Initiation

Discovery of new levels of consciousness, and the opening to new power, wisdom or love. Initiations often link directly to a stage of growth, such as the shift from babyhood to childhood, and childhood to adolescence, but more so to the later stages of life. See Every 7 Years You Change

I had the insight that an initiate is someone who wishes to stay aware, who wants to discover the mysteries of life. That means remaining aware in sleep and what we call death. Therefore it means that while attempts to remain aware and widen one’s awareness in life – in the quietness of life and in its action and tragedy.

I saw that the pathway is open to everybody. It is there waiting. It is not closed. It is not a secret. It is not guarded, and is open to everybody. In a similar way growing up is open to everybody, but some people do not managed to grow beyond certain levels of childhood or youth. And I’m not talking about physical growth but about mental emotional growth. To enter the path one needs to stop drugging oneself and thereby to wake up. There are the drugs of alcohol, tobacco, barbiturates and other things that people take to diminish their relationship with the impact of life and their feelings. These diminish awareness, or the breadth and depth of awareness. But there are other types of drugs too. Some belief systems diminish one in similar ways. Some ways that people live within them into such an intense relationship with objects and exterior things, that they never actually meet themselves in any depth. There are many ways we can avoid knowing who we are.

There is no need for would-be initiate to choose a lifestyle that takes them away from everyday life. The events of normal life of themselves lessons on the path of initiation. It is meeting them with an awareness and with a willingness to learn and understand them that distinguish the would-be initiate from the person who avoids knowing who they are.

Through meeting the events of their life and feeling what is to be felt, and they meet the dangers in trials that are part of the path. The initiate clears the way of lives, clears the pathway, cleanses the debris from the past, so that the energy of life flows through more freely. And with that flow comes insight. That insight gives wider awareness, and that wider awareness is an initiation.

In exploring the power that lies behind initiation, I understood from this that we as individuals, are not in the relationship in which we are dominated or in which we are moved around like pawns. It seemed more as if there was some sort of partnership, some sort of symbiotic and mutually helpful relationship involved. This has arisen because in the end we are not individuals in the widest sense. We have a tiny, vulnerable sense of separateness. We have gradually developed as life forms an awareness that this shut off from the greater whole, and this enables asked to have a sense of self, and of self awareness. This is a very wonderful although vulnerable thing. So, when we confront this wider world sometimes it seems as if you’re losing what took us such a long time to develop. It feels as if we might be losing self. See Life’s Little Secrets

Example: About this part of the session I realised that a initiation was fundamental to the human life. What ever brings this change about it can lead us into a deeper communion with a our society and with our fellow human beings. To pass through to an even deeper interior, we must in some way burst through the boundaries of our mind and feelings. We must in some degree die to ourselves and awaken to that greater of life.

In the past, young males were initiated into their tribe at puberty. They thus became men by such things as hunting alone, fasting, having a vision, learning to bear arms. Now, young men are initiated, but it is a very unspoken of thing, unacknowledged. To reach manhood they have to remain confident in face of yearly exams, terminal tests, and massive competition. At the age of manhood they have to preserve a sense of their own value despite having hardly any share in the world’s wealth.

For young women it is being faced by all manner of what are really fantasies about how they look to others, of whether they can attract a good mate, and also how to compete in today’s attitudes and work. In the past they were initiated into the mysteries if womanhood and childbearing – their first menstruation was a time of celebration.

Initiation I saw was a process of constant adaptation. It remained healthy as long as it was not taken over by an organised group, a priesthood, or made rigid by rules and regulations. To remain healthy initiation needs to stay in the hands of the people. I felt it very clearly that through my experiences and my life I was one of the Elders of the mother Church. I also felt that two of my friends were also elders of this Church. The mother Church seemed, according my deepest feelings and intuitions, to have pre-existed Christianity. The mother Church was as old as humanity.

Example: The wonderful life is in all of us. It is the realisation of universality. However, we may shut it out from consciousness by fighting to maintain our separate identity, by struggling just for our own needs, and fending off others through anger, fear or competition. What had happened to me in the tombs I entered in Ireland was initiation. I saw that some of the wonderfully common things in life prepare us for this meeting with the universal within oneself. Falling in love and caring for another person starts to erode the protection we surround or own identity with. Being a parent and giving oneself to the needs of children takes us further still beyond the isolation of living only for and in oneself. Being a husband or wife who cares for one’s partner stretches the fabric of one’s psyche to include more than oneself. Through the sympathies aroused one can also begin to empathise with the feelings of other parents, other lovers, other partners. Their loss, their wonder, their tragedy and joy is felt more fully as one’s own. And all of this opens one toward the universal spirit of life within oneself. Though imperfect in all my own endeavours in these areas, I had still been helped by them toward finding the wonder of the All within myself.

