by Doug Scott
Audio:
Mystery-Clad Being: The Primal Rhythm of Being and the Heart of all Reality – The Building 4th Podcast
I. The Nature of Mystery
We heard from Tim a couple of weeks ago speak beautifully about the theme of mystery. I want to build on that foundation with a particular question: What is the nature of the mystery that we are exploring?
Mystery is not that which cannot be known. Mystery is that which can never be exhausted in all the ways of knowing. It is infinitely knowable—which means we can spend eternity exploring it and never arrive at complete comprehension. Not because it withholds itself from us, but because it is inexhaustible in its richness.
This is a crucial distinction. Mystery is not ignorance. It is not a wall we cannot penetrate. Mystery is an ocean we can swim in forever, each stroke revealing new depths, new currents, new wonders. The fullness of mystery—what we might call gnosis—is not a destination we arrive at but a horizon that recedes as we approach, always inviting us further.
Ra describes this with precise language when speaking of the fundamental rhythms of intelligent infinity: “The basic rhythms of intelligent infinity are totally without distortion of any kind. The rhythms are clothed in mystery, for they are being itself.” (27.7)
Clothed in mystery. Not hidden by mystery. Clothed in it—the way a body is clothed, the way we wear our appearance. Mystery is not what conceals being from us. Mystery is being, wearing its own inexhaustibility.
So tonight I want to ask: If being itself is clothed in mystery, can we nonetheless discern something of its shape? Its flow? Its fundamental rhythm? Can we, while honoring the inexhaustibility, trace patterns that appear consistently across Ra’s teachings—patterns that might illuminate something primal about the nature of reality itself?
II. Being as Verb: Does It Have a Shape?
Notice that Ra says the rhythms are being itself. Not that being has rhythms. Not that being does rhythms. The rhythms are being. This is being as verb, not as noun. Not a thing that exists, but existence itself as dynamic, self-processing oscillation.
What does Ra tell us about the shape of this rhythm? In Session 27.6, we find a remarkable description:
“Intelligent infinity has a rhythm, or flow, as of a giant heart beginning with the Central Sun… the presence of the flow inevitable as a tide of beingness without polarity, without finity; the vast and silent all beating outward, outward, focusing outward and inward until the focuses are complete. The intelligence or consciousness of foci have reached a state where their, shall we say, spiritual nature or mass calls them inward, inward, inward until all is coalesced. This is the rhythm of reality.”
A giant heart. Beating outward, outward… then inward, inward, inward until all is coalesced. This is the shape of being itself: a circulation. Not linear progression, not random chaos, but rhythmic circulation—emanation and return, expansion and coalescence, systole and diastole.
III. The Primal Desire: Joy Seeking to Know Itself
But why? Why does being beat outward and then inward? What drives the circulation?
Ra gives us the answer in the most fundamental teaching of all: “The Creator will know Itself” (27.8). This is the First Distortion, the primal movement from undifferentiated unity toward manifestation. Not “wants to know” as if lacking something—but will, an active, ongoing, generative drive.
Here is the crucial insight: This desire is not experienced as lack. It is experienced as Joy. The Creator’s desire to know Itself is not a hunger born of deficiency but a fullness seeking to express and discover itself through infinite perspectives. Joy is the fundamental affective quality of being itself.
And this Joy can only be fulfilled through experience. The Creator cannot know Itself through static contemplation. Self-knowing requires circulation—going forth into differentiated expression and returning enriched by what the journey has gathered.
This means experience is circulation. The going forth and the returning are not separate from experience—they are experience itself in its most fundamental form.
IV. The Heart as Locus of Circulation
If experience is circulation, and circulation has a pattern—outward, inward, coalescence—then we can ask: Is there a center to this circulation? Is there a locus where the three movements meet?
Ra speaks directly to this in Session 82.7: “There is a center to infinity. From this center all spreads. Therefore, there are centers to the creation, to the galaxies, to star systems, to planetary systems, and to consciousness. In each case you may see growth from the center outward.”
A center from which all spreads. This is the ontological definition of a heart—not merely an organ that pumps blood, not merely a chakra that processes emotion, but the locus of circulation itself. Wherever being localizes—whether as universe, galaxy, star, planet, or person—there exists a heart: a center where the three forces of circulation operate.
