Exceeding my capacity

Exceeding my capacity, tears flow.
Missing those who have gone before.
Remembering their gifts of friendship and wisdom.
I wish I could hold them in my heart as I experienced
them in my touching their beating flesh, with hugs,
kisses and laughter.
I shared their reality and blended with their essence.
I inhaled their spirits and shared their portion of God.
Tasting their fulfillment in my being I raise a memorial
for each of them knowing that their essence is a piece
of God and He will not mind that I carry these, who have
gone before as they are shared essences of Him.
I find my peace in tears, walking into the abyss of
trust for He who is and intertwines every breath exceeds
my capacity, as I am stretched with each
reverberation of my heart.

-Sam Roberts

Drop It

“drop it.
turn your back to it.
leave it behind.
we need your hands free.
we've got some digging to do to find your
light that you lost along the way.
it's still there, even tho you doubt it.
it's still there.
and we'll find it together.
and when we do,
we'll fall on our knees in gratitude and joy,
we'll laugh. we'll cry.
and then gently, ever so gently,
we'll take it back out to the world.”

~terri st cloud

Gliding Through Life

 

What are you when the world is considered as a whole of which you form a minuscule but essential part? What will "you" appear to be when viewed from longer and longer distances? What happens then is that the "you" first merges into the room you stand in, then to the house, then to the city and so on, until you are the world, until you are the universe from the viewpoint of infinitude.

The whole point is that "you" just do not exist as an individual entity. You are either "nothing" or "everything". Either way, the startling conclusion is inescapable: I am not what I appear to be; I am not what I thought I was.

Acceptance of this conclusion, even at the intellectual level to start with, will lead to a lasting faith if you take the time, as often as possible, to sit for a while quietly. Let your body relax, let your mind cease its usual chatter, and turn your mental gaze inward.

If you do this, there may occur realization (if there is Grace, if this fits in with the divine plan of the functioning of the totality), realization that the nothingness that you are is not the emptiness of the void but the fullness of the plenum, realization that "your" body is but an instrument (with eyes, ears and brains) which Consciousness uses in its functioning.

Such a realization of one's phenomenal absence as a separate entity is tantamount to the realization of our subjective noumenal presence with the whole universe as our objective body. And such realization, say the Masters (the Sufi -- the Advaitan -- the Taoist), is Enlightenment: I exist as phenomenal absence, but the phenomenal appearance is my Self.

Such realization translates itself in actual life as the actionless action of pure witnessing. Pure witnessing is of a dimension radically different from space-time, and is clearly to be distinguished from a mere movement in mind because: a) there is in witnessing no "witnesser" as an individual entity, b) there is no judging of what is witnessed as being "good" or "bad", and therefore, c) there is no desire to change "What-Is" in any shape or form.

In other words, such realization leads to an effortless gliding through life with a willing acceptance of whatever life might bring.

The final truth, therefore, is that the subjective "I" is all that exists. It witnesses the phenomenal manifestation (including all the me's) and its functioning, and is not aware of Itself when there is no phenomenal manifestation to witness.

~ From: The Final Truth, by Ramesh Balsekar.

 

Being and Becoming

If Enlightenment is the discovery of what IS, then it must embrace the ultimate nature of all things—seen and unseen, known and unknown. And I think the most truly all-embracing and inclusive definition of reality includes both Being and Becoming. Being is that timeless void out of which the cosmos was born, the empty ground from which everything arises and to which everything ultimately returns. Becoming is the something that emerged out of nothing and is still emerging in this moment. Becoming is Eros, the evolutionary impulse, the first cause, that original spark of light and energy that created the entire universe. It is that very same creative spark that awakens in our own hearts and minds as a sense of ecstatic urgency to evolve. This is why I have reenvisioned the very goal of the spiritual path, seeing the purpose of enlightenment as not merely to transcend the world but to transform the world, through becoming an agent of evolution itself. This is the new source of spiritual liberation. It's not just awakening to timeless Being—it's awakening to eternal, ecstatic Becoming. Enlightenment calls on us to awaken to both the timeless peace of Being and the relentless passion of the evolutionary impulse.

—Andrew Cohen

Communion of God and People

One God, the Maker of all: this is the first
and foremost article of our faith. But the
second article is the Word of God, the Son
of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who . . . in
the end of times, for the recapitulation of
all things, is become a man among us, visible
and tangible, in order to abolish death and
bring to light life, and bring about the
communion of God and people.

- Irenaus of Lyons -

Souls wait up in heaven for thousands of years, longing for their moment upon this earth to do another soul a favor. Angels burn with jealousy each time a human being turns himself around and creates beauty in this world. Heaven is nice, but on the best things, earth has exclusive rights.

- Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn

Life!

The same stream of life
that runs through my veins
runs throughout the world
and dances in rhythmic measure.

It is the same life
that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth
into numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves
of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life
that is rocked in the ocean cradle
of birth and death in ebb and in flow.

My limbs are made glorious
by the touch of this world of life,
and my pride is from
the life throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment.

~Rabindrinath Tagore

The Threshold

Open the door to us, and we will see the orchards,
We will drink thier cold water where the moon has left its trace.
The long road burns, hostile to strangers.
We wander without knowing and find no place.....

Before us is the door; what use for us to wish?
Better to turn away, abandoning hope.
We will never enter. We are weary of seeing it.
The door, opening, let so much silence escape.

That neither the orchards appeared nor any flower;
Only the immense space where emptiness and light are
was suddenly everywhere present, overflowed the heart,
And washed our eyes almost blind under the dust.

~Simone Weil

The Voice in the Head

The single most important step in your journey toward enlightenment is to learn to dis-identify from your thinking mind.   The thinking mind is a very busy component of our consciousness. It's constantly labeling, judging, defining, conceptualizing, covering the world up with words rather than allowing you to experience the world directly through presence.
  
The thinking mind is a chatterbox that is constantly making commentary on every little detail of our experience, robbing us of a still and receptive state of being that experiences life with an open curiosity that makes the world a living reality that is miraculous and magnificent.

When we are identified with our thinking mind, our experience of life is constricted and limited to an opaque screen of words, images, concepts and labels – second-hand representations of life that might as well be a movie on a screen.   When you create even a momentary gap in the incessant thinking and chatter taking place in your mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. The world around you becomes more vibrant and real.

Your experience of life is direct and alive, you are present in your experience, and thus you are able to touch life directly. This is called direct experience. Experience without words or labels.

Make a practice to create these momentary gaps in thinking as many times a day as you can. It doesn't matter of your gap is long. One minute is good enough. It's the number of times you cease the chatter and noise of the thinking mind that matters. The more you do this, the more you dis-identify.

One day you may even find yourself smiling at this voice in your head as though it were a child misbehaving. This is good, it means you are taking the content of your mind less seriously. And you are recognizing that the content of your mind is not you.

You don't depend on it for your sense of self. You are beginning to identify with something else within your consciousness, with your source and essence, with the presence of your being.
This is the state we wish to cultivate.

~ by Eckhart Tolle

 

The Light of Consciousness

The overwhelming and profound nature of the spiritual metamorphosis that occurs as one begins to move beyond individual and collective egoic self structures is difficult to convey without knowing about it directly from personal experience. If one had only known the darkness and had never seen the light of the sun, how could it be described in such a way that it would truly be understood? The light of consciousness illuminates all things but if we haven't discovered it directly for ourselves, no matter how bright that light may be, we won't be able to see it. And why is that? Because our attention is simply on other things. An enlightened person is illuminated by that same luminous essence that makes it possible for the world to exist.

—Andrew Cohen

The Mystic's Journey

The following article from the current issue of "Noetic Now Journal" encapsulates so much of what we experienced at Wisdom School last week, and raises several of the issues we discussed, especially the relationship of Jung's archetypes to spiritual growth. One different opinion: are Jung's archetypes at a different level from the archetypes experienced as we "ascend" through the realms of mystical awareness?

What I tell about “me” I tell about you
The walls between us long ago burned down
This voice seizing me is your voice
Burning to speak to us of us.—Rumi
Mystics have a reputation for being mysterious. In the most basic sense, a mystic is one who seeks union, or unity. But don’t most of us have such a yearning? Whether what we seek is union with ourselves, with others, with creation, with the Creator, or with Reality, maybe we are all mystics at heart. The mystic traditions came into being to help people remember their true origin and destiny. Remembering where we came from and where we are going would certainly change us and transform our relationships into ones of authenticity, respect, and compassion.
The great mystic poets, like Rumi, knew that remembrance links us to the spirit we all possess, which links us to one another as well. The practice of remembrance is common to all sacred traditions. It assists us in reclaiming our own transcendent identity, as well as drawing out our innate altruistic nature.
The vital importance of remembering who we are is vividly illustrated in the Hasidic story of Rabbi Zusya, who near the end of his life felt anxious about being left with a great question unanswered. He came to his followers one day, his eyes red from crying, after having a vision where he learned the question the angels will ask him about his life. His followers were puzzled; knowing that he was scholarly and humble, they asked what question could be so terrifying. He said, “They will not ask me, ‘Why weren’t you a Moses, leading your people out of slavery?’” His followers persisted, “So what will they ask you?” Finally, after another round of what they won’t ask him, he said, “They will say to me, ‘Zusya, there was only one thing that no power on heaven or earth could have prevented you from becoming.’ They will say, ‘Zusya, why weren’t you Zuzya?’”¹
Perhaps it is our soul that knows the “who” we are whom no one else could be. We have a far better chance of becoming who our soul is destined to be than becoming anyone else, but we don’t automatically know what that is. This is the mysterious journey we all set out upon, whether we know it or not: to remember who we are, to get to the heart of our soul’s story, and to embrace our own process of soul-making.
This life is about the soul’s ascent to the spiritual plane, a formidable task involving challenge after challenge as we make our way through the physical world. But, as Joseph Campbell has made clear, we don’t have to risk life’s greatest adventure alone: “The labyrinth is thoroughly known . . . where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”²
The world’s sacred traditions provide the guideposts and markers for this adventure. Living our lives consciously, we encounter universal motifs, archetypes, and timeless patterns that will help us discover not only who we are but also why we are so deeply connected to all others. And we will then be able to answer Zusya’s perplexing question to our satisfaction.
The Soul Is Timeless
The mystic journey is the journey of the soul. Though a mystery among mysteries, the soul is at the heart of all the world’s religious and spiritual traditions; it defines who we are at our essence. All sacred traditions agree that the soul is eternal, that it exists prior to birth and continues after death, and that it comes from and returns to God.³
A similar recognition of the ambiguous yet central nature of the soul is found in psychology, where psyche originally meant soul. C. G. Jung knew well that “psychology least of all can afford to overlook” the soul, since “everything to do with religion, everything it is and asserts, touches the human soul so closely.”⁴ For Jung, the soul is what links us to the archetypal world; it helps us experience the universals of life, because at our essence we are like all other human beings.
Psychologist James Hillman turned Jung’s individuation process inside out; soul-making for him became a lifelong process of living according to the innate “calling” that is within us. This is his “acorn theory,” which says we are born with an image of the person we are to become, and our soul plays a key role in guiding us through the pattern of the life we live toward our destiny.⁵
Marion Woodman, an English teacher and a Jungian analyst, sees the soul as “the timeless part of ourselves.” She clarifies both the spiritual and psychological connotations of the soul while recognizing its connective and collective nature: “We’re all little sparks of One Soul. We are ‘ensouled’ on this planet . . . we are one people inhabiting one country . . . we are all part of One Soul . . . When we connect with our souls, we connect with the soul of every human being. We resonate with all living things.”⁶ The soul is our perpetual connection to the immortal realm.
Drawing Meaning from the Mystery around Us
A mysterious petroglyph carved on a rock wall in southern Utah may hold the key to the journey of the soul. This particular image—a spiral with a horizontal line running through its middle and extending outward on both sides—appears to be one of a kind. Spirals are common in many indigenous cultures, but none seem to have this horizontal line leading into and out of the core spiral.
Could this design depict the journey of the soul from its origin to its life on earth to its eternal destiny? Is this an ancient representation of the multifaith Creator concept that we all come from and will inevitably return to? And could the spiral represent the earthly experience of the soul, the passages we go through as we make our way in this physical bog, repeating transition after transition, each leading us deeper and deeper into who we really are?
There are a number of traditions, from ancient mystical legends to Plato, that tell a story of the soul before it is born gaining knowledge of its life to come, then forgetting this knowledge when born, and spending the rest of its life trying to remember what it had forgotten. Poets and psychologists alike have further explored this life-journey metaphor of knowing, forgetting, and remembering.
For contemporary nineteenth-century English poets William Wordsworth and John Keats, the soul carries a timeless wisdom to which we can gain access. As Wordsworth put it:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting . . .
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
can in a moment travel thither . . .⁷

Keats focused on how what we encounter here plays a purpose in forming our true and lasting identity:

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making” . . . There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself . . . How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks [which are God] . . . to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? . . . Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!⁸

The soul, a spark of God, needs the conflict of this world to fulfill its destiny. Soul-making happens when the light merges with the dark, when joy and sorrow intermingle, when the eternal breaks through from the temporal realm, and when polarities are consciously acknowledged and confronted in our everyday lives.
When the lesson of opposites is learned in the classroom of life, the soul remembers what it came here for and evolves as it is designed to. As the woodcarver who sees the carving he wants to fashion before he starts to carve the wood, soul-making is a process of revealing what is already there.
James Hillman sees soul-making as what happens when we have the experiences—of crisis and opportunity, of love and dying—that give life a deeper meaning. At any reflective moment, the unique could turn into the universal, or the temporal into the eternal. But soul-making requires such a moment to differentiate the middle ground between these necessary oppositions.⁹
Marion Woodman draws these two threads together when she says:

Soul-making is allowing the eternal essence to live and experience the outer world through all the senses—seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching—so that the soul grows during its time on Earth. Soul-making is constantly confronting the paradox that an eternal being is dwelling in a temporal body. That’s why it suffers, and learns by heart . . . True creativity, true soul-making, comes from that deep communication with what Jung would call the archetypal world. That’s where the real nourishment is.¹⁰

To this we could add, from the developmental model suggested by Francis Vaughan (see “Consciousness, Transformation, and the Soul’s Journey” in last month’s issue of Noetic Now journal), that deeply experiencing the sequence of magic, mastery, meaning, and mystery in our lives is also soul-making. Our consciousness evolves first from being enamored of the magic all around it, then from gaining meaning in all that’s encountered—especially the struggles—and finally from accepting that there will always be mysteries in life. As we explore this deeper story of our soul and digest these timeless experiences, we return to the eternal Self we forgot we were.
The Collective Depends on the Personal
The journey of the soul is not a solitary quest but rather a superhighway meant for everyone. As Marion Woodman puts it, “We are all part of One Soul . . . When we connect with our souls, we connect with the soul of every human being. We resonate with all living things.” Soul-making connects us to the archetypal realm, which is where we find the same inspiration and guidance from our common spiritual heritage. The lifelong process of soul-making leads us ultimately to personal and collective transformation.
In our time, more than ever, when the well-being of the whole is so tied to the well-being of the parts, when the parts are indistinguishable, even inseparable, from the whole, each influencing the other, the personal is the collective. What benefits one benefits us all. The collective is at the mercy of the personal.
The mystic journey of the soul and the path of service are one and the same. Each of us has a role to play, however large or small, in the grand scheme. Each of us has something to offer others. The journey of the soul is necessary for the advancement of civilization. We may not even recognize our role in the big picture until we are conscious of being an integral part of the larger whole—and until we incorporate this into our being.
Consciousness is all that matters; it is the source of all that exists. How we see the world we live in determines what it becomes. As our individual consciousness evolves, so does the collective consciousness. Our transformations transform the world. The timeless and the universal are the personally sacred, and the sacred journey of one is the sacred journey of all.
Soul-making is part of our sacred inheritance—and responsibility. Your soul-making contributes to mine, and mine buoys yours. Getting to the heart of our soul’s story is important, especially now, because it helps us answer the really big questions of life that connect us deeply to one another, that extend our conscious evolution, and that ensure a desired collective future. What is most important in my life that affects the lives of others? How has the journey of my soul expressed my own personal truth, as well as some part of the collective truth of us all? What is my vision of the collective future of humanity, and what role do I want to play in this vision? What do I consider to be the greatest collective truth of our time?
Three Steps of Practical Soul-Making
Everything is laid out for us. “The only path there is,” Chief Leon Shenandoah says, is “the path to the Creator.”¹¹ The prophets of God, mystics, and sages have all illumined this path where opposites meet, clash, and ultimately merge. They have highlighted a sacred pattern designed to bring about the transformations in our lives that will lead us to our destiny.
The first step is to remember who we are, what our potential is, and where our destiny lies. This leads to knowledge of our life as an eternal journey. The important questions for this stage are Who am I at my essence? What is my essential nature? What am I doing here? Where am I going? How can I fulfill my inner potential? How can I accomplish my purpose on this earth?
These are complex questions, but we soon discover that the answers are available to us as part of our spiritual heritage from the world’s myths, rituals, religions, and mystic traditions. As we awaken to an eternal reality, we experience a yearning to immerse ourselves in it as fully as possible. Remembering that our own experience mirrors the lives of the prophets moves us along a continuum of familiarity with the universal archetypes that we also share.
The second step is to revision our own life experience in the context of the timeless pattern that makes up the archetype of transformation. This is when we integrate our experience of transformation with our conscious understanding of its meaning and purpose for our lives, see our lives as having been transformed, and transpose the most important motifs and archetypes from our own lives onto this pattern, thus making the personal universal.
In this pattern, we recognize a repetition of the basic dialectic of crisis followed by victory, or muddle followed by resolution. The goal is to become conscious of the entire experience of transformation so that the continual flow of opposites in our lives won’t overwhelm us and so that their tension is seen as natural and necessary aspects of our existence.
The third step in soul-making is to reclaim a personal spiritual life that takes in our common spiritual heritage. This connection to our collective spiritual roots keeps us on track to achieve our potential and helps bring about a collective renewal. As we embrace and cultivate our own innate spiritual nature and what we share as human beings, we will start consciously integrating timeless patterns into our daily lives that take us ever closer to the person we know in our heart of hearts we truly are—a fully unified being, one with all.
These three steps may well be experienced as a remarkable narrative of opposites—sorrow and joy, accomplishments and setbacks, struggles and triumphs, beginnings and endings, seeking and finding, helplessness and aid, retreat and renewal, doubt and certitude, illusion and truth, tyranny and justice, matter and spirit, all eventually and inevitably blending in a continuous ebb and flow of oneness and wholeness, with contrasting elements merging to highlight a powerful and meaningful story.
The Mystic in Us All
The underlying spiritual principle of soul-making is that the soul comes from an eternal realm, is separated at birth from the original union it knew, and spends its life on earth learning timeless lessons and seeking that lost union. In the mystical classic The Seven Valleys, Baha’u’llah captures with eloquent metaphorical imagery the essence and scope of this journey, from making its way through this mortal world with all its distractions, to opening up to divine aid and assistance, to gaining an understanding of the sublime purpose we inherit as creatures with both physical and spiritual aspects. The book, in fact, provides a magnificent template for the mystical traveler: knowing what is achievable through conscious effort; seeing in the oscillation of opposites the possibility of their union; recognizing that the resolution of such a procession of opposites in our lives is designed to move us closer to our Creator; and understanding that our deepest spiritual transformation comes about not through escape from the world but from work in the world, as service to humanity.¹² Spiritual growth, and in particular the journey of the soul, carries with it a distinct service orientation.
What may have seemed like a principle of the mystic life, of interest only to those few who consciously seek the ultimate reunion, becomes a guiding principle for everyone. The living of one’s life according to the principle of union—or, carried to the practical level of the world we live in, the principle of the essential oneness of all life – is not merely a social commitment or even an act of social justice but a core spiritual belief, designed to direct and guide every aspect of our lives toward the fullest achievement of what is humanly possible.

