The Way Within

Musings of an Old Guy

At this point I felt as if that great inner mind had opened to me and that I could ask a question of it. I asked to be given words in my own tongue that would clearly explain to others and to my children what this path was and what is involved in it. I asked that I might understand clearly what is required of someone taking this inner path, what they will face and what it is about. What shall I say to them? What shall I say to myself?

My experience here was a powerful sense of losing myself. I suppose you could call this loss, the melting away of all that one is. It was a feeling of losing, of letting go of control, of surrendering myself. As this happened to me, I had a complete feeling of trust and was able to let myself fall into that nothingness, a nothingness in comparison with my sense of existence anyway. And that is what I learned about the entrance to the path. It is a readiness to drop into that nothingness that is the core of life, and as you drop into it the thoughts, the feeling that you have is, “I love you!” You go to that meeting, that union, that losing of oneself with the feeling of love. And that is marriage. That is the spiritual marriage.

This linked with what I had already met in regard to needing a female partner. My experience was of, for the first time ever, being ready to completely die, to completely lose myself in the merging. In doing so I experienced the loss of self, the death of self, leading to the emergence of new life. Isn’t that what procreation is about fundamentally?

So, the entrance to the path comes about because you love Life. You love it enough to die to it. You trust it enough to allow your being to lose itself in that ocean. You trust it enough and love it enough to give yourself too it totally. Strangely, you love this action that appears to be threatening your existence. And all of this is so relevant to our everyday experience of love and sex.

I was laughing here because I experienced the loss of self and said, “Meltdown”. I was laughing because I saw that what survives meltdown is the important thing. What is left when meltdown has occurred is the thing that survives. No matter what shit you believed before meltdown, it is only what is left that has any validity. What you were, who you believed you were, up to that point, is in the end a load of crap because it didn’t survive. It is like melting ore, the gold is what is left. The important thing is what survives.

So, here I am and I say hello to the survivor. I say hello to you who can say ‘I love you’ at the doors of death.

I committed myself. I need to remember that. I am not sure if I had said it clearly in my language for my children, but I need to say to my them and to those who tread this path, “This is an ancient path. It was first opened by people who were outcasts from their tribe, or their race. Maybe they were outcasts because of disease or illness. They deepened this path because they either descended into despair or developed a new life, a new awareness, a new relationship with themselves and the world. They changed something inside of themselves, and that change became a possible new pattern for other human beings.

Some of these people, in today’s world would be judged as crazy or unbalanced in some way, perhaps fanatics. If we look back into the past we see there were groups of people living the life of hermits in deserts or in isolated places. Some of them tortured themselves in various ways, such as starvation or flagellation. It was out of such strangeness that a new type of inner life developed; a new way of relating to the world arose. Of course, those early pilgrims on that path were unclear about what they were doing, and were often confused, and so included many strange and unnecessary practices.

But through their lives they began to form the possibility of a new direction for human beings. It became a flow of energy; or at least a pathway that energy formed, like a river creating a riverbed as it flows. It could be described as a pattern that was etched into human nature, or just nature, in some way. Life itself moves in that way. Whenever a new form offers survival it has life. And although it does not necessarily lead to reproduction in the normal sense, it does lead to caring and giving of oneself. It does lead to another form of survival, that of entrance into an awareness of one’s eternal core. I felt that deep in the levels of consciousness, in what Jung called the collective unconscious, such a new pattern developed and established itself.

This new pattern leads to compassion. You realise more and more fully the vulnerability of human nature and its many failings.

What opens the path to you is that you have given up on everyday life in some way. Maybe you have seen the fruitlessness of it or the illusions that many of us live under. Perhaps you have felt there is something more to being human than is lived or displayed in the everyday world of human society. That is all it takes, and that you are ready to open your being wholeheartedly to the mystery that lies at the core of you.

Here it struck me that how I was seeing the path was probably from a very different viewpoint than many people. I believe this came about because I was quoting something about the archetype of the dark night. The person I was quoting really went to town on describing how terrible it was, how much suffering there was, the tortures of hell etc. At the time it struck me that there was something odd about it, but it was only now that I began to recognise that some people actually identify with certain aspects of this. They emphasise such things as what somebody is going to lose, how they might lose their physical beauty, how they might lose their sense of self, that they will meet powerful emotions, as if that is some terrible torture. And so I wonder if these people have actually met this experience or are they simply fantasising about what other people have written of it.

I don’t have that sense of it. I see it as something radiant. What does it mean though? What can come of it? I suppose the question is really, what can’t come of it. It is life! What do we want to create with it? Here is this divine power flowing through us at every moment and each second we direct it in one way or another, and it can be anything.

I returned to the question – what do I say to my children? I need to say to them that this path bequeaths no outward honours. But you know you are amongst brothers and sisters, even if they are not close at hand. You know you are involved in something of incredible antiquity. It has involved all races and all periods of history. It has never been bounded by any one faith, any one philosophy or way of life. And those who have walked this path have felt they are kin to life itself. If they did not use that term, then they knew they were related to the mystery that underlies existence. They were kin to life rather than identifying themselves through the actions and creeds of their fellow human beings. It is an ancient order, and our family have been priests of it – some of us have chosen to be priests of it – for many generations.