The common life of love and caring, of social endeavour in service is the path to the wider life of the spirit. Through them you learn the world of love that transcends one’s own small life, and gives you entrance to Life’s love. The beautiful sexuality of a man or woman is part of that mystery which we share with each other. It is a part of the universal life. If we are at odds with it, then in some way we are at odds with life. Loving a person we may fall through the personality at the surface and fall into the deeps of desire and love that lies behind or around the conscious psyche. Therefore sex, if it is not for procreation can be a time of worship.

My feelings about this in the session were connected mostly with the feeling that society does not understand, respect or support the action of initiation. Without social acknowledgement the initiation is still only a personal thing. This is very personal, but with social acknowledgement it integrates the individual more fully into the world and makes of him a more satisfied and useful member of society. I had a great desire to press for governments to allow use of the ancient tombs such as the one’s I visited, for the sake of individual initiation. In this way one connects with the most basic aspects of oneself – the earth, the rocks, the return to the darkness of the womb. I had no sense of there having to be a priest. The sincerity and readiness of the initiate is the ‘priest’, or the power that opens the person. What I did feel was necessary was that the person was supported by friends and family, and so the initiation and the entrance into a fuller life which it provides, was witnessed by loving and supportive members of the community connected with the initiate.

Example: I saw that what I have called the borderline, the frontier, is actually functions in what I suppose we call our mind. But I also had a sure sense of knowing that it was also to do with parts of the brain, the very top of the head. Mostly we do not use this part of the brain unless we develop a very active spiritual life where we really are opening to something beyond the boundaries of what we already know, what we already dare to experience, what we already are capable of experiencing.

What I saw was that what my female partner and I have done, the relationship we have developed, has further stimulated this area of my being, helped me to go on, given me confidence to take that leap beyond where I have been before. So this has stimulated  processes in myself that were ready to emerge, but needed our relationship and what it has brought to further it.

I also saw that this higher brain functioning, this higher mind process, has a particular function. It is an interface between all that we are as our everyday waking personality; between all that we have gathered and understood and lived in this lifetime, and the immensity of what we are as a human being. I saw the details of this and it is quite difficult to summarise or to explain in any way. But as clearly as I can it was like the processing of information, so that all that you are, formed a sort of the pattern or a signal, and that signal called out of the immensity of the spiritual life what was relevant to you and your further development. Now that is a very clumsy description because even as I say it I sense an enormous subtlety of what I met and experienced. What I saw was that the interface is unique in every being. This is because every being is unique and creates their own pattern. And that pattern calls out of the infinite something different. So in this sense there are as many faces of God as there are human beings.

As I saw all this I realised that if one could help people to come to that point, to bring themselves to that meeting, then they would begin to receive that influence that frees them. It frees them by growing them, by giving them more of themselves.

As I stood on what I have called the borderline, that interface with the highest in oneself, I understood that the interaction needed to be complete. One needed to bring everything of oneself to that meeting. This is because the relationship is a transforming one. If you do not come to the meeting completely it is like leaving half of you, or some of you, outside the door. Therefore the process cannot work in you. Also it means you’re not really opening to the process.

So I came to that frontier with everything that I had. I came with everything that I am, everyone and everything that I love, everything that I possess. Therefore my partner was by my side standing with me on that borderline. And I understood that the process, although it is no form of judgment, nevertheless cannot help but reveal the shadows, the lies, the falsehoods one brings. Because of this it can be a meeting that we might avoid, because we may not wish to lose or have revealed certain parts of what we are, what we hold onto, or what we have hidden within ourselves. But the connection between my partner and I was blessed, was seen as whole and a truth. This was quite a wonderful feeling. I understood why Abraham was asked to bring his son to the Mount and sacrifice him. It had nothing to do with killing his son. It represents a willingness to come with everything that you love with the risk that you might lose it. Or at least, it might be revealed to you that it has no real value or place in your life.

Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.

As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.

So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak.

