| PROGRAMMING PARTNER: 29TH GENE KEY | PHYSIOLOGY: SOLAR PLEXUS/DIGESTION |
| CODON RING: THE RING OF PURIFICATION (13, 30) |
AMINO ACID: GLUTAMINE |
Deep within the matrix of the DNA molecule lies a vital code that is greatly responsible for the building of our human civilisation. This is the 30th Shadow of human Desire. Often when we think of desire we think first of sexual desire, which is in fact only one direction that desire can take. To understand this 30th Shadow we will have to strip desire down to its essence, and this means detaching the force of desire from its projection into the world. As a pure phenomenon, desire is simply genetic hunger. It does have a deep connection to our physical need to eat, but desire alone is not responsible for our individual survival. This aspect of our genetics does not influence individuality at all. If anything, desire is far more likely to get us killed than protect us. However, desire does serve a far wider purpose when viewed at a collective genetic level.
The real purpose of desire is to get human beings to make mistakes so that we can evolve. Let us clarify this statement — desire does not serve the individual but it does teach us something valuable at a collective level. The real hunger coming from this 30th Shadow is the hunger for experience itself. In order for human beings to master their environment, they have to taste all aspects of it which means that they also have to explore the darker side of experience as well as the lighter. The fact that individuals or even large populations are killed in the process is of no consequence to the awareness operating through the whole human gene pool. Humans are expendable to the collective — even whole races are expendable — but humanity itself is not expendable. We are programmed through the 30th Gene Key to learn and evolve through experience, so there is nothing we can avoid experiencing. If there is anything that is still untried by humanity, then somewhere, inside someone, the hunger of the 30th Shadow will push them into trying it — no matter how outlandish or depraved it may be.
For consciousness to enter into form, it must immerse itself deep within the form. In human beings, consciousness has at its disposal a very powerful and sensitive system of awareness — an awareness only overshadowed by the spirit of Gaia herself, of which humanity is essentially a sense organ. There is something very profound to understand here — the genetic instructions that guide humanity do not come from humanity as a separate entity, even though it appears that way to us. We are only a part of a wider organism with its own genetic imperative, and desire has formed an integral part of humanity’s evolution as the driving force behind our sensory apparatus. It is as though humanity operates like nature’s brain, with desire providing the force that opens up all manner of neural networks within that brain. Some neural connections lead to short circuits while others open us up to great leaps in awareness. All possible connections must be tried and tested in order to discover which are of the greatest service to the totality.
The greater part of human experience is actually non-essential to our future, but it still has to be explored. As part of a chemical family known as The Ring of Purification, this 30th Gene Key naturally bonds with the 13th Gene Key whose shadow frequency creates a powerful energetic field of discord and pessimism. Humanity is thus designed to move through a vast evolutionary cycle in which it is progressively purified. Such purification can only take place through the shadow frequency, since this provides the raw material for a higher state of consciousness. Most of the fallout from this incredible genetic process is found on the human emotional plane, sometimes also known as the astral plane.
The astral plane is a subtle electromagnetic frequency field arising out of the sum total of all human desires and feelings. At the lower frequency bands of the astral plane the overall tone is one of Discord, the 13th Shadow. Discord is a collective frequency that is sounded as a result of human beings inexorably expressing what they think to be their individual desires. At higher levels of the astral plane, human desire and emotion begin to turn inward and upward to seek its own source, moving through progressive levels of purity before it is experienced in its purest form — ecstatic rapture.
When seen in this macrocosmic way, it almost seems as if nature has conned humanity — as though we have been set up as guinea pigs for evolution itself. This is exactly the case — that even though desire in itself is a pure impulse of nature, it tends to drive human beings mad! In Eastern Buddhist thought, desire is said to be the source of all human suffering. In fact it is not desire itself but your reaction to it that creates your suffering. In every human being the force of desire is translated differently and projected out upon the world in a unique way. Thus some people experience it through their sexuality, others through their yearning to be rich, famous, in love or spiritually enlightened. The point is that the desire itself is pure. It isn’t for anything. Human beings are simply creatures who are by design supposed to feel a yearning. What the 30th Shadow of Desire does is emotionally fuel your mind to try and find a way of escaping the yearning, or at the very least venting it in some way. However, as every human being learns, the cycle of desire is eternal. The moment you have sated your hunger, you once again find yourself empty as the yearning begins a new cycle.
