Pain and Clarity: The Great Offering
More is being asked of us right now but more is being offered. Metaphysically and spiritually we are given opportunities to grow unlike ever before, while materially, for many, things are being taken away. Perhaps spiritual practice does not always have to have this equation of hardships/suffering/falling away of the familiar in order to have a deeper, more refined spiritual practice (if chosen). Perhaps it’s possible that times of plenty can yield great change as well for some, but the deep dissolution of the old to make way for new growth always requires a burning. Gifts of abundance (emotional, physical, spiritual) help push you forward but they can never take the place of that painful destruction, that wrenching away of the false, that release of the small self with which all identify.
Now, the stripping away of certain freedoms of movement, expression, relationships, money and material goods, work and living opportunities, have been exchanged, in an exponentially greater ratio than 1:1, I would suggest, for opportunities of spiritual insight and connectivity. A deep knowing of truths that a short while ago were available to only a few, a glimpse over the precipice into the vastness of the whole of reality, not just this hard little painful one, is available in an expanded and accessible way.
It is hard not to want the whole house of cards to just come tumbling down finally and fully, to get it over with, but unlike those road-side accidents, there is something to see here. It is both deeply personal, the most personal thing possible, and something shared on a world-wide scale. I think literally on the microcosmic level it is possible for many more of us to actually feel the cells in our bodies changing over—the old ones dying and the new ones replicating. Around us so much is dying and the real pain comes from hanging on too long to the decay. Letting it go unleashes new energy, growth, insight. Not without grief, not without loss. Personally, globally.
Does this mean you stop caring about what happens around you? To you? To your friends and family and this nation and all others? No! You care more deeply because more of you is available to care, more of you has the capacity to care about more than just your immediate concerns. Your caring, though, can encompass the big picture, which contains but does not become, embroiled in the immediate discomfort or even death of the individual’s system. This can be physical or simply the loss of a comfort based on false premises. The whole of you can then care for the whole of the trajectory, of a person, a nation, a world. The whole of you can care about what is most important, a commitment to knowing and serving God, front and center, by a focus on truth, through a letting go of the self as one’s primary concern and motivation.
If it sounds like I’m advocating a purity of detachment, I am not. Mostly what I’ve seen of people supposedly practicing “non-attachment” has been avoidance and escape. True discernment, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love for others, require us to feel and pass through our own pains. The purity comes when we understand our own experiences in the larger context and so can understand the suffering of others in theirs. It is perhaps more accurately described as a vibration happening so quickly between the microcosm and the macrocosm, that both are experienced simultaneously. We can always be aware of the large view of positive release of the old poisons, even as we feel intensely sick as those things exit. The two poles which might seem as though they are opposites when embroiled in our human dramas are in fact on the same spectrum of experience, a mesh of continuity rather than two distinct points. From one end of this reality to the other, there is no separation, you can’t find the place where one ends and one begins. Within this space of expansion we are being offered everything of value, even as it feels that much is being taken away. The adage of making space is certainly apt, even as we might fight tooth and nail to hold onto what we perceive to be losing.
As all the apparent evil in the world seems to be bubbling up to the surface for any, for all, to know, to recognize, to denounce, so too does God seem to be closer and more revealed now. I feel it most at night these days, with the moon and the stars and planets blazing their intelligence, their divine information, their love down on us, so close they are practically warming our heads.
Each person’s experience of divinity, of the ineffable, is singular, is beyond words to adequately capture. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. If I were to attempt to describe in broad strokes some of those experiences for myself, I would say it’s like a total fullness, being full up to the brim and a spilling over of that essence that makes, at least temporarily, the small self recede to almost nothing. Not goodness or love, neither word is complete.
I do not like my freedoms or those of others to be threatened or taken away, to say the least. I do not like to see the active harm done to so many who don’t have a choice, i.e. children or those who cannot choose for themselves. I do not like to see the willful stupidity, the collusion with evil, both tacit and obvious. I do not like to hear the continual lies unquestioned. It makes me angry, it makes me upset. And there is a place for these feelings. I would never advocate getting rid of them entirely. A teacher of mine used to say, “When you eradicate anger from the world, you allow injustice. Injustice should make you angry.” But you hold the anger to a higher standard, to another order. You attempt, as always it is an attempt because as humans we cannot of course encompass the divine purity, to hold to God’s standard of this anger. We attempt to feel, understand and transmute our own grievances and resentments, our own pain from those ways we feel we’ve been wronged, to better hold the larger reality of what we really should be denouncing. When we hold the larger reality, our anger is of a different magnitude, it is productive and can burn through that which requires dissolution, rather than destroying and weakening systems we wish to strengthen, those of ourselves and others.
