Inspirational Quotes
For all of you "going through the fire", just know that you are not alone. Also know that it doesn't last forever ... though at some points, it may be so intense that you think you are going mad. What's a few weeks of madness to pay for the bestowal of SEEing?
Most people avoid their (painful)emotions by suppressing them, in this process the individual believes that he has moved on, if someone looks at one’s own painful emotions, it's quite clear that you will experience suffering, but this suffering is needed for you to accept the emotion, understand the emotion, and move beyond it.
We all have our attachments to certain emotions, it is such a relief to deal with these emotions, you feel like reborn, a feeling which cannot be described.
From Barbara Marciniak's book Bringers of the Dawn:
"One of the big secrets that has been kept from you as a species is the richness and wealth that accompanies emotion. You have been steered away from exploring emotion, because through emotion you can figure things out. Your emotions connect you with the spiritual body. The spiritual body, of course, is nonphysical, existing on the multidimensional sphere.."
You will also realize that the more you deal with your repressed emotions, the more easier you will be able to see yourself.
You have to develop skills and abilities within a few hours that will allow you to travel a few decades in your own emotional evolution. You are going to have to travel the emotional highway, because the human body expresses itself through the emotions. That is the uniqueness and gift of your species.
First you will need to open the emotional highways to areas that you have hidden from yourself in this particular lifetime. Memories may flood in as this data is lined up inside you memories about events that were difficult for you at the time or perhaps that you did not have a context for. Some of you may uncover the events of extraterrestrial contact that all of you had when you were children. Some of you may uncover expressions of sexuality that you did not understand at the time you were involved in them, whether you were a passive or an active participant. Such things have been buried by the human emotional body because it is very sensitive to judgment, and the mental body passes tremendous judgment. The emotional body, linked to the spiritual body, hides from this.
[...]
Many of you don't want to go beyond these emotional barriers and through your personal boundaries because it might be painful. You'd like to say "abracadabra" and just have them be gone. Pain brings you feeling. If you can feel in no other way, sometimes, in order to capture your attention as a stubborn human, you create pain to show yourself the range of your abilities and to bring yourself into life. In this way, you can feel the richness of being alive.
Most human beings are afraid of their emotional or feeling center; they are afraid to feel. Trust your feelings no matter what they are. Trust that they lead you to something and that the way you feel can bring you a realization. You all want to be in life and be removed from it at the same time. You say, "Let me just be here and be a powerful person, but I don't want to feel or participate too much because it hurts too much and then I will get sucked down. I don't trust life."
When you are not afraid of feeling, and you move past judgment and allow yourself to feel all the ways you feel, you will have a tremendous breakthrough because you will be able to /ride feeling into other realities. /Some of you are afraid to feel and participate in this reality; let alone ride into other realities, because you do not trust your feelings. If you wish to have an acceleration, dive into something that brings up feeling. Stop skirting the issue so that you can think you are in control. Dive in the middle of it and then see if you are in control.
It's not that you don't know how to feel, it's that you are afraid of your feelings. You don't know what to do with them when you have them. They bring up a sense of powerlessness within you, so you associate feeling with a sense of, "Oh, no, I blew it." You have a boundary in your belief system that states that when something comes up that is emotional and brings pain or anger, then it is not good. It is time to stop tiptoeing around things and avoiding your emotions.
Anger serves a purpose. All of you want to get finished with it: you want to sweep it under the rug and act as if it is no good. You act like it is rotten vegetables, throw it out, and bury it in the back garden as if there is no purpose to it. We are emphasizing that there is a purpose to fear and a purpose to anger. If you would allow yourselves to express and experience your fears, which might lead to the expression of your anger, you would learn something. Those of you who want desperately to avoid fear and anger, and who are really afraid of these feelings, have something great to learn through these emotions. They are techniques that move you beyond your personal boundaries of identity and behavior, and you are simply afraid to experience this.