~Robert Atkinson, Phd

---

The Power of Love

"When mystics use the word love, they use it very carefully -- in the deeply spiritual sense, where to love is to know; to love is to act. If you really love, from the depths of your Consciousness, that love gives you a native wisdom. You perceive the needs of others intuitively and clearly, with detachment from any personal desires; and you know how to act creatively to meet those needs, dexterously surmounting any obstacle that comes in the way. Such is the immense, driving power of love."

-- Eknath Easwaran

Desire for the Hidden

"Hope always draws the soul from the beauty that
is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the
desire for the hidden through what is perceived."

- Gregory of Nyssa -

In Whom All People Share

Christ is the first-born of God, his Logos,
in whom all people share. That is what we have
learned and what we bear witness to . . . All
who have lived in accordance with the Logos are
Christians, even if they have been reckoned
atheists, as amongst the Greeks Socrates,
Heraclitus and the like.

- Justin Martyr, Apology (100-165) -

The Way of the Teacher

The Buddha said to Ananda: "Truly, Ananda, it's not easy to teach the way of freedom to others. In teaching freedom to others, the best way is to first establish five things and then teach. What are the five? When you teach others, you must think: 'I will teach in a gradual and sensitive way. I will speak with the goal in mind. I will speak with gentleness. I will not speak in order to gain anything. I will not speak with a view to harming anyone.' "If you establish these five things, your teaching will be well received."

- Anguttara Nikaya

What Is Soul?

What is soul? Soul is conscious of good and evil, rejoicing over kindness, weeping over injury. Since consciousness is the inmost nature and essence of the soul, the more aware you are the more spiritual you are. Awareness is the effect of the spirit: anyone who has this in abundance is a man or woman of God.

- Rumi

Death According to Hindu Theology

When body and mind grow weak, the Self gathers in all the powers of life and descends with them into the heart. As prana leaves the eye, it ceases to see. He is becoming one, say the wise; he does not see. He is becoming one; he no longer hears. He is becoming one; he no longer speaks, or tastes, or smells, or thinks, or knows. By the light of the heart the Self leaves the body by one of its gates; and when he leaves, prana follows, and with it all the vital powers of the body.

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

A very Extensive Reach and Effect

Minimizing the value of small things does not,
as some assert, arise from greatness of mind;
but, far otherwise, from a short-sightedness,
esteeming things small which in their tendency
and consequences have a very extensive reach
and effect.

- Francois Fenelon, On Faithfulness in
Little Things -