Not
Ready Yet…
“All
destiny leads down the same path—
growth,
love and service.”
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross
Talking with a friend the other day, who over the summer holidays
had read my book The Lion that Swallowed
Hemingway, from which he gleaned a surprising insight into his own life,
the topic of reincarnation came up and I told him about a dream I had that in
my next life I’m going to come back as a precocious writer, and then I was
about to share an epiphany I had about reincarnation but for some reason was
censored and couldn’t relate my epiphany because I couldn’t remember it.
It’s not unusual to have my mind censored when I’m talking
with someone, and by being censored I don’t mean that I had a “senior moment”
or a “brain freeze.” It was certainly a lapse of memory, but it had nothing to
do with brain chemistry; it had to do with the information I wasn’t supposed to
share with my friend because he wasn’t meant to hear it. But who or what
censored my thoughts?
As exciting as this may be, it’s not the subject of today’s spiritual
musing; it is only my entry point, because it was this conversation that called
me to write a musing on my epiphany on reincarnation which is as clear in my
mind today as it was when it first came to me; and my epiphany is this: no one can break the cycle of life and
death until they are ready, and making oneself ready was what inspired my
epiphany on spiritual liberation; but before I reveal my epiphany, let me shed
some light on this mystery of my mind going blank whenever I’m about to share
something that is not meant to be shared with the person that I am speaking
with.
This hasn’t happened all that often, but enough times to
alert me to my censor, and by censor I mean an inner guiding principle that is infinitely
wiser than my working-day personality. And as strange as this may seem, I’m not
alone in this unique relationship with my inner guiding principle because the Greek
philosopher Socrates also had a censor that he called an inner voice, an
“oracle which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am
going to do, but never commands me to do anything,” as he tells us in Plato’s
Dialogue the Apology.
I’ve never been commanded to do anything by my “oracle”
either, but when I get censored I know I have been forbidden to share my
thoughts with the person I’m speaking with, and I can only assume that it was
either for my own protection or because it wasn’t meant for them hear what I
was about to share. Why they weren’t meant to hear what I was about to say, I
can only guess; but the memory of what I wanted to share always comes back to
me after I part company with the person I was speaking with. Now, back to my
epiphany that I was called upon to share in today’s spiritual musing…
I can’t count the number of times in the course of my life
that I’ve heard people say: “This is my
last life. I’m never coming back. One lifetime is enough for me, thank you,” or
some variation of the same theme that one has had their fill of life and wants
nothing more to do with it, and this includes people who believe in karma and
reincarnation and should know better; but they don’t, and that was my epiphany.
What I find curious however is why it took so long for me to
see it, because I had long ago come to the realization in my journey of
self-discovery that the purpose of our existence is to become what we are meant
to be, which is our true self; but herein lies the mystery of today’s musing,
because I know now why I was given this epiphany that I was about to share it
with my friend the other day before I got censored.
Gurdjieff impressed upon me that nature will only evolve man
so far and no further, and to become what we are meant to be we have to take
evolution into our own hands with conscious
effort and intentional suffering;
this is why I was censored when speaking with my friend. My epiphany would have
threatened the conventional status quo, which he represented and which evolves
unconsciously through the natural process of karma and reincarnation until one
has evolved enough to take evolution into their own hands and consciously
complete what nature cannot finish, as I was compelled to do early in my life
when I was called to find my true self.
Upon reflection, I can’t help but see a common thread now
running through all the times that I got censored; and that common thread is
what Carl Jung called “the problem of resistance to understanding.” In a letter
to his friend and pupil Doctor Hans Schmid (November
6, 1915), Jung revealed how man’s resistance to understanding was finally
clarified for him by a vision given to Brigitta of Sweden (1303-1373), who
became St. Bridget. Jung wrote that
Brigitta’s vision explained the psychology of devils, which in Jung’s lexicon
would be the psychology of man’s unconscious shadow self that is insatiable in
its appetite for life experience.
“Their belly is so swollen because their greed was
boundless, for they filled themselves and were not sated, and so great was
their greed that, had they been able to gain the whole world, they would gladly
have exerted themselves, and would moreover have desired to reign in heaven,”
wrote Brigitta about her vision; and Jung realized that “the devil (the shadow
side of our ego personality) is the devourer,” and “understanding is likewise a
devouring,” because “understanding swallows you up.”
