Daily Theosophy

Wasps are so-called ‘primitive’ creatures – nevertheless they fly a thousand times better and more efficient that the latest hi-tech airplanes. Their field reconnaissance was excellent. And so was their performance of duty on behalf of the next generation.

(159)

(the wasp)

One day a new wasp, that is one who Mustafa had not seen before, came to build her nest. She came alone and also in the future did everything on her own. She selected a vertical corner in the shadow that was a remainder of the ruin of the long abandoned desert house where Mustafa was sitting at that time. With the fullest self-confidence she arrived with a little bit of fine sandy or loamy material, which she had gathered from the desert. She mixed it with her saliva which served as glue and one by one she stuck the sand grains together to the stone wall as a professional mason forming a tiny horizontal ridge of some kind of natural light brown cement. She had arrived from around a corner of a rock and Mustafa could not actually see where she had come from. When she left he followed her with his eyes and saw that she flew off with high speed, too far to follow her. But some 15 of 20 minutes later she came back and again carried some of the sandy material. She must have flown quite a distance, because, though there was enough sand, she needed water also, and that was at least a mile away. When she returned, though she came only for the second time, she knew perfectly how to find her way between the various crevices and obstacles, and inside the ruin of the house. She added the newly brought sand grains and fixed them next to and on the already existing ridge. The ridge became the horizontal bottom of her house to be. Mustafa himself did not know yet where this ridge was going to serve for, but he understood that she had probably decided to build her nest there; apparently the wasp knew what she was doing. Consciously or by mere unconscious instinct, Mustafa wondered. He supposed that she would not have a total model of the structure in her mind, like a human architect who has designed the plan of a structure. The basic plan would be the same with all wasps of her species. Something however guided her to do the right thing at the right time. No doubt she followed her instinct, but that instinct was intelligent. She was not at all like a pre-programmed computer. It was no artificial intelligence, it was real intelligence. One moment Mustafa wondered whether it was God who guided her, but then he thought that God could impossibly guide every individual creature in the universe personally. Also he clearly saw that the wasp seemed to be enjoying what she was doing, and that part of this enjoyment was an strong inbuilt sense of duty. Theoretically the wasp could have been distracted or deluded to go somewhere else. But that never happened. She knew her task and never doubted or faltered. She simply did not have the type of mind that would enable her to doubt. What she did have was a higher type of intelligence which was unconscious to her personally (because she had no personal reasoning mind, like people have). That higher type of intelligence reflects itself in her conscious as ‘feeling of duty’ or dedication, as some type of attraction or happiness. That motivated her. The instinct had bit of reasoning intelligence also – that was however of a nature ‘lower on the scale’ than the architectural instinct which was shared by all wasps of her species. This architectural instinct or intelligence however found its variety of expression in other species. Every species of wasp had a different nest structure, but all wasps of exactly the same species built the same nests, though even then with individual variations according to circumstances. It seemed to Mustafa that intelligence itself was like an omnipresent ‘stuff’, but that it was arranged in well communicating hierarchies: the higher ruling over the lower, the lower serving the higher, but all of it of the same fundamental intelligence-stuff, and working in harmony for the same goal. Her intelligent instinct remained with her wherever she went, because on every flight the circumstances were a little different, and needed intelligent adjustment.

So she left again, and came back again, left again and came back again, repeating the same action. It was never exactly the same action, because every time she came the situation was a little different. Sometimes she had to add the grains horizontally, at other times vertically, thus creating a hollow cup-like structure that became deeper and deeper. She stopped towards the evening and continued the next day. The structure became almost an inch high, but before she closed it at the top, she constructed a perfectly round hole in the vertical outside of her cement house, went in, and put an egg there. Then she closed the hole with cement, so that it could not be seen from outside.