Most of the time, all you want is to be accepted. You feel that no one will like you if you do certain things or feel certain ways, so you don't give yourself permission to have those certain feelings. That is where the anger comes from. You have anger because you make judgments about what you can and cannot do. If you do not give yourself permission to feel, you cannot learn. Feeling connects you with life.
Feelings serve a variety of purposes in human beings. We encourage all of you to please trust and cultivate and rely on your feelings. Understand that your feelings are your ticket to ride into multidimensional realities, where you must go if you are seriously playing this game. In multidimensional realities, you learn to hold and focus many different versions of yourself at once. Feelings can take you to these places, particularly feelings that you trust. Many of you are very suspicious and masterful over your feelings. You will not allow certain feelings to come forward, or you judge them when they come up instead of observing where they take you or what they do for you.
Because you have a fear of something, you keep yourself from experiencing it because you put up a wall that says, "If I go there, it is bad." You put the brakes on. In actuality, your fear will eventually energize the experience into your realm of development because all thought is drawn into form based on the emotional influence behind it. So sometimes the greatest thing to do is to simply say, "What the heck, I will go there. I surrender." Then deal with being there and don't worry about being centered while you are in your feeling center. If you intend to go into your feeling center and always be in control, you are not giving yourself the range of movement that is needed to ride the emotions that knock down boundaries and belief systems."
[...]
You must learn to love your emotions. As long as you describe something as difficult, you are making it difficult. No one else is. You are resisting and judging the changes coming about. You are feeling that you do not know what is going on, and you wish to be in control. Control is something very convenient and very handy. It must be applied at the right place at the right time, like super glue. Super glue in the wrong place doesn't do much good. Did you ever super glue your hands or lips together? You must learn to exercise control in the way you use super glue. If you screw up with super glue, you get stuck and you can't do anything. Control is the same way: you get stuck with it, and it sticks you to something that you don't need to be stuck to. You must be very selective about what you decide to control or not control. The old human pattern, or the paradigm that exists, says, "You must be in control."
[...]
Get clever. Next time you come into one of these emotional situations, say to yourself immediately, "Alright, I know what is going on; I'm not getting caught in this one. I know there is something here for me to learn, and something for me to change. I believe that I am guided and that I am following a blueprint, so I will check out what is in this for me by not judging it and by going with the flow. I request that all my changes come in joy and safety and harmony. That is my decree. Everything in my evolution I am intending is covered by that: I experience joy and safety and harmony. So I will go with this energy and see what is changing for me and what I need to give up."
[...]
Feeling is what connects you to your humanity; feeling is what connects you to your emotions. Emotions connect you in this realm of existence to your spiritual body. What we are saying is that emotions, or feelings, are the key to being alive in this reality. Many realities exist without emotions, but in this reality they are your greatest gift. If you deny your emotional self in this lifetime, then you had best realize that you have hung it up. If you are not going to be part of your emotional self, then you are never going to make the game we are talking about. You will simply be one of the masses who watches television and feels like a victim over and over again. If you are feeling pain within your emotional body, ask yourself why you believe the pain is there, what purpose the pain serves, and why you are choosing to create pain through your emotions. Why is it not your choice to create joy? All is choice. We need to remind you of this.
ADDED more:
The passages from Bringers of the Dawn are excellent adjuncts to the program! Barbara Marciniak certainly deserves many thanks for her work!
Here I want to quote a bit from Ibn al-Arabi on the topic. This was my guide while going through all this:
"The experience of unveiling opens up an infinite expanse of previously unseen ralitites to the heart of the seeker. The realm into which the adept first enters is, after all, the "imaginal world," or world of the mind. Its byways never end. Unveiling opens the door to direct experience of the myriad worlds of Samsara.
"By being taken up in a state of love, yearning, fear, thanksgiving, dread, or any other psychological and spiritual attribute, the adept gains first-hand knowledge of the unseen realities which these states manifest.
"Like a madman, the possessor of the state loses his reason in the operpowering experience of his state.
"The word 'hal' or 'state' is derived from an Arabic root meaning self-transmutation, to change from one situation to another. The state is the situation, condition, predicament of change.
"A state is for you to be susbsistent, or annihilated, sober or drunk, concentrated or dispersed, absent or present... the experiences are broadly divided into pairs of opposites and you experience both. First one way, and then the other.
"The states are the divine tasks, the continual transmutation, self-disclosures of God within, the new creation at each instant.
"A state is that which enters in upon the heart without self-exertion or any attempt to attract it. One of its conditions is that it disappear and be followed again by its like, as in waves, until it subsides.
"The state is the changing of the attributes of the servant. Once they become established, they become 'stations.'
"States are bestowals and through the states come earnings.
"States signify certain dimensions of spiritual realization that differentiate the advanced seeker from ordinary individuals.
"The state also denotes special powers which are accruing to the seeker as a result of the station that may be acquired.
"The state is associated with several other terms which denote extraordinary feats or miracles which the friend of God may perform. These include exercise of governing control over secondary causes, bringing things into engendered existence, acting through resolve and producing effects in the outside world.
"The possessor of the state is he who is able to exercise these extraordinary powers.
"The possessor of the states engenders things through their resolve and throw the secondary causes far from them.
"When anyone sees such a servant in the extremity of his weakness during the states, he will remember God. God has singled out such as these for himself.
"The states present dangers to the person who experiences them. Though they are divine bestowals, there is always the risk of thinking one has deserved them and becoming proud, or losing mental equilibrium. The states are as trials that the traveler has to undergo.
"When the seeker is overcome by states, they become as madmen, and as a result they are no longer answerable to the Law. In this world, the state is an imperfection, while in the next world it is perfection.
"The 'inrush' arrives at the heart without self-exertion and enters in as a manifestation of one of the divine attributes.
"Sometimes the inrush is greater than the strength of the soul, so it rules over the soul. The state turns the seeker this way and that. If he does not master the state, there is danger of losing his rational faculty.
"The object is to increase the ability to receive 'inrushes' without being outwardly affected by them. "Without doubt, the possessors of the states exercise a penetrating power and governing control through which they are able to perform the putting aside of secondary causes."
– William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge
"But, exercising governing control may also become a veil past which the seeker must ultimately move.
"Deception is the continuation of favors in spite of the seekers opposition. A seeker may be able to retain the state and perform the miracles without divine command and without punishment. This is due to God's deceiving of the servant and providing him with knowledge which demands practice and then deprives him of sincerity. Or, he may give the knowledge and deprive of the ability to practice. When you see this in yourself, know that he who has such an attribute is the object of deception and must penetrate this veil."
[Excerpts from "Futuhat al-makkiyya" of Shaykh Muhyi al-Din ibn al Arabi, 1165-1240 A.D.]
– William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge
There is more about the physiological things that accompany the states and how to specifically identify them.
The main point I received from this was that the state must be controlled and absorbed into the system somehow as it confers power.
At the time I was going through some of this, I wrote to Ark:
.... I am not entirely sure I can stand getting it this way! Holy Frijoles! For the past two weeks, it has been trickling and gushing in surges. Last night it really ripped through me.
And, I think I ought to consider that this sort of thing could also be some sort of frequency modulation.
So, yes, you are right that the internal state must stabilize and then the external conditions will change accordingly. But, if God had a suggestion box, I think I would suggest that we start earlier on these things so they can be done in smaller steps.
Then, there is also this, from George Gurdjieff:
[Lying] can only be destroyed through suffering. ...The principle reason for it is that it is impossible to sit between two stools; you cannot acquire the new and preserve the old. ...This is a law: it is very difficult to climb the hill, but very easy to slide down it. ...I have already said before that sacrifice is necessary. Without sacrifice nothing can be attained. ...Nothing can be attained without suffering, but, at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering. ...To destroy suffering would mean, first, destroying a whole series of perceptions for which man exists, and second, the destruction of the force which alone can change the situation. The work [of awakening] consists in subjecting oneself voluntarily to temporary suffering in order to be free from eternal suffering. But, people are afraid of suffering. They want pleasure now, at once and forever. They do not want to understand that pleasure is an attribute of paradise and that it must be earned. If a man gets pleasure before he has earned it, he will not be able to keep it and pleasure will be turned into suffering. The way lies through suffering."
What Gurdjieff meant by "sacrificing suffering" is that one must give up the idea of focusing on the flesh as the means of "salvation." Whatever a person thinks they can DO to suffer and thereby gain knowledge, will be wasted. The object is to attain the knowledge. The suffering will manifest all by itself.
And, what Gurdjieff never spoke about, and he may or may not have been aware of it, was the nature of beings at higher levels who seek, consciously, to keep knowledge from us and who inflict all kinds of suffering on us either literally or symbolically, to drive us from the path. As a friend of mine says: "If ignorance were painful, everyone would strive for knowledge!" But, it is exactly the other way around. And, the majority of people cannot understand this nor do they wish to accept it. They want to make a profession of faith in Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha or Swami Gotcha and let them "take the burden" of "sin" while the people pursue pleasure at the very least, in terms of feeling that they have "done all that is necessary" and now it is just a matter of following some simple rules of minor suffering; i.e. abstention from foods or drink or certain sensual behaviors.
The truth is, becoming a vegetarian or teetotaler will do nothing to make one holy, though it can certainly "prepare the vessel." (Editor: Since this was written, we've learned that vegetarianism is the opposite of a healthy diet.) But that is not really suffering – as those who go through this process well understand. No fleshly suffering undertaken to acquire knowledge will have any effect whatsoever except to support an illusion that one is "more holy than others." No fleshly abstention is useful except as a preparation for the "real thing".
When new knowledge is acquired, it can be accommodated up to a point, at which the whole system must then "come to pieces" and reorganize in a new way. This is, I believe, what the C's mean when they talk about knowledge and lessons and the relation of being at a given point on the learning cycle and "all conforming" to the new knowledge and awareness as a "spherical mosaic consciousness."
Seeing my own experiences in perspective, I saw this pattern, though it was certainly taking place in modest steps. Since 1985, it has been a constant series of internal reorganizations of the dissipative structure type. And, each reorganization has a serious effect on me in a physical way that has MEANING. I noted that when the suffering of knowledge came upon me, it manifested in ways that have MEANING in my personal experience. I lose my sight, voice, hearing, or ability to feel in a strictly physical way, and to use my limbs effectively. When I make the adjustments, bring the awareness to consciousness, pass through the emotional gauntlet, then the physical manifestations clear up.
So, in trying to fit all the pieces together, the suffering in the eyes shows me that I am SEEING something that is difficult to HOLD and that what I am seeing and trying to hold is an integrated WHOLENESS that comes from accessing and accumulating past, present and future.
I wrote more at the time I was going through these things, mostly to Ark. You will see that these things – this effort to understand the emotional cleansing – became seeds for the writing of The Wave:
[From Laura's journal to Ark]
There are many, many pieces to this mosaic. Many things from the distant past, my early life, my recent life, the present, and probably the future. And all of these things are like packets of energy being added into the system... and, it may be that the more evolved the system, the less energy is needed to destabilize the dissipative structure.
The fact is that some sort of energy entered the system and I am now seeing in a different way, and have passed through a psychic storm of the flying apart of the structure, and it is manifesting physically in some damned uncomfortable ways!!!
Can we think that this may also be imposed on us consciously from some other level of being in attempts to dissuade us from the path? Can these "attacks" be designed to "separate the sheep from the goats?"