Spiritual practice as I know it isn’t about transcending the material but about moving through it and feeling more and more the interwoven nature of the infinite within it. It’s an interaction with the material in full awareness, or at least an openness to the possibility of this awareness, of the deeper spiritual reality expressing itself at all times, all around you. The relationship of you within this expression here is a constantly evolving one when you engage fully, and the you in this relationship becomes more and more the bright clear essence deep within, rather than the created self.
I have understandings I didn’t have five or twenty-five years ago, but I also have more questions. As some things clarify and become more available for understanding, others become less clear, and seem to recede into an obscurity. As you go deeper into the mysterious and feel the familiar road signs fall away, your sense of gravity, or whatever it is that we call “gravity” falls away and you are left in a potent space of potentiality. If you prevent yourself from immediately filling that space with old, familiar patterns, transformation is possible. This glimpse of new discoveries, this foray into that infinite space that is our reality if we choose it, means that a destruction of the old must also occur. To see what is true we must destroy what is not true within ourselves. If you are unwilling, if you retreat, then the process is shut down. No one can go through these radical transformations without real pain. It is best for most to go step by step, slowly, allowing time to pause and integrate but still, it is not possible to avoid the real dissolution that will eventually have to happen if one continues on this path.
Again, what is compelling about this time we are in now is that what had seemed a stable 3-D reality is breaking down all around us, not just in the middle of the jungle in the middle of the night, but every day in the full glorious light of the sun, in the cities, in the country, everywhere. Even as the dark forces seem to be spreading their control everywhere into our lives, I would argue that reality is reshaping itself, more and more, into its true spiritual nature. That means that the evil that had been hidden is showing itself in grotesque physical forms, just as the beauty of true divinity is also expressing itself.
We are experiencing what’s called in biologic terms a die-off reaction or a healing crisis as the toxins are being stirred up in every global organ making the world sicker first before finally releasing the illness into complete destruction. It isn’t pleasant, it isn’t fun, to say the least, but when we add our individual purge to the greater purge, we are rewarded many times over. We need to choose this, we need to use our free-will for there to be healing.
As I’ve written about before, being here on earth in this frenzy of darkness or craziness isn’t a mistake. The materiality isn’t to be transcended while here, it is an essential component of the teaching. Only in the 3-D do we have this opportunity to see so clearly what is good and what is evil. Only in the material do we have these fundamental opportunities to learn real discernment, to elevate the light and choose it. One notion of the Sepher Yetzirah, a foundational text of Kabbalah, is that God created the world so that humans could overcome evil, could turn the darkness to light. In the purely spiritual arena, there is no space, no time, and so good could never get close enough to evil to defeat it, to transmute it. Only within the material world, within space and time, can we comingle with good and evil so that we can know it in ourselves, within everything we touch and interact. Close up, firsthand, we can choose to recognize and align with goodness. We can denounce and eradicate the false, again within ourselves and within the world.
Without question we are here to learn, to understand, to grow. This is no accident, that I feel in the marrow of my bones, as much as I might fight it at times of great testing. Our chance to expand our own limits within the confines of such pressures is why we’re here. Not as an egoic test of strength, but as an act of wanting to be a part of that greater, beautiful, transcendent force of good that pushes us all ever forward if we run and jump into the fold with it. This is so hard to remember when we look at data, hear the numbers of those getting sicker or dying by the obviously evil agendas.
Many, most, are choosing to destroy themselves in this shifting reality which they perceive as chaos. Heads down, masks on (metaphorically and not), they ingest the poisons, do what they’re told to do, yell at those suggesting otherwise, and keep the sickness playing out in themselves and the world. The more we clean ourselves up, the more we purge the false decay and the dying within ourselves, the more we accelerate the process of the total cleansing. Within this corrupted earth, the pure Divine spark can be found by all-- unadulterated, pulsing, consistent, eternal. Turn toward, and not away, from that. Choose to serve that ultimate Goodness, from the all of you to the All.