The interpretation of the original Chinese name for the 30th hexagram of the I Ching literally means Clinging Fire. This is a wonderfully evocative name for this 30th Gene Key. It causes you to burn with longing or desire but despite what you do to try to fulfil that desire, it persists in clinging to you. It continually drives you out into the world of experience, which of course is exactly what is intended. Nature’s con is that we humans cannot escape the fire of our desire, no matter what we do. It must be accepted and embraced as a part of our mortality. Moreover, the more you think of desire as unspiritual, the more powerful you make it. Many of the great religious and spiritual traditions have been taken in by the great con — having us believe that desire can be somehow transcended or fought. Fighting an evolutionary force as powerful as desire is what causes human beings so much suffering in the first place. The great heretical irony about desire is that the desire to be one with God and the desire to kill your enemy is the same desire. Both lead to metaphorical hell.
Alongside its programming partner, the 29th Shadow of Half-heartedness, the Shadow of Desire programmes our world into a deep unconscious pessimism. Somewhere deep within every human being a very uncomfortable truth resides — that you can never transcend desire. Our denial of this truth is what causes us to live half-heartedly. We do not fully indulge our desire because it is too terrifying. Those who do so externally usually end in destroying themselves, while those who hold it back also destroy themselves on the inside. It seems then that desire has human beings outflanked and outgunned. Whatever we do, we are caught like rats in a maze. Even the most sophisticated esoteric traditions promise us transcendence from desire, but then warn us that our very desire to transcend in the first place will prevent such a state. What is one supposed to do with this information? What is the future of a race that is caught in such a paradox, if desire itself prevents us from ever evolving beyond desire? As ever, the answers lie within the higher frequencies of this 30th Gene Key.
When desire is repressed, life force is also repressed and this leads to a stiffening of one’s whole being — physically, emotionally and psychologically. We begin to take life very seriously. As we have seen, desire equates to fire and passion. When it isn’t allowed to burn within us, our inner fire fizzles out. Many people deal with their desires in this way, particularly in repressive societies and religions. Over-seriousness manifests through religion itself, which almost always imposes moral laws over the top of our natural desires. One might even go so far as to say that the majority of human civilisation has repressed desire and become over-serious. It is the hallmark of our whole modern world. The great fear within the 30th Shadow is the fear of being burned by our feelings, a collective fear that has been repressed on a collective level. True feelings unleashed on a collective level might lead to anarchy — that is the fear that is held in check by this aspect of the 30th Shadow.
Those people in the world who indulge their desires without care always run the very real risk of being ostracised by society. They cannot subscribe to any moral framework and abhor all forms of religion or imposed control. They then become flippant about life as a reaction to that society. The result is that they often become embittered by the projections of the world and lash out by abandoning themselves even further into their desires. Just as the repressed nature wants to end desire through controlling it, the reactive nature wants to end desire though exhausting it. The result of this is that such people burn themselves out, and often early on in life. By totally externalising all your desires, you are in fact becoming their victim. This kind of flippancy is akin to paganism, the extreme pole to organised religion. Just as one is a repression, the other is a reaction.
There are two possible human responses to a paradox — either you become tense or you surrender to it. The mind has great difficulty with paradoxes because it is not built to handle them. It can only resolve things through logical reason. The higher mind, which is really akin to an awareness operating outside your brain and body, adores paradoxes because it knows that they represent Truth. When you surrender to the helplessness of being a normal human being, then something remarkable occurs — you experience a shift in frequency of your whole being. You begin to lighten up. The human mind is incredibly serious about life because it so wants to understand and control existence. The 30th Gift however is a new operating wavelength for humanity, and it really involves an inner surrender that cannot be forced or faked.
When we talk about lightness in respect to this 30th Gift, we are not talking about escaping life by making light of life. On the contrary, we are talking about entering more deeply into life’s suffering than ever before. We are talking about a kind of suicidal tendency that simply holds up its hands and says to creation: “OK, I give in, do your worst!” What is actually committing suicide is your distrust in life, or what some traditions label the ego. You have to come to a deep realisation of your own mortality and weakness in order to realise that true strength lies in simply trusting. Life is having its game through you and you are simply a genetic pawn in that game. You have to become utterly helpless. It is not that you become helpless in a victim sense, but that you realise you are beyond needing help. And then the magic happens — you discover you can enter into that expanded state of consciousness that is guiding the overall game. This gives you access to a higher level of functioning and you realise it was simply your distrust all along that was making your life seem so difficult.
