A mind made dull by conformity, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion. The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another, following mechanically the one promising a comfortable spiritual life. Otherwise, we stand alone. The first thing to learn is not to seek. —Krishnamurti
My counsellor is good. He knows me, not only by what I say or what I deny, but by my birth chart. From there, I assume, he knows how best to reach me. He often calls me to task and I am frustrated and grateful, both at the same time. Ive always wished to see and know what it is about me, those invisible causes everyone else sees and knows but me. The counsellor is effectively pointing to those things. Like, for example, how Im not always making sense about the cult stuff in these pages. But hey! I was in a cult. My brain was washed, wiped and worked over by someone creating his own reality. Clearly, creating ones own reality is pathology. Who knows what harm may come. Anyway! I wont be using that excuse much longer, about being in a cult.
The people I meet these days are totally different than the motorhead. Slowly I am becoming different, too. The transcripts leaked from the other side of his wall are ghastly reminders of the brainwash I was soaked in. There are a dwindling few who continue, drenched as they are in his hogwash. How they bow and faun! Imagine someone elevating himself so high, high above law and humanness, creating a reality that is destructive to people while making them believe it is all for their own good. The covidcrisis brings a number of reptilian people to mind.
A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth. —Rudolf Steiner
Be mindful of your heart. And your body.
The counsellor frames things up in compelling ways. He sets a scene, and out of the blue, Im there, inside my life, revisiting another time.
Its must have been difficult as a child, having an ambitious mother, not interested in her children, a cold and distant mother. Cancer sun, Capricorn moon. A full moon, at odds with nurture.
Hes aiming right for my emotional body. I can feel it. He hits the mark and Im drawn to the point he is piercing. A deep target at the very centre. Im pulled to my core and Im remembering.
Do you remember, he asks, what it was like for you then? As if he is playing the same song Im already hearing in a broken heart, far off somewhere.
Traveling backward through time and slipping into a smaller body. Innocent and still mostly new in this world, I thought of my mother from this long ago realm and I felt love. An expanding all-embracing spaciousness of love. For her.
It seems you are sad he said, a bit too laconically, risking my shutting down the whole scene, becoming deaf to any music from within or without. Access denied for lack of sensitivity. But hes a professional, not a friend, not a cult leader. He does this work day in and day out. Im paying for this, knowing health is a measure of freedom.
So I successfully ignore the mechanism that would shut me down. I stay in the feeling, whatever it is. Maybe sadness, maybe regret. Maybe an agonizing awareness of a mechanism that denies access to the rare and precious openings of my heart.
Emotions rise up from seeing how I diminished and sidelined that spacious expanse of love I knew for her. That space shrank the more I denied its expression.
I could forgive myself for that.
You could forgive yourself for what you made her out to be.
That shocked me right out of my righteous reverie. Ready to forgive myself for not tending the absolute-divine-essence of love, flowing directly from innocence to the other. Yes, thats forgivable. I can forgive diminishing what is our birthright, what gets mauled and damaged by lifes perpetual longing to experience itself. But to forgive myself for what is worse than that! Having made an enemy out of my pain. A slow and dreadful turning from pain to hatred. I refused to hold open any space of loving kindness, even if it was shrunken and could barely breathe. If only I had allowed a little crack, open to what love might still reach, maybe I wouldnt have needed this cult business.
In the beginning I knew. Small and barely formed, as a child I knew! I knew then and now from what we all come. Time travellers indeed! We are meant to express that energetic essence fearlessly, in spite of the afflictions that assail us. Can you stand steady in this exquisite-loving-expanse in the face of pain? Can you be like a bison in a storm, moving your powerful-innermost-knowing directly into the wind and snow. Bison move like that through storms. They come out the other side faster than the animals trying to get away.
How delicate that first frequency is! How easily it is drowned out in the pains of this world. Nonetheless, in a quiet moment, in the rays of the sun, in the eyes of a beloved child, we sense it and it is in us. We are on the look out for it in any other. Teachers, gurus and charlatans will give it a name and we look up wide-eyed, alert. Yes, thats it! And others beside us cry out, oh yes, thats definitely it! We have landed in a field of knowers, all knowing the same thing. What is tiny and delicate, an invisible first cause, becomes massive. A mass formation within the clear expanse of all that is love and all that is true. Therein is the capture, hooked by our own tender knowing awareness.
To take the road less traveled, the one to make all the difference, is the one that stays in love, regardless of what the other is up to. Existence is not other dependant. We imagined it was in order to keep our job, our marriage, our family together, and the shot was the only answer. I imagined my existence was dependent on a guru and lost myself in the not-so-great reality of a motorhead. In another time, I gave myself to a charismatic lover I could not resist but knew I should. And from the beginning, creating a solidified narrative around my unavailable mother to convince me I was actually alive. Staying in love is the cure in every case and the most harrowing medicine to pound down in lifes most crucial moments.
I dare to imagine we are all in this world of pain for staying in that original open expanse. What is real freedom, true joy and infinite love. It moves directly from the heart, emptying and filling and giving without any hesitation. Come hell or high water, there is the safest spot. If we die in that place, what a way to go. Meanwhile, there are powers in this world that shouldnt be, creating reality for us. If it resonates with what we know in our hearts to be true, we better look out.