When that was finished she continued as ever, and built a second story seamlessly on top of the first story, then constructed a hole straight above the first whole and put an egg and closed the round hole invisibly. Thus she built six stories. When she had closed the top of the sixth story Mustafa expected that she would continue with a seventh, or perhaps she would not come anymore – her task being fulfilled. She came back and started sticking grains of sand again and Mustafa thought that she was building her next wall. Then she suddenly stopped, and formed the grains of sand into some kind of horn-like point on top of the sixth floor. The structured was now adorned, and the work was finished. It was a flat building with of six floors with six rooms for six wasp generations – all brothers and sisters. Five holes were on the left side, but one was on the right side of the vertical building.

Mustafa had as a child seen many times how people built houses in and around his village. One day, suddenly without a reason visible for the boy Mustafa, people would come and start bringing cement, iron rods and bars and other materials. They added water to the dry cement, and when it had been mixed by a machine they would put the wet cement exactly at the right place according to the plan of the architect (but that plan was invisible and unknown to Mustafa, it was only with the architect and the building supervisor.) The workers just did their work as ordered according to their various skills, and adjusting to circumstances, making floors, walls, ceilings and staircases. Some were unhappy because they were not payed enough, and others tried to hide whenever they could and sit behind a wall and smoke cigarettes. Because Mustafa himself was a human being he understood the processes and the feelings of the workers (and sometimes admired, at other times despised them).

Mustafa thought that now nature would do her own work and that after some time young wasps would crawl out of the closed wholes after scratching them open from inside. But to his amazement the mother came back and would walk over the nest from top to bottom and bottom to top. touching the outer wall it with her antennae. Sometimes she would open a whole and leave it open for some time. Then perhaps next day she would close it again, and she might open another hole. But not always, it depended on her perception. At other times she merely made the outside of a hole wet, and the moisture would that dampen naturally and, Mustafa guessed, cool the room of the babies. Ultimately she opened the holes one by one, knowing that the babies had grown enough to see the daylight. They would still stay on the nest for a while. Ultimately all went their way and the nest was abandoned.

The nest year, mother came back, repaired the old nest and produced another generation. In the mean time the environment around the nest had significantly changed, but after a little searching she always found it, and than remembered the new way.

God being eternal and omnipresent, logically every wasp was God, and God was every wasp. God was also all other things, but at the same time fully present in a wasp, and in Mustafa’s mind. That is why wasps could unawares teach the mind of one of the greatest thinkers of the country, and they taught him even more than books and professors. He had learned something about the structure of intelligence.

Wasps are refined beings. They have four wings; two big ones and two smaller ones – cooperating to perfection to answer to the wasps will. The will of the wasp is immediately translated into direction of flight, landing or taking off. Wasps have a heart and a digestive system and a complex structure of internal air channels, called tracheids, inside their bodies. Despite their smallness and cold-bloodedness without a temperature stabilization system to keep themselves at the same temperature like we humans and all mammals and birds have, they could adjust to quite a spectrum of temperature. They were beautiful also. They had various colors, had slender and most flexible bodies, completely fit instruments for the tasks of their souls.

It meant that God was mind, feelings, flexibility, purpose, happiness, technology, desire, saneness, adaptability, and an infinitude of other properties – and at the same time He was breathtaking beauty. Then Mustafa thought of his own mind. If a wasp could influence his mind – in fact it had captured almost all of his mind at that time – within the concept of mind, everything could influence everything. The wasp might not be aware of it, but Mustafa certainly was. And because Mustafa’s mind was just an ‘imperfect’ reflection of God’s mind – his conclusion was that nothing whatsoever in the whole universe was standing alone. Everything could and would continuously interact, cooperate, communicate, influence each other, without ever changing the real nature of God’s mind. Such an insignificant little creature – as people usually think (but at the same time are often afraid of because of their inbuilt weapon for legal self-defence) – could capture the whole mind of a great philosopher!