Example: I dreamt I was up a very large tree in the grounds of a university. A great branch ran out over the grounds and a car park. I was at the end of this branch with a bag in my left hand and a man’s head in my right. The head was dismembered and skinned. The bag held the rest of the dismembered body.

I threw the head down in front of a man walking across the car park. He was an intelligent, respectable, schoolteacher or professor type. He was very shocked and poked at the head. At first he thought it was plastic, but then he saw the reality of it. An eye came out, then the brains. He realised the thing he had been holding at bay – this must mean a murder had taken place. He went off to call the police. I began to work my way back along the branch, feeling there was no way of tracing the head to me. But I realised that each move was leaving clues, everything I had done had left traces to my involvement.

I explored this dream with two members of a dream group I had led. At first I couldn’t get into it deeply. I felt a fear when I thought of the police coming to investigate the crime. In short I felt guilty. Then I went through the track of leaving my wife – staying with my wife – going away – back to the beginning – conflict. No way out!

Then I looked at the head. Wendy had been saying I was a masochist. I just felt such labels didn’t help. Love was like breathing. I couldn’t, didn’t want to stop loving either my children or my wife. As long as I could, I would suffer the pain the conflict produced. The pain was because I had leftmy marriage and thereby broken up their home.

I had a strong fantasy of the head coming alive it was me and what I had done to myself, torn my body and head apart trying to find a solution. Then I saw flesh on its cheeks. Then it was like a native mask made of various things, and feathers. The feathers predominated in the fantasy. The mask kept breaking up, leaving only a few feathers, as if it or I were all nothing. I remember saying – “There is not even a mask, it’s just a few feathers!”

With enormous certainty I realised that there was no cure for my sickness and I had struggled in vain. It was a tremendous blow – and I gave up. I mean I gave up hope, everything.

Then it was one feather tied to a twig by piece of wool, blowing in the wind – a feather blowing in the wind. This was very stable and persistent in the fantasy. Everything resolved back to the feather blowing in the wind. It seemed like a Red Indian symbol, perhaps tied to the suspended body of the dead, but I could not understand.

Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity. I was healed.

The only thing I can see as the turning point is complete surrender, a total giving up. Then it was like an experience of enlightenment.

Example: One of the major parts of what I saw/realised/had insight into, was that life was a Whole as well as a Part. That is a clumsy way of trying to describe the experience of the fact that we each exist as part of a Whole. As such we may only have access to a very limited part of the whole, to a limited part of our own mind, a limited part of social possibility, of sexual meeting, of financial opportunity. In a relationship we may only be able to let a small part of our partner into ourselves, or of giving them only a tiny part of self.

From this the theme unfolded into seeing that widening our access to this physical, social psychological, spiritual Whole, is what has been called initiation. When a new level of accessibility opens to us it feels like a dramatic event, a new level of experience, and manifests as further maturity. The new level of maturity offers access to greater power and opportunity, but it also brings with it new responsibilities. It is like an inverse balancing. The less that is available to us, the more we can be intensely egotistic and individually possessive or seeking personal rewards such as money, sex, fame. The more that is available the less person, the less self-centredness is involved. So that I saw grades of possessiveness, grades of dependence upon possessions and role, grades of personal sexuality. Within the grades of great access, need for personal possessions drops away, need for a personal sexual relationship drops away. At the top of this one owns nothing but in a way has everything. One is without any sexual relationship, a complete celibate, but has intimate relationship with all living creatures.

Needs for Initiation

1) Willingness to go along with an inner process, to struggle in some measure, to be changed.

2) Sufficient understanding, from any source, nature, religion, philosophy, poetry, history, dance, to be able to face disruption and change. The keynote is to contact and be centred in the Source or Self. In this way, because the Self both disrupts and builds up, the personality need to be able to face change. Thus it is necessary to feel in contact with, and directed by, the Master.

3) Discrimination – Humour – Patience – Initiative – Action – Inaction.

4) To feel sufficiently self-assured to release the contents of the unconscious and redeem them.

5) Ability to relate well to widely diverse situations.

6) Willingness to look at self impartially and see faults; to take criticism without being overthrown by it.

7) Tolerance and openness to new ideas in an explorative way.

8) Willingness to co-operate with God.

9) We must be able to be born, to die, to be attracted and repulsed, to give and to receive, to love, to hate.

10) Ability to forgive the past – one’s parents – one’s culture – one’s religion – and be thankful. Then one can build. Otherwise we are still chained by these things. Accept, and thus integrate the past.

11) Recognise limitations