclusion, comparison, ostracization, rejection, a privileged point of view. It requires the possibility of being cast out of belonging, of being declared unworthy of inclusion in the whole.
But nothing can be outside the whole. There is no privileged point. Only perspective.
III. The Dimensional Game
In this human dimension, at this scale of reality or awareness, there is the gated I.
We are tidy (or not-so-tidy) little bundles of blood and guts, wonders and longings and complaints, with families and stories and reasons and blames. Born and dying inside a limited life in a meat suit, with a birth certificate and a gravestone certifying that you were here, and if you played big, a mention in some storybook of the explicit memory of humans.
But it’s a multi-dimensional game. A planar game.
One plane above, there is the cross-generational game, the lifetime-spanning game, architected by karma and the relentless play of light and dark. The unending churn. Lives shaping lives, patterns repeating, consequences rippling forward and backward through generations. Yet still a limited view from this human experience. Still cause and effect.
On another level, you are dancing with the deities and archetypes that flood the whole of the body of God—the mythical, the fictional, the clairsentient, clairvoyant, clairauditory. The figures and forces that seem larger than any individual life, yet move through our bodies, dreams, stories, and imaginations.
Karma is the mid-plane churn. Archetypes are a mythic bloodstream.
Above that, or perhaps underneath it all, you are in the preternatural stillness. The endless, peaceful, glorious light from which it is all constructed.
These planes are not simply places, states of consciousness, or symbolic representations of reality. They are all three at once. Each is a scale of existence, a mode of awareness, and a symbolic language through which reality becomes legible.
We don’t necessarily leave one plane to enter another. We may be participating in several simultaneously, with our attention and perceptual apparatus determining which dimensions become available to experience. The human self is real at its scale. So is the cross-generational churn of karma, the mythic bloodstream of archetypes, and the stillness from which the whole arises. None cancels the others. Each is a different resolution of participation in the whole.
The planes overlap. The boundaries are permeable. What changes is the scale, the density of symbols, the rules of causality, and the kind of knowing available to us.
These bodies matter precisely because they are temporary. They burn bright and brief against this vast backdrop. Their limits are not a mistake in the design. They are part of what makes this particular experience possible.
I experience this dimensional layering is less like a hierarchy and more like a change in scale and symbol density. Not higher is better/ lower is worse, but that different rules apply.
The gated I is not a mistake to be transcended. It is the particular aperture through which this life becomes possible. Its limitations are simultaneously constraints and conditions of participation. The gate is glorious, and ever more permeable.
IV. The Gates
There are ways to touch these dimensions while conscious.
One is by summoning a perfected form, or an avatar, into awareness and bringing that frequency into the body. This could be deity or demon. Attuning to the frequency of the perfected form of a thing, its purest frequency.
This is prayer: vibrational field-tuning, a way of aligning our consciousness. We bring ourselves into resonance with something, and that resonance changes how we perceive, how we move, what we notice, and what we make possible. Attuning to these harmonics bends the reality we are creating here in this dimension.
Another way is to touch silence.
Another is to truly feel the body, to bring light into the body. To become so completely present to the body that awareness is no longer hovering above experience but illuminating it from within.
And then there are the ecstasies, the attentions, the practices which get us there. The disciplines that alter the aperture of perception, that allow us to participate in what is ordinarily filtered out.
To die and come back is also a feasible, although risky, gate. Not every door needs to be forced open. Not every threshold is worth crossing without care.
But the gates are not all extraordinary. Some are as ordinary as attention, practiced until the familiar becomes transparent.
V. Participation
Whether or not you can throw your body in dreams, astral travel, commune directly with Shiva, feel the presence of angels and archetypes, even having this frame of possibility changes something.
These dimensions don’t only open through extraordinary states. The musician disappearing into the phrase, the chef whose hands know before the mind does, the artist pulled by something emerging on the canvas, the intuitive hit that arrives before thought: these are all touches. Moments when the gated I thins and something larger moves through.
Knowing arrives before explanation. Creation feels less like the execution of a plan and more like participation in an unfolding.
There is no one creating this reality but you, and there is no you creating it alone.
Subjective reality is the perceptual mechanism: the way the world is rendered through this particular body, this history, this aperture of awareness. The individual I is not simply a spectator watching reality unfold. It is part of the apparatus through which reality becomes experience.
