Unbinding Consciousness: Alchemy, NDE, and the Chalice of Jamshid
By Maryam Sayyad
Unbinding Consciousness: Alchemy, NDE, and the Chalice of Jamshid
Running Kosmos Institute has its perks, and topmost among these is having a seat in all the classes. This perk turned out to be invaluable. Even on day one, as I attended The Near Death Experience, followed immediately by Alchemy East and West, I clearly observed a thread of light connecting the two and illuminating what I now perceived as their shared field—consciousness.
Joshua Cutchin opened with the “hallmarks” of the NDE. Among these, reports of out-of-body-experiences struck me as especially rife with implications about the nature of consciousness. What is consciousness? Is it, according to the materialist paradigm, an epiphenomenon of the brain and localized to the body? Or, is consciousness independent of the brain and only inhabiting the body temporarily? The question is the age-old one about the existence of the soul and typically treated as a matter of belief—many believe we are composed of mortal body and immortal soul.
Belief is one thing, however, while conviction is another. Josh’s lecture convinced my rational mind that consciousness separates from the body in the near-death state. Research into NDE-related out-of-body-experiences supports the theory that consciousness endures when electrical activity in the brain slows or ceases and, furthermore, cognitive abilities and fields of perception mysteriously expand at this time. Ordinarily, we rely on our eyes for vision but when eye, brain, and heart function cease, near-death experiencers continue to see. No longer seeing from behind their eyes, they now find themselves looking down from the ceiling, or passing through walls and other barriers. Just as the eyes remain in the lifeless body while vision continues, the brain remains in the lifeless body while consciousness detaches, continues, and perceives more and other than what is normal. It now perceives its body from outside, witnesses verifiable events in other rooms and across town, then passes into other climes entirely to reunite with dead loved ones, encounter spirits, angels, deities, and sometimes even its whole life in a flash.
Leaving consideration of spirits and deities for another time, the verified out-of-body-experience indicates that the relationship between the physical body and consciousness is one of containment. The physical body contains consciousness, setting boundaries and enclosing it behind walls. Near death, the gates swing open and reveal the expansive landscape beyond.
Floating in liquid certainty that consciousness is unlimited yet bound, I next enter the quietly evocative world of Alchemy guided by Dr. Aaron Cheak. He begins by describing the broad arc of Alchemy in its various cultural manifestations by means of a simple diagram—a circle illustrating the process of cosmogenesis as a clockwise movement from Unity to Multiplicity and back again. Understood psycho-spiritually, the circle describes the process of consciousness investing itself with physicality, and then divesting itself of physicality to become pure consciousness again. I see this dual process as the binding and unbinding of consciousness.
As I consider these ideas, my mind wanders to myth, to the Iranian mythological landscape and the Grail-like object that appears in Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings as a vessel called the Chalice of Jamshid and described as the cup that mirrors the universe. It belongs to the great king Kay-Khosrow who peers into it for knowledge of anything he wishes to know. This all-revealing chalice remains a consistent motif throughout the mythological, philosophical, and mystical movements of Iran; and, in the twelfth century, concurrently with the penning of the Arthurian romances in Europe, the Illuminationist philosopher Suhrawardi writes about it in a story entitled "The Language of the Ants.” He describes the Chalice of Jamshid as a cup wrapped in a leather sheath and bound by ten chords—the ten chords being a metaphor for what his teacher Avicenna identified as the ten senses, five inner and five outer. Whenever Kay-Khosrow wishes to access hidden things, he gives it a turn to unfasten its ten bindings. Unbound now and held against the light of the equinoctial sun, “all the lines and forms of the world would appear therein.” Suhrawardi’s Chalice is a metaphor for unlimited consciousness wrapped in skin and bound by ten organs of perception. Revealing its meaning even further, his contemporary Ruzbehan Shirazi adds, “this chalice that shows the universe, it is myself.”
I came away from day one subtly aware that unlimited consciousness is within me, and that psycho-spiritual alchemy and perhaps all techniques of gnosis and liberation have as their aim the release of unlimited consciousness from the ties that bind it.
To be continued…