The Three Forces
1. Outward Flow (Emanation): From the heart, energy emanates. The Original Thought—the Creator’s desire to know Itself—pulses forth from this center into manifestation, seeking, exploring, differentiating. Ra speaks of the vast and silent all “beating outward, outward.”
2. Inward Flow (Return): To the heart, experience returns. The spiritual nature or mass of the foci “calls them inward, inward, inward.” This is what Ra elsewhere calls “spiritual gravity”—the attractive force drawing consciousness back toward center, back toward Source.
3. Coalescence (Integration): Within the heart, what went forth and what returns are integrated. Ra uses several terms for this: coalesced (27.6), distilled (18.5—”distilling from them the love/light within them”), and in other passages, the image of atoms finding “precise distances from each other” to “produce a lattice structure which we call crystalline” (29.23).
Coalescence is not mere combination. It is integration that transforms. What went forth as seed returns as harvest. What emanated as question returns as lived answer. The heart distills, processes, and prepares the next arising.
V. The Modes of Joy: Yearning, Longing, Rejoicing
“Let us examine the heart of evolution.
Let us remember that we are all one. This is the great learning/teaching. In this unity lies love. This is a great learn/teaching. In this unity lies light. This is the fundamental teaching of all planes of existence in materialization. Unity, love, light, and joy; this is the heart of evolution of the spirit.” –Ra 52.11
Now we can go deeper. The three movements—outward, inward, coalescence—are kinetic. They are movements. But what generates them? What is the affective quality that drives the circulation?
I want to suggest that the three movements are responses to three prior conditions—three ontological yearnings that are themselves modes of Joy. These yearnings do not cause the movements mechanically; they are the movements in their affective dimension.
1. Yearning (to go forth): At the primal level, yearning is not lack. It is eager desire, anticipation, the joy in becoming. The Old English giernan means “to strive, be eager, desire”—and shares roots with the Greek chaírein, “to rejoice.” Yearning is rejoicing—no lack, only eager delight in the adventure about to unfold. This generates the outward flow.
2. Longing (to return): Once consciousness has gone forth and differentiated, a new quality of desire emerges. Longing is desire stretched across the distance that experience has created. The Old English langian means literally “to grow long, to lengthen”—stretching toward what is distant. This is the memory of home pulling homeward, joy stretched toward reunion. This generates the inward flow.
3. Rejoicing (in union): When outward and inward meet in the heart, there is consummation. Rejoicing, from the Latin gaudēre, originally meant “to possess, to enjoy possession of, to have fruition of.” It is the joy of completion, of harvest gathered, of distillation accomplished. This generates coalescence and seeds the new arising.
And throughout—enjoying. Being in joy. The Old French enjoir means literally “to be placed within joy, to dwell in joy.” This is the medium through which the entire circulation occurs. There is no moment outside of joy, because joy is being itself in its affective dimension.
VI. The Two Energies Within Us
This cosmic pattern is not distant from us. Ra tells us it operates within our own energy system. In Session 49.5-6, Ra describes two types of energy operating within the mind/body/spirit complex:
“The most important concept to grasp about the energy field is that the lower, or negative pole, will draw the universal energy into itself from the cosmos. Therefrom it will move upward to be met and reacted to by the positive spiraling energy moving downward from within.”
“Meanwhile the Creator lies within. In the north pole the crown is already upon the head and the entity is potentially a god.”
Two flows: one rising from below, drawing universal energy from the cosmos; one descending from within, where the Creator already dwells. The place where they meet—this is what Ra calls kundalini, “the meeting place of cosmic and inner vibratory understanding.” This meeting point is our heart, in its deepest sense.
The cosmic rhythm that beats through all creation beats through you. The yearning that sends energy outward, the longing that draws it back, the rejoicing where they meet—these are not metaphors. They are the actual dynamics of your being.
VII. The Pattern Appears Everywhere
This pattern of three forces—outward flow, inward flow, coalescence—appears throughout nature and science. Not because science “proves” metaphysics, but because the same pattern that constitutes being manifests at every scale.
Physics: White holes (cosmic emanation) and black holes (cosmic return). The Big Bang as universal outward flow, gravitational collapse as universal inward flow. The strange attractor in chaos theory—which we will watch in a moment—reveals how apparent chaos organizes around a hidden center.