The Gift of Lightness does not change your destiny. It simply allows you to view it from a different level of awareness. However, the very shift to this higher awareness functioning always signifies a change in the script of your life. It is a breakthrough that occurs, or one might describe it better as a meltdown. All life follows a mythical script or storyline, and you can only see your life from this expanded awareness when you have escaped feeling that you are a victim of it. The moment you see the joke that life must be the way it is, you also see your place in the overall script and you immediately feel at home. More than this, your whole being lightens even if your body continues to suffer. This lightening then finds its way into all your actions. Whatever you do from the Gift of Lightness there is always a glint in your eye, because at some deep level you know it is all really just a game, and the worst thing anyone can do is take it too seriously. There is a great difference between one who pretends to live life lightly and one who has real lightness of being. This difference is always found in the emotional nature — one who pretends is afraid of his or her true feelings, whereas one with real lightness is never afraid of being overwhelmed.
The Gift of lightness does not make you immune to desire, but neither does it cause you to react to desire. It allows you to become your desires in all their mystery. This is a Gift that knows desires do not necessarily have to be followed, but they do have to be felt. Sometimes they do have to be followed in order that something is learned, but generally what this Gift knows is that the fulfilment of desire is a sham. When human awareness penetrates down into the emotional system in this depth, then a huge sense of freedom emerges. This is the freedom of having a wide-angle view of desire. You know that whether or not you follow through with the desire, it will not lead to any lasting sense of peace. This means that desires no longer have such an addictive hold over you. In fact, desires become like guests you invite in for tea; they either leave in their own time or they stay and insist on being followed. In this sense true lightness can be seen as the letting go of the need to escape desire itself.
The other vital hallmark of the Gift of Lightness is a sense of humour. Everything is viewed in a detached way even though it may still be deeply and sensually felt, so everything is seen lightly. The humour that comes from this Gift is not a clever or sarcastic kind of humour and neither is it ever directed personally at another. It always manifests as the ability to laugh at yourself above all else. Your own life becomes a great tragi-comedy, since it incorporates both sides of the experiential spectrum. You learn to see through all human behaviour. You see both the depth of suffering that lies in the false belief that your desires can ever be fulfilled, and the great pleasure that comes from the build up and release of your desires. The humour that comes through this 30th Gift is a very compassionate humour — it is not about laughing at anything — it is simply the true response of a human being who has surrendered to the higher self.
As you move into the higher frequencies of the 30th Gene Key, you finally begin to understand the mystery of the cycle of desire. Beneath the thousands of desires that pass through your emotional system each day, you begin to determine a single underlying desire that gradually becomes stronger and stronger — this is the desire to end your own suffering. The desire to end your own suffering is the same desire that leads all human beings on the path of spirituality and inner inquiry. This desire to escape or to ascend or to be free is the final great desire within human beings. It is the urge of evolution itself longing to transcend the form. As you step fully into the pure field of this longing, you enter the purifying fires of consciousness. This codon group, the Ring of Purification, takes you on a journey in which your whole being begins to relinquish the hold of desire. You will have to trust implicitly in your desire to transcend, even as you understand that the very desire itself prevents you from transcending. This final desire must be followed, tracked, embraced and allowed, and, as it is, the fire of your longing becomes intensely bright. This is the other meaning of lightness in the context of the 30th Gift — your body actually begins to fill with light as your lower vehicles and subtle bodies are purified by the strength of your longing.
The 30th Siddhi is an unusual Siddhi in that it manifests as one of the great Divine ecstatic states. Along with its programming partner, the 29th Siddhi, these are aspects of our genetics that really terrify the majority of human beings. In our western culture in particular, these kinds of ecstatic states are deeply distrusted, as we no longer have any clear cultural vent for them. In times gone by it was the ancient shaman who could enter these states of consciousness. Nowadays, the closest we come is through the burgeoning drug and dance culture. We have grown so far away from being a devotional culture that we can no longer understand it at all. Certain religions such as Islam are rooted in these devotional codes, and they therefore recognise them more readily, although they can also misinterpret them just as easily — the contemporary cult of the suicide bomber is clearly rooted in the lower frequencies of the 30th Shadow.