The world we experience is not ours alone to author. There is also the conjoined material reality we are building together. Every action enters a world already shaped by other actions. Every choice meets other choices. Our beliefs, agreements, institutions, technologies, relationships, and physical interventions accumulate into a shared world that no individual controls, but in which every individual participates.
We are simultaneously perceiving reality and contributing to its construction.
Our subjective realities overlap, collide, reinforce one another, and sometimes radically disagree. Yet we share a material world with consequences that are not reducible to any one person’s perception of it.
What we perceive influences what we do. What we do changes the conditions others encounter. Those conditions shape what becomes possible to perceive and do next. The world feeds back into us, and we feed back into the world.
The subjective and the collective are not separate domains. They are interdependent processes, continually making and remaking one another.
The line between creator and created, observer and observed, self and world, is not a permanent boundary. It is a transient property of existence: a distinction that emerges at one scale, serves its purpose, and dissolves at another.
When Marianne says, “You are powerful beyond measure,” this is what she is getting at. Not that the individual ego controls everything, but that the individual is not as separate from the act of creation as it assumes itself to be.
Once you see this, it cannot be unseen.
Responsibility increases. But so does joy.
Because participation is real, even when control is partial. We don’t have to be omnipotent to have leverage. We don’t have to see the whole field to influence what happens within it.
Even holding this as possibility, whether or not we know how to use it yet, loosens the sense that reality is fixed, finished, authored elsewhere.
We are already participating through attention, through belief, through what we reinforce or interrupt. Through the ways we meet one another, the worlds we imagine, the systems we sustain, the realities we make possible for those who come after us.
Awareness has leverage.
We are neither the sole authors of reality nor its passive audience. We are participants in a world that is continually becoming through us, between us, and beyond any one of us.
The question is not whether we are creating reality. We already are. The question is how consciously we engage the adventure we’re already in, and from what field of play.
WIth Jill Purce and Rupert Sheldrake last summer
A note on sources
This essay draws on memory science, on philosophical and contemplative traditions and testimony: what I have seen, felt, and come to know in practice, in ceremony, and in the body.
Memory as reconstruction. My doctoral work at CIIS included a paper on memory as reconstruction, and that research shapes this section. The picture of memory as a lossy, malleable compression is well supported. Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering (1932) showed that recall is an act of reconstruction shaped by expectation and culture. Elizabeth Loftus’s research, beginning in the 1970s, demonstrated how readily memories absorb suggestion and change. Karim Nader and colleagues (2000) found that a memory becomes unstable each time it is retrieved and is stored again in altered form, a process called reconsolidation. Work in predictive processing, accessibly described in Anil Seth’s Being You (2021), frames perception itself as the brain’s best guess about the world.
Memory beyond the brain. The proposal that experience persists in high resolution in a field of knowing goes further than current neuroscience, which locates memory traces in the networks of the brain. Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory (1896), described the brain as an organ of selection and action. William James, in Human Immortality (1898), proposed that the brain may transmit and filter consciousness. Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception (1954), borrowed C. D. Broad’s image of the mind as a “reducing valve.” Theosophy named this field the Akashic records, and Ervin László later developed the idea as the Akashic field. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance offers a related hypothesis.
The contracted I and the planes. The essay’s deepest roots are in Kashmir Shaivism. In the Pratyabhijñā teachings, Shiva’s omniscience and omnipotence contract into the limited knowing and doing of the individual through the kañcukas, the coverings of limitation. Kṣemarāja’s Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam teaches that universal consciousness itself takes the form of the contracted individual. The gated I is my contemporary name for that contraction, and the dimensional planes echo the tradition’s map of the thirty-six tattvas. The siddhis appear in the third book of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras. We cover this in my Living Tantra courses.
The gates. The practices in Section IV draw on the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, whose 112 contemplations open the ordinary moments of breath, sensation, and attention into the vast. Attuning to a perfected form reflects tantric deity practice and mantra, which I have practiced and taught for many years. We also cover this in my Living Tantra courses.
Participation. The closing section joins a conversation about the participatory nature of reality. Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) and Jorge Ferrer’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory (2002) are touchstones from my years at CIIS. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991) and John Wheeler’s “participatory universe” offer scientific companions. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow describes the musician and the chef. Marianne Williamson’s words are paraphrased from A Return to Love (1992).