Chemistry: Dissipative structures maintain organization through constant circulation of energy—taking in, transforming, releasing. Living systems are precisely such structures.
Biology: The heartbeat itself. Systole (contraction, emanation) and diastole (relaxation, reception). Breath: inhalation drawing the world in, exhalation releasing transformed air. The cell taking nutrients in, processing, releasing waste.
Psychology: Attachment theory describes the child moving out into the world (secure base), returning to the caregiver (safe haven), and being transformed by the cycle. We spend our lives circulating between independence and intimacy.
Neuroscience: The brain itself can be understood as a torus on its side—two hemispheres longing for each other across the corpus callosum, which functions as both veil and bridge. The left hemisphere specializes in focused analysis; the right in holistic context. Neither is complete without the other. The longing between them is the mechanism of integrated consciousness.
VIII. Strange Attractor Contemplation
Watch the point move through space.
It never repeats. Never traces the same path twice. And yet—it does not wander randomly. Something draws it. Something organizes its apparent chaos.
This is called a strange attractor. “Attractor” because the system is drawn toward it. “Strange” because it has a shape that can never be fully occupied—the trajectory approaches infinitely close but never lands.
The point spirals around one wing… then crosses to spiral around the other… then crosses back. Two centers. One circulation. The pattern never settles, never completes, never exhausts itself.
Watch how each spiral tightens toward center… then releases… and is drawn across to begin again.
This is what longing looks like when mapped in phase space. The memory of center draws the wandering point. Not forcing—luring. The attractor does not compel. It invites. The point is free at every moment—and at every moment, it is being called.
You are watching the shape of yearning made visible.
Going forth… being drawn back… crossing over… spiraling in… releasing out… and being drawn again.
The outward is contained by the inward. The inward is activated by the outward. Neither exists without the other. This is circulation. This is life.
Now notice: there is no visible center. You cannot see the attractor itself. You see only the response to it—the endless spiral dance of something being drawn, being lured, being loved into pattern.
The attractor is known only by its effects. It is mystery-clad. Present everywhere in the system. Visible nowhere except in what it organizes.
Ra said the rhythms of intelligent infinity are “clothed in mystery, for they are being itself.”
This is what it looks like when being wears its mystery: infinite complexity, perfect order, inexhaustible novelty—all dancing around a center that can never be possessed, only approached.
Feel how this is also your life.
Going forth into experience… being drawn back toward something you cannot name but cannot forget… crossing between worlds—outer and inner, manifest and hidden—spiraling closer, then releasing, then spiraling again.
You have never been lost. The attractor has always been calling. Every apparently random movement was already part of the pattern—the inexhaustible pattern that clothes the Center in visible mystery.
The heart beats. Outward, outward… inward, inward… until all is coalesced.
This is the rhythm of reality.
—
IX. Consolation: We Are Never Alone
Before we turn to practice, I want to offer something pastoral.
If the cosmic rhythm is yearning-longing-rejoicing, and if this same rhythm operates in you… then your own yearning and longing are not separate from God’s. Your ache to return, your restlessness for something more, your homesickness for a home you cannot quite remember—this is God’s own longing operating within and through you.
You are inside divine longing even as it is inside you.
Whitehead called God “the fellow sufferer who understands.” But it goes deeper than that. God is not watching our longing from outside. God is longing through us, with us, as us. The yearning you feel is not evidence of God’s absence but of God’s presence within that very yearning.
This means: You are never alone.
The sense of alienation—the veil’s deepest effect—produces not separation itself, but the felt conviction that separation is absolute. Softening that conviction is the heart of spiritual practice. Not replacing it with certainty of connection—that would be another kind of grasping—but allowing the possibility that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, that aloneness was always appearance rather than reality.
And the restlessness? The ache that never quite goes away? This is not meant to be eliminated. It is meant to be tended—like a wound that is healing, like butterfly wings that are still wet, like an infant in arms. The tender, aching place is holy ground. It is where the longing lives. And the longing is the connection.
X. Feeling the Torus Within
I want to share from my own personal experience, because perhaps you have this too—and if you do not, you can, because it is simply a latent sense organ.