It is true that, at the time that the UFO showed itself to me and my children on August 16, 1993, that this was the beginning of the SERIOUS suffering relating to the present conditions. Prior to that, the problems were centered in the heart and reproductive system. Those problems have ceased. (But, we can see that problems with the heart relate to lack of joy and love and problems with the reproductive organs relate to denial of the self as creative.)
Now, having moved past the "lack of joy" because I was denying my own creativity, and having become joyful in discovery and dedication to knowledge, I find an entirely new set of effects!!!!
For example, for eleven months (there is that number 11 again) after the UFO sighting, my eyes and throat swelled shut every night at the same time and I was forced to exist on antihistamines to control this angioedema. Once the C material started coming through, some of that lessened, and it then became more of a period of relative calm and ease of movement followed by a leap in perception and understanding accompanied by massive physical "fall out." I thought I had been through the absolute worst back in late March and early April {1996} when I began to perceive the true difference between free will and lack of free will, sts and sto, subjectivity and objectivity. This perception caused me to take very definite actions in my life which included divorcing my husband and eliminating a lot of people from close association because I could clearly see that they were not interested in knowledge at all, but merely the idea that I might be able to teach them some means of manifesting materially or "creating" for selfish reasons.
At the human level, this created massive and overwhelming suffering, both physical and emotional. I was unable to speak for several weeks due to a major inflammation of the larynx, my eyes swelled shut and refused to respond to either anti-biotics or any other form of treatment, my ears rang constantly, and I had difficulty breathing and moving. Every joint and muscle in my body hurt as though they were broken and torn. Having a baby was easier than all that! I felt as though I were being literally crushed. I thought I would go mad from the pain and the grief of seeing what my life truly was and being forced, by virtue of my quest, to modify everything I thought I knew. At that point, I could have plunged back into denial for the sake of peace and keeping everything stable, but I had a dream that clearly told me that I was in mortal danger if I did not take immediate action.
Now, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about the "Dark Man" in people's dreams. I have connected the pertinent elements here and modified it slightly, but it is mostly her words.
"The natural predator of the psyche is not only found in fairy tales but
also in dreams. "There is a universal initiatory dream, one so common that it is remarkable if a person has reached age 25 without having had such a dream. The dream usually causes the person to jolt awake, striving and anxious. The dream usually involves being in a house with danger outside or darkness outside. The dreamer is frightened and frantically tries to obtain assistance. Suddenly, they realize the danger is virtually on top of them, or right with them, or cannot be overcome or avoided, or that they have lost. The dreamer awakens instantly, breathing hard, heart pounding.
"There is a strong physical aspect to having a dream of the predator. The dream is often accompanied by sweats, struggles, hoarse breathing, heart pounding, and sometimes crying and moans of fear. We could say the dream-maker has dispensed with subtle messages to the dreamer and now sends images which shake the neurological and autonomic nervous system of the dreamer, thereby communicating the urgency of the matter.
"The antagonists of the 'dark dream' are, in people's own words, 'terrorists, rapists, thugs, concentration camp Nazis, marauders, murderers, criminals, creeps, bad men, thieves.' There are several levels to the interpretation of the dream..."
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Oh, if Clarissa only knew the true level of interpretation!!!!!
"For instance, often such a dream is a reliable indicator that a person's consciousness is just beginning to gain awareness of the innate psychic predator....
And who might that be??? Could it be those slimy little Gray guys and scaly dudes? How about some blond, blue eyed liars who are so beautiful that we think they are gods?
"The dream is a harbinger; the dreamer has just discovered or is about to discover and begin liberating a forgotten and captive function of the psyche.
How about being warned about the psychic danger of the hyperdimensional beings or the controllers from higher densitites?
"The dark man dream tells a person what predicament they are facing. The dream tells about a cruel attitude toward the dreamer. Like Bluebeard's wife, the dreamer can consciously gain hold of the 'key' question about this matter and answer it honestly, and can then be set free. ...
