The Harvester

The process led me back to the image of the dream of the harvester. I experienced a degree of fear that the problem with the motor referred to my heart. I let myself slip into the fear and it dissolved and I saw that it referred not to my physical heart, but to my heart as my feelings. I could see that the problem is to do with no feeling connected with people. There’s nothing that makes me feel connected with people. I don’t feel excited about anything.

I still see I am looking for something to believe in, not phantoms of my mind. I mean I want to find what is real in myself. I want to see if God is an image I have created for my own comfort. I want to find what is real so I can feel on stable ground. While I am uncertain it takes my enthusiasm and certainty away. In fact I have been uncertain for many years. The variety of experience I have had over the years has done nothing to give me a rock to stand on. Rather it has gradually eroded the beliefs I did have. For instance seeing that behind the god image was the desire for the father – that one created images and experiences by unconsciously manipulating mental processes. So I am trying to press through to some point of reality even if it completely counters what I have previously known.

I began to face the issues that have been so strong lately. The wanting to find a reality beyond the fantasies of spirituality. I began to see that I was getting in the way of myself in being so critical of what I was/am experiencing. It is a bit like I have put a label on what I have found. The label say – this is useless. It is an illusion.

Doing this cuts me off from my own creativity and mental life. It doesn’t need to be labelled. If I am the creator, why do I keep worrying if I create a sense of God? So the problem has been a sort of negative loop. I want God to be something exterior to myself. To make this so I have to create an image of God. In doing this I become aware that this is a created image. So then I put a negative connotation on the process and deny it to myself. Meanwhile, myself as the whole, as the creator, gets lost in the process.

So I moved on to the question of – If I create these things, what can I get from them? Instead of pushing them aside and denying them. I see the possibility that humans created an external image of God as a symbol of their own potential – said all this so many times before, because it is so bloody difficult to accept oneself as IT – then by various ways of approaching the symbol, it becomes a workable process of manipulating their own potential and accessing it.

Having accepted that, I approach my wholeness as God and ask to see what would be a direction that would be rewarding to my wholeness, and to other people as well. I prayed for guidance and what arose was the realisation that I had always wanted to be a medium, and I could do that if I wanted. It was something I had wanted to do for a long period of my life. The reason I hold back is because I feel it is a questionable process. At times what arises in this way is amazingly to the point and unexpected. Other times it seems like me making up drivel.

A clarity about self doubt then came. I am a man who could go in almost any direction in terms of doing what would be satisfying, but don’t go in any direction much because I am haunted by self doubt. The crippling thing is that I doubt the very thing I love – the spiritual experience. I doubt the very validity of Christ yet Christ is the centre of my inner life. I love that – I doubt that. So this leaves me in a sort of limbo.

I went on to see that I had based my whole life on beliefs about the spiritual life. But at the moment I doubt the validity of those things, so my whole life is in question and disabled in some degree. This knocks the legs out from underneath me. And in looking around at the people who claim to be following the spiritual path I can’t see that they – any of them – have found anything more valid. So that doesn’t lead me to consider that I may be deeply mistaken. They all seem to be following dreams and conceptions. I guess I need to perhaps find a new slant on the vision, or find some way to re-energise myself.

I didn’t reach a conclusion about that but started checking through myself to get feedback on my overall situation. I looked back to check over my baby self, to see if the recent massive experiences about premature birth needed any more attention. In general the area appeared okay, but I experienced the quiet life in the womb, and felt a tension in the chest area that seemed to have started at that point of development. It manifested as the ache in the chest I have had so many years.

On examining it I arrived at the sense of there being a basic anxiety about existing, as if behind the scenes there is a bogy man, the doctor with a knife, some dark figure that will come to give pain. The dark figure is basically someone who hasn’t got any love, and can therefore do one damage. This wasn’t a big issue though, and it was easy to deal with it.

The theme of seeing that I am learning something different about love arose again. I saw my love is becoming one which doesn’t depend upon sex, looking for favours, dependency, etc. It is an appreciation of someone else’s spirit. It is a love that doesn’t go out to many people – perhaps only those who recognise me, the beauty of me, the scars, the pain and the joy.

A fantasy arose of being a disciple of Christ, but the self-doubt and uncertainty was still there. Once more it became clear that I was in conflict over whether my experience of Christ was simply a compensatory experience. But this seemed ridiculous, because it was obvious that I needed compensation to make my life whole. All of us do, because we are only a part of a whole in our physical life, so the link with the passion of life in Christ allows us the communion of bathing in the wholeness that everyday life cannot ever give us. Realising this I joyfully knelt before Christ and asked for the blessedness of ‘communion’ and healing. It was such a relief to accept my ordinariness and my need for that contact. I want compensation, and I felt sorry I had used that word in a demeaning sense. I want to be healed, and I want to be whole. I want to relate positively to other human beings and animals. I want to be recognised for qualities that I have. I don’t want to creep around like a hidden thing, demeaning myself as I had been demeaning the need for that compensating love. I opened myself to a complete healing of body and soul.

It was a wonderful but gentle feeling of accepting my own possibility of wholeness – a joyous acceptance that within me was the possibility of healing the difficulties of my body and soul. I was ready for any healing change, my prostate difficulty, my eye, all of me. As this occurred I had a wonderful sense of being a lovely bird that has been in some way ill all its life. This meant it never flew when the flock took flight. Instead, to deal with its own difficulty it felt feelings of not wanting to fly like the others, of not wanting to be like them and do the meaningless things they do. But with the healing came the realisation I could fly, and I took wing and joined the flock. Now I am a creature of spirit, which I had always been, and I asked Christ to help me learn the ways of ‘flying’ in the spirit.

The beauty of it and the sense of softness it gave me led me to ask what the religious impulse is, what is the compensatory thing I had been seeking yet denying myself? Immediately from within came the wonderful insight and experience of it being an internal sense of connection with ones fellows, with the rest of the flock. If this sense of connection is injured it produces great distress in the person. One then constantly feels isolated and lonely in a crowd. It also connects with ones self esteem, with asserting oneself and becoming a recognised part of the society within which ones grows up. I felt that it often fails to become healthy in people today because as a culture, especially living in larger cities, we lack the rituals, the understanding and the techniques to help youngsters achieve their full sense of connection.

I wanted to meet God in the same manner. I lay for a while without any apparent perception. Then the sense of being It/God myself grew, but without any satisfaction or wonder in it. I was simply the thing I was looking for. As such I had amazing potential, but this didn’t manifest simply by wanting it to. Nevertheless, feeling that as Thomas I wanted to know, to have a hands on experience, I asked my being for proof of its encompassing nature. That is, proof that my being connects with others in the everyday world, in a spiritual sense.

I remained waiting for what seemed like about a minute or so, and suddenly the doorbell rang. It was a man I had met months before who was selling Encyclopaedia Britannica’s. I asked him in, and within a minute we were talking about spiritual matters. This was very stimulating and enthusiastic. I can’t say this was something that produced deep insight in me about the nature of God, but it was a strange and impressive cooincidence.