You and I have five sense organs that perceive third density space/time: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. But did you know that we also have subtle sense organs? These are latent—not often used consciously—but they do arise in us through intuitive knowing and through the empathic connections we make with others.
I’d like to share that you can begin to feel a sense of circulation around you. For the past five years or so, I feel this all the time. At my core—at the heart, the central axis of my personal torus—I feel a clockwise circulation spinning within me. But there is also an outward field around me, and this outer field circulates counterclockwise. I feel it. It is my subtle skin.
I feel this most acutely when I am connecting with someone else. As a counselor—or simply as a friend—when I am fully aware of what I am doing, I will intentionally extend my toroidal field and connect it with the other person. Sometimes I extend it so far that it encompasses them entirely, depending on what I feel called to do in the moment.
When I do this, I essentially become the other person. We are all one self, other-selves in one body, and this is a transposition of consciousness. In the counseling moment, it is myself—Doug—who connects with my client, and then I become embodied inside of their experience. I become that person, in a sense, through the energy. Through this flow, through this exchange of information on the subtle realm, I feel intuitively the blockages or the places of freedom within their aura, within their energy centers, as if they were my own.
And so I am able to almost surgically connect with the other person through verbal speaking—articulating what I myself am feeling as if it were my own body on the other side. Because when I join that field, it is my own body.
You can learn to do this too.
XI. Living from the Heart
To “live from the heart” is not sentimental advice. It is an invitation to conscious alignment with the very structure of being. The heart already functions as this center—it cannot do otherwise, for this is what hearts are. But we can dwell there consciously or unconsciously, harmoniously or in resistance.
The center was never absent. The rhythm never ceased. What awakens is not the heart itself but our recognition of it—our willingness to inhabit the center we never left, to feel the pulse we always were, to dance the rhythm that dances us.
The yearning that sent you forth on this journey—it was already joy in the guise of anticipation.
The longing that draws you homeward—it is joy stretched across the distance you have traveled.
And the rejoicing that awaits in the meeting—it is joy consummated, the fullness you have always been moving toward.
The heart beats. The mystery clothes itself in rhythm. And we—mystery-clad beings ourselves—pulse with the same life that pulses through all creation.
Outward, outward… inward, inward… until all is coalesced.
This is the rhythm of reality.
This is who we are.
Appendix: Key Ra Quotes Referenced
Ra 27.6: “Intelligent infinity has a rhythm, or flow, as of a giant heart beginning with the Central Sun… the vast and silent all beating outward, outward, focusing outward and inward until the focuses are complete. The intelligence or consciousness of foci have reached a state where their, shall we say, spiritual nature or mass calls them inward, inward, inward until all is coalesced. This is the rhythm of reality.”
Ra 27.7: “The basic rhythms of intelligent infinity are totally without distortion of any kind. The rhythms are clothed in mystery, for they are being itself.”
Ra 27.8: “In this distortion of the Law of One it is recognized that the Creator will know Itself.”
Ra 82.7: “There is a center to infinity. From this center all spreads. Therefore, there are centers to the creation, to the galaxies, to star systems, to planetary systems, and to consciousness. In each case you may see growth from the center outward.”
Ra 49.5: “The most important concept to grasp about the energy field is that the lower, or negative pole, will draw the universal energy into itself from the cosmos. Therefrom it will move upward to be met and reacted to by the positive spiraling energy moving downward from within.”
Ra 49.6: “Meanwhile the Creator lies within. In the north pole the crown is already upon the head and the entity is potentially a god.”
Ra 18.5: “[T]o experience all things desired, to then analyze, understand, and accept these experiences, distilling from them the love/light within them.”
Ra 29.23 (Question and Answer summarized): “[A]s the atoms form from rotations of the vibration which is light, they coalesce in a certain manner sometimes. They find distances, inter-atomic distances, from each other at precise distance and produce a lattice structure which we call crystalline.”
Ra 36.7: “The mass increases, shall we say, significantly but not greatly until the gateway density [7th]. In this density the summing up, the looking backwards—in short, all the useful functions of polarity have been used. Therefore, the metaphysical electrical nature of the individual grows greater and greater in spiritual mass.”
Ra 52.12: “This octave density of which we have spoken is both omega and alpha, the spiritual mass of the infinite universes becoming one central sun or Creator once again.”
Building 4th Cosmic Christ 