"The dark man appears in dreams when an initiation – a psychic change from one level of knowing and behavior to another more energetic level of knowledge and action is imminent. The initiation creates an archway which one prepares to pass through to a new manner of knowing and being....
"Dreams are 'portales,' entrances, preparations, and practices for the next step in consciousness.
"Dark man dreams are wake-up calls. They say: Pay attention! Something has gone radically amiss in the outer world. ....The threat of the 'dark man dreams' serves as a warning to all of us -– if you don't pay attention, something will be stolen from you! The dreamer needs to be initiated so that whatever has been robbing her can be recoginzed, apprehended, and dealt with.
"In the Bluebeard story we see how a woman who falls under the spell of the predator rouses herself and escapes him, wiser for the experience. The story is about transformation through knowledge, insight, voice, decisive action. We must unlock the secrets and use our abilities to be able to stand what we see. And then, we must use our voice and our wits to do what needs to be done about what we see.
"When instincts are strong, we intuitively recognizes the innate predator by scent, sight, and hearing... we anticipate its presence, hear it approaching, and take steps to turn it away. In the instinct-injured (i.e. nuts and bolts person) the predator is upon them before they register its presence. We have been taught to be nice, to behave, to be blind, and to be misused. We have been hypnotized to give up our flesh and skins.
"The young and the injured are uninitiated. Neither knows much about the dark predator and are, therefore, credulous. But, fortunately, when the predator is on the move, it leaves behind unmistakable tracks in dreams. These tracks eventually lead to its discovery, capture and containment.
"Wild Ways teaches people when not to act 'nice' about protecting their souls. The instinctive nature knows that being 'sweet' in these instances only makes the predator smile. When the soul is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required. ..."
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
And this is a key to free will.
There is more from William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience."
"At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperamemt, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying them outright. Evil is a disease and worry about evil is a disease in itself. Even repentance and remorse.. may be but sickly impulses.
"Let us now... turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. ...there are different levels of the morbid mind... there are people for whom evil means only a maladjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable... by either modifying the self or the things or both at once. There are others for whom evil is... a wrongness or vice in [their] essential structure, which no alteration in the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, ...while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.
"...we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low 'difference threshold.' His mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a 'pain threshold' a 'fear threshold,' a 'misery threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be reached by their consciousness.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
And this reflects also quantum transitions, as well as dissipative structures. Those individuals with a "high threshold" are probably beings which have just transitioned into this density from a lower one and therefore are able to accommodate more 'packets' of energy introduction into their systems without major disturbance. Those that are on the verge of "quantum transition" would be more sensitive to these energies and have a lower energy addition tolerance.
"Goethe [expressed] 'I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at the bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.'
"And Martin Luther said: 'I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence... rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise.'
"The only relief that 'healthy mindedness' can give is: 'Stuff and nonsense! Get out into the open air! Cheer up, you'll be all right if you will only drop your morbidness!' But, to ascribe spiritual value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles are that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill, that we ... need a life not correlated with death, a health not laible to illness, a good that will not perish... said a friend: 'The trouble with me is that I believe too much in happiness and goodness and nothing can console me for their transiency.'
"[And so those who experience] a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little descent of the pain threshold, brings the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turns us into melancholy metaphysicians.
"Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our world may appear endued with are pure gifts of the spectator's mind. [For example] love transforms the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment. [So with our emotions] if they are there, life changes.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
This alone should tell us how easily our emotions can be used to control or hypnotize us!
"In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we study the phenomenon of regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. ...An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relation with the matter, the sufferer is often led to a solution...
"Tolstoy writes: '...I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects. And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply. But perhaps, I said to myself, there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. it is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind. And I sought for an explanaton in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but loboriously and obstinately for days and nights on end. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself – and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair – the meaningless absurdity of life – is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.'
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
And I can echo the above with certitude as having been my own experience. Only, I did come to a conclusion: that the object of this knowledge is to move to an entirely new level of being.