This was such a powerful vision that Jung immediately saw
why people (especially his patients who bared their soul to him) have a
resistance to understanding. “Understanding is a fearfully bounding power, at
times a veritable murderer of the soul as soon as it flattens out vitally
important differences,” wrote Jung in his letter. “The core of the individual
is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is ‘grasped.’” Hence man’s resistance
to understanding: our shadow does not want to be snuffed out and swallowed up
by being understood and resists the light of cognition; but this is such a
profound insight that it needs further explanation…
Our shadow is the unconscious side of our conscious ego
personality, the repository of everything that we do not want to deal with
consciously; like those embarrassing little moments when we made a fool of
ourselves with our friends or at a social function, or the lie that we told to
save face and countless other sins and foibles and grotesqueries that we refuse
to resolve by dealing with them consciously and which over time coalesce into
little matrixes of unresolved energy that become our personal demons. This is
why I refuted novelist John Irving’s karmically flawed premise in my spiritual
musing “Chicken Little Syndrome,” his personal belief central to all his novels.
“You don’t choose your demons, they choose you,” he boasted, with authorial
certainty; a totally blind perspective on how the logic of life works.
Karma is a personal responsibility, and not until we have
evolved enough through the natural process of karma and reincarnation will we
be spiritually mature enough to take evolution into our own hands and live our
life with conscious karmic awareness; that’s why I was censored from sharing my
epiphany with my friend the other day, because the thought of taking karmic
responsibility for one’s own life scares the devil out of people, and one
instinctively blocks out the light of understanding by going into denial to
protect their shadow self. And this brings me back to the central motif of my spiritual
musing: no one can break the cycle of
life and death until they are ready. Which begs the question: when is one
ready?
Given the analogy of the oyster creating its own precious
pearl, man creates his own precious spiritual identity by individuating the
consciousness of his many personalities that he created with every incarnation.
This presupposes reincarnation, because it’s not possible to individuate one’s
spiritual identity in one lifetime alone; and I have proof of this from my own
past-life regressions which I’ve written about in The Summoning of Noman and need not expound upon here.
The Oyster’s pearl grows out of the oyster’s own cells, and
our spiritual identity grows out of the karmic “cells” of our many life
experiences, which means that we grow in positive and negative karma until we
have grown as far as evolution can take us; but like the acorn seed that longs
to become an oak tree, so too do we long to become all that we are meant to be,
and to do this we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what
nature cannot finish, and herein lies our problem.
To complete what nature cannot finish we have to resolve our
negative karma, because the consciousness of negative karma is not pure enough
for our soul self to realize its divine nature, or spiritual identity; and to
purify the consciousness of our negative karmic self we have to transform it,
which is the essential purpose of all spiritual teachings. But how exactly do
we transform our negative karmic self?
I began the process of self-transformation with Gurdjieff’s
teaching of “work on oneself” with conscious
effort and intentional suffering,
which inspired my edict of self-denial that I called my Royal Dictum, which in turn awakened me to the secret way that I
found in Christ’s sayings and parables, and the more I practiced the secret way
the more I transformed my negative karmic self; and by secret way I mean the
art of purifying the consciousness of my negative karmic self by becoming a
giver instead of a taker, which was the most difficult part of my journey of
self-discovery.
In the words of St. Paul, I practiced the art of “dying
daily” to my selfish nature and disciplined myself to become unselfish. That’s
how I purified the consciousness of my negative karmic self, which Socrates
confirmed in the Phaedo: “And what is
purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying
before, the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself.”
That’s how one takes evolution into their own hands, by
becoming a giver and not a taker; because
the act of unselfish living has the power to purify the consciousness of our
negative karmic self and, in the words of Jesus, makes our two selves into one
self which he called “the pearl of great price.”
Given my love for aphorisms, I distilled my whole journey of
self-discovery into a simple saying which speaks to the paradoxical process of
spiritual self-realization consciousness: the
more you give of yourself, the more of yourself you will have to give; and the
less you give of yourself, the less of yourself you will have to give. And
one day we will have grown enough to realize our spiritual identity, as I did
that day in my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the
kitchen table and I gave birth to my spiritual self. I knew that I was immortal, and the longing in my soul no longer
drove my will to be because I had become my true self.
Not until we have evolved enough to give back to life then will
we be ready to break the cycle of life and death, because this is the only way
we can complete what nature cannot finish; and until we do, we karmically fate
ourselves to return to life to complete our journey of self-discovery. This is
what I couldn’t tell my friend the other day, because my “oracle” knew that
silence was the better part of wisdom.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment