28 Nov 2007 @ 03:21, by Raymond Powers
This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Simple Brilliance.
From a dialogue on relationships
How do you explain the unexplainable, the mysteries of the heart taking us by surprise?
I have a very scientific mind and sometimes all I can do is throw my hands up in the air and acquiesce that most of my existence is a great mystery. I trust in Life, in the Universe and am very clear that we co-create, sometimes procreate with it.
There is always an opportunity for us to awaken, to heal. In essence I know you know we are all One; that separation is an illusion; that human-kind is a singular organism similar to a beehive and individuation psychologically is necessary to function in physical reality. When it comes to Oneness, we have simply forgotten. Yet, here in physical reality, if we choose to ignore the nature of the multi-verse, our his/herstories get pushed to the forefront as our personalities try to stay in control in an uncontrollable reality. We are a reflection of chaos self-organizing itself. My fears, your fears (based on our stories, our past experience, and the conclusions we have drawn and worldviews we have adopted from our fear based lives) are what keep us from knowing Love. What are we afraid of? Being alone, vanishing in the immensity that Love is, losing our sense of self, taking responsibility for the truth that we can never possess or control another, the realization that when we try we to control others we also wound ourselves as well. For many people, once this is realized there is no turning back, from Truth that is, from the knowing that freedom is found when we understand, accept and embrace our fears. We were born as ecstatic, joyful entities. Joy has never left us. We have simply distracted ourselves by believing in our story and believing we are powerless to change it.
Many times we make life hard for ourselves. We add to the challenges of Soul in human form. Your Soul has been wanting to unravel the secrets of simplicity since your first breath; wanting to discover self compassionate access to liberation. We are very adaptable creatures. You can stop and choose to let go, change your behavior, models, beliefs, conditioning. You can even do this without feeling that you are sacrificing anything in your outer world. The sacrifice takes place on the inner. Crucifying the aspects of yourself that no linger serve you and then resurrecting as a lighter, more authentic expression of yourself. Sometimes we cannot choose immediately, so I suggest you be courageous and stay in the inquiry, ask the hard questions and most of all let Life reveal itself to you. Be still and feel. Breathe. Let your breath be your guide.
These inquiries into your nature, your human nature, can take you, at times, into the shadow regions of your psyche. However, these regions are not negative, or wrong or bad. They are a part of you. How can you be anything but a positive reflection of Source, of Creation. Yes, your behavior may be hurtful at times, cause distress in yourself and others, but behavior is not your essence, behavior can be changed with support, practice accountability and imagination. The shadow remains in the dark until it is illuminated by your awareness. Once it is named, given a name, it moves from the unknown to the known, from an unconscious force to an ally.
I have walked on the edge. Gazed into the precipice. Plunged into the depths of my shadow to excavate the jewels of my Soul. This willingness to accept the dualities of the human experience, while maintaining the awareness that I am whole and complete has allowed me to navigate through the amazing experiences of my life; from mansions to shacks from riches to homelessness and in some ways I feel I didn't have much to say about the circumstances, that I was Divinely guided, brought to my knees and lifted to heights of ecstasy in a truthful phenomenal life that has enabled me to know… Love.
Love that is devoid of myth. Love that is devoid of a story that is based on my past. Love that is not informed by my history but rather my history has shown me what love is not. I say, let the fires of love that have been stoked in your hearts cleanse you and polish the sharpness of your form, becoming smooth and rounded, reflective, light filled, multifaceted in your countenance.
How Can I Not Be Overjoyed?
How can I not be overjoyed?
Blue stars from the ethers that only I can see,
They look so much like your eyes,
The face of Love,
The moon behind the clouds,
A shadow puppet,
Two lovers embrace,
They dance in the firmament,
I dance in the cool canyon breeze,
The fire in my heart is fed by thoughts of you,
I am drunk, but not drunk,
I am wide awake,
Lucid as the fig whose roots drink from the stream,
Or the double winged dragonfly that lights on my hand,
There is more that I do not know than what I know,
The more pomegranate seeds I eat the more are revealed,
The juice stains my lips,
Runs down my chin,
The sweetest nectar reminding me of you.
Love and loving is both a personal and transcendental experience. We move from one to the other finding the balance, the marriage between the two. For me, I enjoy having the face of love in my life, a person to count on, who has mutual attraction and can soar both the heights and depths with me, with gracefulness.
This awareness of my preference has transformed from a need to a want. When it was a need I was living a life of fear, of expectation, of projections onto another. When the need transformed into a want, I found freedom, I found autonomy and I discovered that the primary person I am having a relationship with is myself, the Other is a mirror of this.
With wanting we can set an intention and move into choice that can always choose loving, ourselves and others.
I don't have a singular concept of Soul mate, knowing that Oneness includes many Soul mates, or individuals in my Soul group. There is a resonance with someone specific that may be more fluid, more peaceful, more “at home”. Similar to overtones, the vibrational waveforms of music, there are those we have consonance with and those we have some dissonance with in varying degrees. The closer someone is as an overtone to our fundamental note, the more we are at ease with them. When these people come together you have great potential, and we have the choice to realize that potential or not, to explore the vast possibilities of vision and unity. We also have the opportunity to heal and complete energies that may be lifetimes old.
Most restlessness in life doesn't have much to do with anything outside of us. Yes, I think sometimes the relationship “container” isn't able to flex enough and adapt to the changes/transformations an individual may be experiencing, however many times people just don't know what shifts/ adjustments need to be made to the relationship container (and everything that contributes to it) to have it accommodate the consciousness shifts of the individuals. This is when relationships become rote, automatic, we think we know the person yet we really only know them from the past. This occurs because we ourselves have ceased to be awake to ourselves, we have become redundant within, ignorant of our Souls whispers and thus the world outside of us has lost it’s sparkle, its’ vibrancy. There is a symptom of serial monogamy in the West which is caused by a deadening within an individual so that this individual seeks novelty, vibrancy once again by seeking something, someone outside, with another. When, in fact, often, if we enliven ourselves once again, the other, which seemed so dull and distant, miraculously becomes once again the reflection of Love and all the attributes that accompany it.
The aspiration is to live peace as much as possible through your hearts, with mindful actions; cultivating your connection with Life, others and nature. By healing oneself from past wounds, coming to understand the story that has been informing your life and fully accepting who you are and who you are not you will find yourself deep in the experience that all there is, is Love. All else is illusion, myth, story born from a fear-filled past.
It takes courage and faith to cease living our non-truths. We all have our fears. I believe they are our allies. Our fears, at times, have kept us from fully showing up in Life and sharing our gifts, living our passions to their fullest expression. And even given that, we accomplish quite a bit. Imagine what your life would look like if you truly learned to listen to your heart, to use your inner guidance and cultivated the daily practice of interpreting the symbols, synchronicities and manifestations of your inner life. To listen from the silence to your Souls inner calling.
Our fears are present, but like a two year old, probably shouldn't be behind the steering wheel. For me, fear is based in my passed and has little to do with my present. In the present there really isn't much to fear. So maybe the journey is coming to peace with our past and discovering all the meaning we put on the present, that may or may not be accurate. It is important to thank ourselves and each other for acknowledging our fears and to let this inspire our courage to heal them, relinquish them and utilize them to create a foundation of spiritual strength.
I have suffered many losses, many heartbreaks, at times feeling as if God had forsaken me, that I had become un-tethered from the Universe, from the multi-verse, and yet, here I am, more capable of compassion and loving than I ever thought imaginable. Why is this? How did I escape from living the life of a victim? The answer is this: I realized that I was a co-creator in all of my experiences. I was making choices. This gave me the freedom to choose differently. The relationships that were hurtful were not something that was being done to me. Like a magnet, my thought forms attracted certain individuals into my life. Because my personal resonant field was in a holding pattern based on my past wounds and fears, and stuck in the energy matrix of my body, my belief system, worldview, and the experiences I attracted were informed by my past.
There is a cost and payoff to our psyches’ lens to the world. We can live a life amassing the payoffs (benefits, gains), and you may want to make a list of the payoffs to the relationships you have had. In a healthy relationship the payoffs outweigh the costs. However, many times, because our wounds are unconscious, we create relationships where the costs have equaled, if not surpassed, the payoffs. …and yet we continue debilitating ourselves when these relationships are costing us our lives.
By handling your psychology, stilling your mind and coming into “right” relationship with your body you can create a life that is a miraculous reflection of a future abundant with possibilities you could have never imagined. To live as a Soul in consort with the Divine nurtures the ability to witness your “feelings” about the past and your story regarding it, yet not allow these stories to be the informants and creators of your reality.
When we love our “story” about someone, our “idea” of them, we risk putting them on a pedestal, or creating expectations that can never be met. We never truly come to know who they are. We project onto them the archetypes that inhabit our collective unconscious, often based on our past, lineage or media projections, and become blind to who they are as Souls, as human beings. We become trapped in loving the concept of a person, who we would like them to be. Over time the relationship becomes a series of disenchantments and disappointments and eventually degrades into a field of illusion.
If you have created an image of a person that diminishes your own sense of Self worth, an image that keeps you afraid of being your fully expressed self, you may find that you are “walking on egg shells”, not wanting to meet them in their natural fullness because you think you can't. You may find yourself feeling invisible because you think you are “less than”, unworthy, undeserving. Do not believe these thoughts. They are lies, untruths. You were born deserving, worthy, capable of love and being loved.
What you also want to be conscious of is becoming a representation yourself in the eyes of another. You must remember that you are a flesh and blood Being not just a symbol. Even if it “feels” good to inflate yourself and embody the archetype someone else is projecting onto you. Believe me, eventually you will fall from grace. I understand that some will say that Life is not personal and… it is important not to become too indifferent. Life is based on connections, weavings, overtones of each other. The model of impersonal is to give us some power in the area of response-ability, and discovering the power of intent and our own creative majesty.
Archetypes, to me, after years of experience projecting them onto others and becoming conscious of the behavior, are best to remain as energies/ images in the psyche. Their function is to allow us to personally draw upon them for strength, inspiration and understanding of our human dilemmas. They live in the realm of myth and are containers for the universal characteristics of humanity. The reality is and where we can draw great empowerment from, is to remember and come to know that we are making it up, we are the creators, writing or reliving the stories that are a collective agreement. The world IS a stage for make believe, though it hardly feels that way sometimes, and we can re-write the myth as soon as we can name it, identify it, as a myth. Once we can name and reveal the aspects of our psyche that are influencing the disheartening qualities of our life, we have the opportunity to heal and change our relationship to the world and with others. We can begin to attract experiences that are more in tune with the nature of our Soul.
When an archetype becomes too embedded in our social fabric, too embodied in our cultural conditioning, we run the risk of projecting cliché’s and stereotypes onto others, or even constituting ourselves as such images. When these become solidified and inflexible we collectively begin believing in them, as if they are “the truth”, rather than “a truth” a possibility of creation among many. Some of the symptoms caused by such dis-ease in our social/communal interaction are racism, classism, dogmatism, in fact every “ism” that feeds the fire of man’s inhumanity to man; even in the context of personal dyadic relationships.
How do we heal these schisms?, This separation from self and others? What can spark the awakening that will end the inner turmoil and separation of self from others? How can you cultivate and live as “peace” within and without?
By giving yourself the gift of being still, forgiving yourself and others, listening to the voice of wisdom inherent inside your heart, and first acknowledging that your unresolved wounds have been the source of your separation, understanding that the past has caused a schism within yourself, a disassociation, and knowing, re-membering that there is an eternal experience of Soul that you are, that has never been fragmented and resides entirely in the Oneness, the wholeness of and completeness of the Supreme, Source, Creation, call it what you will.
At any time you can step to the altar of the sacred marriage within yourself; where you ARE the experience of unity, peace, and love. You are the bride and groom, the alpha/omega, creator/destroyer, lover and beloved. The polarities dissolve and you realize you are whole, complete just as you are. The world of duality ceases.
Then what? We live into authentic relationship effortlessly. We relate from a presence of freedom, of love, of giving, rather than our lives being motivated by wants and needs. We meet and are met in our greatness, our creative genius, both residing on our thrones, side by side, the hierarchy has vanished, patriarchy vanquished.
In a song lyric I wrote I speak of this:
Sometimes we go too far,
there is no turning back now,
walking the razors edge,
giving more than we take,
taking just what we need,
and needing to be close to you.
It is important to define what devotion means for you. When I am devoted, my actions completely honor my own integrity and truth and thus honor the other. When I am devoted the other knows that they can count on me, count on my word and the trust we have created. Devotion to me is not a set of rules given to me by my culture, family, friends, laws etc. These do have some influence, however I keep a watchful eye if my devotion has its’ genesis in my core, my heart or from my beliefs/”shoulds”/conditioning. This is something I encourage you to look at. Our conditioning can, at times, be so powerfully “running” in the background that we have no access to our freedom of choice.
Mind shaking, belief altering, indeed, when we discover we have been dis-membered most of our lives, along with most everyone else, and collectively, as the human organism, have been sleep walking, unconscious, all the while operating heavy machinery and formulating global policies and national identities. Our birth certificates should have a warning on them soon after we enter our bodies, "Don't drive under the influence." Influence of what? Influence of anything that is not a natural expression of ourselves, an authentic, choice made from your heart. The wondrous, inspiring, miraculous story of ourselves as human Beings is, that in spite of all of our neurosis, patterns, conditioned beliefs, habits and fears, our beauty shines, Love has its' way with us, the illusions break, we re-member, and we can live lives of freedom. Freedom to enjoy the birthrights of Soul in human form.
When we are loving another, void of the romantic stories about being “in love” (and I qualify this with the awareness that I am a “romantic” and often behave as such), there is a resonance, a chemistry that becomes an alchemy into something ecstatic, pure, holy and finds its’ expression through our sacred sexuality. Our bodies ARE amazing vehicles of perception and ecstasy; the potential is limitless. Our orgasmic nature is an infinite bloom on the tree of life. This may or may not “look like” making love in the way we have been conditioned to. When alchemy is present the two becomes One, a simple gaze, or touch can ignite us, expand our experience of our bodies, of sublime Love and bring us to the feasting table of the Divine.
Love, like water, seeps into every crevice, to fill, smooth the edges of rough hewed stone, quench our longing thirst for home. Love follows the path of least resistance, descends into flesh seeking lower ground, wanting to embody and nourish our roots and fruitful harvest. When the waters of our hearts ignite they evaporate, creating a canopy that rains down upon other’s hearts. You are the water bearer, the fire tender; welcome the rains of Love.
|
|
