What is primordial Consciousness?

Whenever I use the word primordial, I inevitably get the question what do I mean by that word? And it's a fair question. Because primordial often appears as a very abstract and conceptual word that is quite remote from our everyday reality and existence.

The dictionary meaning of primordial according to the Merriam Webster dictionary is something that is, at the beginning of time, something that is primeval, the first created or developed, persisting from the beginning, for example of a solar system, or a universe earliest formed and the growth of an individual or an organ, or something that is fundamental in primary, and other places describe some of the similar words have to primordial as primitive, intuitive, elemental, etc.

But I find that all these words only serve to increase the abstract and conceptual nature of primordiality it also situates it in time. So it is something that's at the beginning something that's at the foundation, and you know, we move very far away from it, and we develop very far away from it, and it's somewhere there in the mists of time. Is it important to us or not, except as a kind of an analytical and intellectual exercise? So, I understand when people say, what does primordial mean?

The primordial is important, and especially in an archetypal tradition, archetypes are the expressions of the primordial. So what does this primordial mean here? It is true that it is something of the beginning, it is the source, it is the birthplace, it is what preexists time itself, it is what was always there. In fact, in Indian philosophy, the word ancient is used instead of primordial. However, when we translate it, we situate the ancient in time, what that which is old, not new, that which is historical or pre historical. And so once again, we situate it in time.

And the problem with that is, we always think that what is new, and what is now is always better and more civilized and more sophisticated and more intelligent. And so we carry this attitude to the past as something that was interesting, maybe intriguing, or we have this very utopian romantic concept of the past as a place where everything was perfect, and people did all the right things. But you can see from the archetypal traditions itself, that it didn't present, either a past that was irrelevant to now, nor a past that is utopian and perfect, it is something quite other.

What is suggested as the primordial space of the primordial invocation, which is the archetypal world is that aspect of our consciousness, that aspect of our being, which preexists, the narratives into which we are born. So right from the minute we are born, we get a name, we then inherit the stories of our circumstances, the lineage, the inheritance of the past history of family, the times that we are born into the ideologies of the times the roles, there's so much noise and clamor for almost from the second that we are born. And the primordial is what pre exists that moment when we begin to become the story the narrative.

So it is in an archetypal practice, it is like the seed and the way in which the seed is invoked is by returning to the waters so primordiality is always a associated with the great oceanic waters. It's like a seed that just drops into the waters. And indeed, what we have to do is to drop into the waters of that deep, vast oceanic consciousness, which is not of the story, which is not what we know, which is not what we have made into information and roles and ideologies, but that which preexists and that is available in us already, those waters are already within us.

And all we need, the movement we are invited to do is nothing other than returning into those waters, we don't have to create the seed nor what comes from the seed. And this is the importance of the seed. Because the seed holds the information of the tree, the seed holds the life plan, as it is called, sometimes called, for example, in Chinese traditional medicine philosophy, that the seed holds the tree and the tree will, it's the like the life plan of the tree, and the trees unfolds, it doesn't have to be invented. So, when we return to the waters when we return to those amniotic waters where the seed consciousness, the seed itself, of our being, can be nourished in the waters, then the tree will unfold of itself. We don't have to create what we are the life and everything about our life mechanistically bringing it into manifestation, but it will unfurl.

That doesn't mean that we don't have any agency and we are passive, not at all. Because we dance as the tree and we allow this unfolding through the expression and manifestation in our bodies in our consciousness in our expression in what we do in the world. And that just like a tree, the tree still must do its photosynthesis or whatever it does grab on to the to the soil to keep itself rooted, moving the wind. So the tree is never passive, it is always intelligently dancing with the forces and the energies around it and within it, and that is what we are asked to do.

But that dance is a collaboration or it's something that is going along with we are dancing with nature, and nature is also primordial. So we dance along with that primordiality of nature, which is also timeless. We didn't create nature, nature preexists us it has as it has its own intelligence, its own existence, and it preexists, our story and our meaning making and we also hold that intelligence and that primordiality of nature, within ourselves, which unfurls and unfolds and dances as the tree when we return to the waters and into that seed dimension of our consciousness.