Mustafa understood that God was Mind, and that his own mind and all other minds in the universe were part of God’s mind, and therefore he himself could know and even create the whole universe if he would have pondered and reached the essence of his own mind. Ultimately there could be no difference between his mind, the wasp’s mind and Universal Mind – or God. Everything that exists, has existed and will exist is in Gods Mind – and there is nothing else. Every thing or phenomenon or being which people regard as non-mind (such as bodies and objects) are in reality only Mind, properties of the working Mind itself. There is nothing else than eternity and infinity (to use these clumsy human terms).

At the same time Mustafa realized that he personally knew almost nothing. Even though he was regarded by others as a genius, he himself saw the truth of humility only – of almost complete ignorance. Mustafa saw clearly now that all that he had been thinking of as ‘true’ so far, were but illusions. Reality, Truth, God, was always beyond any mundane mental truth. Nevertheless even illusions were part of reality. He concluded that every illusion could indeed lead to reality – because Divine Reality was always at the heart of even of the weirdest thing.

It would be impossible to investigate every single object one by one – there were infinite objects. So he would have to dive into infinity directly. He had to watch and investigate his own mind, and nothing else, and then finally transcend it, ‘kill’ it – because though his mind was of God and was God, it was also the veil by which God hided himself. He couldn’t yet figure out why God had veiled himself. No doubt God had a good reason! It was Mind alone in which both Illusion and Reality lived.

Mustafa began to watch his own mind. How did it work? How many different types of mind could he distinguish? Which workings of the mind were useful, which useless, and which possibly harmful? How and why did the mind, God’s mind, lead people astray and make them land in hell?

But he continued to watch the wasps also. He had become kind of attached to him, and regarded them, besides his camel, as his friends. More and more he felt himself into a wasp’s consciousness. It was as if he could feel their wings moving between his own shoulders, and if they felt always happy – and a bit tired – when they reached their nest. He always had some worry that one of his friends would not be able to find her nest – but she herself did never think about that eventuality. Why think about something that exists only in fantasy – like getting lost? So Mustafa learned to act rightly, as he felt from inside he should act – but never to worry. Henceforth he lived in the present moment only. He felt the moving air below his breast, as if his wings had produced a stream of uplifting wind.

Then it happened. He was a wasp. He felt like a wasp, he was in her consciousness, his consciousness had become identical with the wasp’s consciousness. She/he was moving towards her nest with some half-conscious but still very definite expectation or knowledge. He/she did all the things wasps do. He /she felt all the things that wasps feel. But is was a shock for Mustafa. It lasted only a few seconds. He suddenly knew that a wasps consciousness is on an altogether lower scale than a human consciousness. He realized that for a human it would be worse than hell to live as a wasp. It would be the worst kind of punishment for a human to have to continue with a wasp’s consciousness. Still the wasp was quite happy – in her own world of consciousness, but it was even below a human hell. She felt the movements of her body, legs, wings, but from Mustafa’s human point of view it was monstrous. Even her beauty was of an entirely lower type than human beauty. Since that experience he could never see a wasp, or any insect or creature the same as before. He knew another living being from within now, whereas before he had only felt what his own mind had projected on it. He had projected his love to the wasps, and his imagination, but never before had broken through that self-created barrier to become a wasp. Reality is different from any mental imagination. He had learned a lot again, but didn’t want the experience to be repeated. He felt that it would take almost infinite ages for a wasp to raise to human consciousness and happiness. Nevertheless, if you could have asked the wasp she would have said that she was happy.

Perhaps, on a human level, it can be compared with a holy man living in the experience of a drug addict or alcoholic for a few seconds. It would be an inconceivable horror for him. Still the addict regards it as the best feeling he knows and yearns for it all the time – even into death.

Apart from horror it evoked, it evoked compassion as well. ‘All beings are there to help each other,’ thought Mustafa. The wasps had helped Mustafa in his philosophical, almost mystical thinking, and he owed a lot to them. Forever he felt love as well as pity for insects and other animals, and prayed for their rapid evolution.

Human mind could create architecture, art, ideas, instruments. It was as nothing as compared to …