The 30th and 29th Siddhis represent an archetypal stream within your DNA that causes powerful mutations in your endocrine system. These result in the ongoing production of certain rarefied hormones within the brain chemistry of the pineal gland that induce states of great devotion and divine rapture. The 30th Siddhi of Rapture only occurs when you step willingly into the fires of annihilation. We may recall that the ancient name for this 30th hexagram of the I Ching is the Clinging Fire. At the Siddhic level, you dissolve entirely into the fire. Everything about this 30th Siddhi looks insane to ordinary waking consciousness. It involves mystical suicide — a complete immersion in the fires of Divine longing. You finally give up everything, even the desire to transcend. All desires merge into the one primal desire — the desire with no target — the essence of all creation and the pure longing at the heart of the life force itself. There is a mystery here that is carved into our English language and captured in the word belonging. We can only truly belong in the world when we can utterly be our longing.
The state of Divine Rapture is really akin to being burned by the fires of bliss over and over again. These are people who are so flammable that the smallest thing will set them off, and whoever comes near them will very likely catch their devotional energy. The nature of the mutated solar plexus system, which is where this 30th Siddhi lies, is to carry awareness outside of the physical body through the aura. Thus the 30th Siddhi is what creates the devotees of its programming partner — the 29th Siddhi of Devotion. These two siddhis radiate their power and shakti through the morphogenetic field of the enraptured one. This is why certain teachers and masters can literally transform the hearts of their devotees forever. The aura of such a being is as palpable as it is dangerous. It is dangerous to the human mind that cannot comprehend such a phenomenon and will not let go of trying to be in control. The very lifeblood of this 30th Siddhi is about dissolution into the primal chaos of the Divine frequencies.
These Siddhis are not such a common phenomenon in the world. Wherever they erupt, they are often misunderstood. If this were to happen to someone in the West, they would most likely be heavily sedated and locked away. In India, the Divine ecstatics and madmen were traditionally given the same treatment and were both revered, since there is a fine line between the two states. Early manifestations of this Siddhi and the 29th Siddhi can also cause all kinds of difficulties in the human body since we have not yet evolved to fully carry these extremely high emotional frequencies. In this respect the 30th Siddhi has a particular role to play within the coming evolution of the human solar plexus system as described in the 55th Gene Key. The role of the 30th Siddhi is literally to burn out all human desire from our DNA. This means that humans who attain this Siddhi are really performing an important genetic task on behalf of the collective. They are allowing their vehicle to deliberately short circuit and burn out the collective desire of our past. The perk that goes with this role is that they experience the Divine Rapture!
In the 22nd Gene Key there is a detailed description of the seven subtle bodies of the human aura. The process of transcendence through this 30th Gene Key directly mirrors the purification of the second astral body and its assimilation into the higher buddhic body (the fifth body). It is the human longing of the 30th Gene Key that creates enough bhakti to catalyse the higher currents of grace from within the higher self. The bhakti is the subtle fluidic emanation that rises up from this purification of human longing. It is an emanation that reaches up into the buddhic body and activates its counterpart known as shakti. Shakti is the Divine Essence that descends or rains down upon the initiate and causes the state of Rapture. It is this interchange of bhakti and shakti that characterises the 30th Siddhi. The Divine Longing expressed as bhakti is an evolutionary force, whereas the Divine Grace expressed as shakti is the involutionary force.
In the future genetic vehicle of humanity, this 30th Siddhi will cease to exist, having deliberately burned itself out. In this sense it will become redundant. The experience of Divine Rapture is a genetic anomaly within the evolutionary programme for humanity. It has one purpose alone — to kill desire in order that a new awareness can dawn. Interestingly, the 29th Siddhi of Devotion will not share the same fate as the 30th Siddhi but will go on to form the basis of human relationships and therefore whole communities. In the meantime, all those who have a deep affinity with this 30th Gene Key will experience certain degrees of this burning within their lives. We can easily see it working its way out of humanity at its lower frequencies through all those in whom devotion and rapture are translated into external destruction and devotional fanaticism. The higher your frequency rises however, the more you must surrender to the Divine currents that are waiting to burn you into a higher state of consciousness.