"The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of this absolute disenchantment with ordinary life... when disillusionment has gone as far as this, when one has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again... the only happiness that then can come is something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements. The sufferer is born again as a deeper kind of conscious being than he could be before.
"Having arrived at this point, we can see the antagonism that must arise between the 'healthy-minded' optimist and the morbid-minded who take the experience of viewing evil as essential. To the latter, 'healthy-mindedness' seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the former, the latter seems seems unmanly and diseased. They believe that there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. And, if religious intolerance, hanging and burning at the stake, were still in vogue, there is little doubt that the 'healthy-minded' would advocate the destruction of the morbid minded rather than the other way around.
"The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. ...yet there is no doubt that 'healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and these evil facts may be, after all, the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
"The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination – they seem too much like museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum skulls that did not daily hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims fill the world about us today. Here, on our very hearths, the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles, pythons and rattlesnakes are vessels of life as real as we are; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which the morbid minded feels is the literally right reaction to the situation.
"...Since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, and our philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, then systematic failure to accord these things active attention is less complete than those systems that attempt to include these elements in their scope. The 'healthy-minded optimists only need to be born once, but the 'sick souls' need to be born twice to be happy.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The result is two different conceptions of the universe: subjective and objective.
"In the once born, the world is a one-storied affair... whose parts have just the values which they appear to have... [to the twice born] the world is a double-storied mystery. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. It keeps us from our real good and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Someone wrote to me, regarding the C material and the ideas above:
"So, Jesus gives us the message, asks us to learn from it, but surely doesn't force it on us. He was an optimist. Offered us the best of both worlds-– a no lose proposition!"
I responded with quotes from the New Testament:
"I have given and delivered to them Your Word; and world has hated them, because they are not of the world – do not belong to the world – as I am not of the world."
"Peace I leave with you; My peace I now give and bequeath to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you."
"The world cannot hate you, but it does hate Me, because I denounce it for its wicked works and reveal that its doings are evil."
"He said to them, You are from below; I am from above. you are of this world – of this earthly order. I am not of this world. "
"Any one who loves his life loses it. But any one who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. Whoever has no love for, no concern for, no regard for his life here on the earth, but despises it, preserves his life forever and ever."
"Now the judgment of this world is coming – sentence is now being passed on this world. Now the ruler, evil genius, prince of this world shall be cast out -expelled. And if I be *lifted up from the earth,* I will draw and attract all men to myself."
– Jesus
Juxtaposing the above sayings of Jesus against the passages from James gives fuller insight into the process. It seems to me that we can achieve knowledge only by comparing the two sides, positive and negative, which have become separated from each other. As long as the two sides are together, there is no creation. The visible world is only recognizable because of this separation from unity in which nothing and everything are at rest within each other.
All creation is like a tree which bears positive fruit on one side and negative fruit on the other. It is still on the same tree. Only through this separation and comparison is it possible to achieve recognition and knowledge, and because of this, the material world must consist of good and evil. Otherwise, nothing could exist.
The material world is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To eat of something is to become identical with it; for what you eat is what you will become. By identifying in any way with this world, we retain this fruit within us. We have identified our consciousness with it and become subject to it. Therefore, the material world is the result of separation. Our bodies are the material, manifested part of our true selves.
The striving for reunion is the desiring of the manifested part of the consciousness to reunite with the unmanifested God consciousness. This striving toward the "God state" or unification of positive and negative forces is the source of all power in the manifested world. And, opening to the objective, but painful, reality of the material world is crucial to this process. Wherever negative forces are manifested, positive forces are present in the unmanifested state. So, it might be said that the more darkness one can be aware of, the more light one is capable of receiving.
So, for all of you "going through the fire", just know that you are not alone. Also know that it doesn't last forever ... though at some points, it may be so intense that you think you are going mad. What's a few weeks of madness to pay for the bestowal of SEEing?