A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.
Think what you are doing.
As a child, in my experience, I loved my mother. She was my first and beloved other. She confirmed my existence. I loved her and could not have done otherwise. She was a hard nut to crack and I wasnt able to. I gave up too soon. But in childhood, I loved her with all my innocent, bold and bright heart.
I can forgive myself for falling out of the love we are born from. Pain is too much to bear some times. Its easy to slide down into a lonely place. Some old show locked in my memory, about a doll that was discarded for a new and better doll. The boy doll. No wonder little kids are susceptible to gender politics. If only I were the other, I would be loved, and then they will see that I love them, too.
It was so lonely then. What did I learn from the realm I inhabited but to turn the pain into something it really wasnt. Pain is not an inevitable road to hatred. Pain is the sensation of loving care bulging behind a denied access, urgent to be made manifest. Forgiving myself for not knowing how to move love in a painful place, that is possible.
Traipsing through my conditioning, I met a teacher, a self-styled-spiritual one. He professed True Love and Expansive Awareness. That sounded real good. Any other, able to antagonize my conditioning, would have to be similar in relationship as I had known with my mother. Ambitious. Narcissistic. Seductive. It requires the similar in the right match and measure for the original wound to be reached. From long ago, St. John of the Cross discovered this in his wreck of a dark night. It is love that wounds us and it is love that will heal us.
There is no forgiving John the Motorhead. The consequences of his folly are upon him. As he himself once said, there is no reason to forgive someone who has caused harm. That would be foolish.
I sense the possibility of forgiving myself for needing his cult of abuse and pain in order to heal. What I made of my mom, he was to me. Its clear to see, though cloaked in invisible causes, I chose for what would lead me back to love, likely in a way never imagined. I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference. It makes me new again, though no longer innocent, not so bold nor bright, but here I am, braver and a bit wiser.
In a thunderous tumult, the greatest depth of pain I have known in this lifetime was in hearing of my brothers death. I was struck down. That horror reached far below any hurt or hatred or suspicious holding back. A grief more terrifying than any state of mind and heart I have known. It wiped out all previous damages in one foul swoop. Nothing could be worse. In the midst of that horror this came: Love everything and everybody. An inner voice, screaming in pain from the deepest core of me. From that unadorned space inside, a inviolable place that is never completely forgotten, love everything and everybody. We come from love, we heal through love, and when we leave here we are, ideally, better lovers.
Surely my brother was a warrior of love. He lived with and loved a woman that no one else could bear. O the bear!
The morning my brother was killed I was in the middle of an appointment and I walked out because of how I felt treated there. I was so pissed and let it be known! I never would have done that back in the cult days, having been told that receiving injury was the higher road, and a goodness to develop. It served John when we received injury, but truth be told, he is incapable of that lofty ideal. No mastery there! In his words, it really doesnt matter.
So, I stormed out of that place and was walking down the avenue when this large black man— like a black bear someone said later— got my attention and said I LOVE YOU! And without hesitating I said, I LOVE YOU TOO! And we walked on by each other like it was the most normal exchange in the world.
Later when I found out about his death, I wondered if somehow, someway, by some stark mystery, if that was a message from him? It was so supernaturally natural. So disarmingly perfect.
Love is calling out the Dark Lord to bear what will be real and true consequences for harm he has caused. May it return him to love. Miracles happen.
I chose for his cult. I think Ive got it now, the lesson of my ball and chain. I am returning to what I came in with and I know its real value now.
My eyes are swimming, imagining your faces. All of you who have stayed with this cultura cura and sometimes held me when I felt especially low and confused. Or called me to task, like the counsellor does. From the clear bright spacious expanse of what we are, and what we are here to be, I love you. If I have the luxury of a deathbed, if I dont suddenly, unexpectedly keel over from hanging out with the shedders I love, if I have the luxury of a death bed, I will remember you, and best of all, I will know I loved you.
This is such a lovely and loving revelation, as spacious and clear as the heart; and I hesitate to add any limited or limiting thoughts, Dear Friend, but for the frequency of your heart calling to mine.
I wish to affirm that finding and recognising the 'exquisite-loving-expanse' of who and what we are is the one True irrefutable trajectory of our lives; as spacious, long winding, and harrowing as the journey need be. The image of Bison moving into the storm is us, coming into the realm of the senses, the density of this dimension, susceptible to immeasurable pain, delusion, and suffering. Time, space, and ignorance are irrelevant to our mission though, because once we find it, we bring the Light of Recognition into this dimension. Once we find and claim that Self-Other Recognition, we have the capacity to Forgive All, be Free and Lifting up in Gratitude and Joy.
I love that Steiner quote... and the bear revelation!!
And it has been up for me too, that reconnecting with my original innocent self is how to pick up the pieces of me where I left myself in order, I hoped, to be acceptable, valuable and loved, to belong, to fit in. I detoured 20+ years ago to be immersed in the cult of another John and the blind adherence to the institution of marriage and family.
I denied my own eyes, my heart, my truth over and over just so I wouldn’t be cast out and alone. And it started with the wound of being rejected by my mother.
But the self betrayal hurts the most and I’m in a process of forgiving myself and earning my own trust back by obeying my heart over my conditioning. I won’t be fooled again.
I love you Jess!