As I was experiencing the above a sudden spontaneous image played in my mind. It was a small and lively creature, like a tree squirrel, running to me with a feather in its mouth to give to me. It was a rainbow coloured feather, a gift and an assurance of my place in the rainbow tribe.

Somewhere here I went very deep and experienced a very powerful vision or insight. It wasn’t in the form of images but as a direct knowing. And yet the knowing seemed to include many details. I understood, with a great thrill, that a new paradigm had matured deep in the collective mind of humanity. In seeing it I understood that my inner partner and I had been an active part in helping the development of this new paradigm. In some strange and wonderful way our very coming together and the birth and nurturing of our spiritual child was part of this development. I understood that our child was now the very substance of this new paradigm. It wasn’t that my partner and I were the sole influence in building or helping this new paradigm to form. Countless others had also made this and given their life and energy in its formation. Nevertheless, we had been a very definite part of it.

But as the understanding of it filled me I saw that our part in it was just to build a particular aspect of it. Our child had matured beyond us and was far more inclusive than we had been or are. For this paradigm included a whole realm of human change that human beings are trying to move toward, inclusive of social, political, agricultural and personal change.

As I watched I saw that this new paradigm was now mature and secure. I could see something amazing happening that was difficult at first to believe, and yet somehow I could see it working. I could see that the mass of human beings live within certain mental beliefs that are common to their culture. They are quite unconscious of this, usually believing that their view of life is something they have developed themselves rather than something they exist within and partake of without awareness. I saw that this new paradigm, active and formed in the deeps of the collective human consciousness, was already impinging upon a mass of human beings. I could see that as they slept the new paradigm worked on them in their dreams and their unconscious life. It was penetrating them almost as if it was re-programming them. This was the strange part because it seemed to me that they would wake, perhaps not simply change from one day to the next, but certainly changed and they wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t really see that any change had happened. They would however be looking at life differently because the new view had gradually re-programmed the way they saw life.

I also experienced that in our union, a very deep spiritual togetherness had formed between my partner and I. I could feel the serpent power, the plumed Serpent, flowing through us, transforming us. I knew at that time that my inner partner was being transformed as I was because of our link.

Then something equally strange came about. I was being called into the very heart of the paradigm. This is something I would never have thought or imagined. My imagination of extended spiritual life was certainly not into an archetype of any sort such as this paradigm. I had of course experienced and imagined that transformation would be into the spirit of life. But here I was being called into this developing new force in human nature. It was doing this because most of my life had been given to its development in one way or another, so in a real sense my being was already a part of it, as were many other people. Now though, I had the opportunity to die as this limited old man and my essence pass into this new power in human life, so that the best of who I am could be active in many more lives and become a new being.

I agreed with this without any knowledge of where it would lead. I agreed because everything I understood about it seemed so right, and had such a direct link with all that I had lived and tried to be. This new life, I felt, was also offered to my inner partner.

Now I met feelings about the commercial influence, or the influence of commerce on nature. Nature itself, I felt, groans under the impact.

Nature is moving toward ridding itself of this parasite that is clutching its dirty hands right into you. It is going to suck at you in any way it can to earn a living. Long suffering nature. Long, long suffering nature. Nature is our own body. As we abuse and misuse it so sickness develops. So, many people will develop cancerous growths where there once was life. The breasts the ovaries, the testicles the prostate. They have been abused for so long. We need to recognise what we do as unhealthy.

I don’t want a mechanised life. I don’t want to be part of a huge mechanised food machine. Because in the end you are not only treating nature and the animals as if they are machines to be plugged in and run without care for the processes and drives that have taken millions of years to develop, those attitudes also are impinging on your own life, on your own children, on your own reproductive faculties. Are you and your children simply resources to be eaten up and used by huge commercial companies? Do you want your ovaries and sperm measured, dictated, controlled by huge pharmaceutical companies? And yet here are so many people handing their genitals, their emotions and their body over to these companies to control.

The contents of much of the food we now eat are dictated by commercial interests – such things as shelf life, quantity of sales, and often unhealthy desires in those who buy the goods.

The mother is the supreme guardian of her eggs. They are a her sacred trust, her treasure, her ancient and wonderful heritage. Each woman must judge, through inner searching and questioning, what her deepest being shows her about how to relate to and care for that treasure. She must penetrate the motivations of those who attempt to take control of the reproductive faculties Are they benign, or of their activities directed by commercial interests in profit motives? Are they perhaps, as in past ages, a disguised predator?

What you want done with your eggs and your children is your choice. It is true that through that choice you create your future. You create your future and the future of the world. Tread carefully with life.

A sudden insight here about choices. I saw that each of us in our decision-making are quantum probability generators. This is especially so in choices about how we handle our sexuality and reproductive functions. The choice to have or not to have a child, to bear or to abort, alter the very future. On those moments of decision whole new futures are built or destroyed. The moment of decision is an unbelievable point of flux. Around that moment infinite possibilities surge. They break through into moving toward reality, or they are pushed back and remain a mere potential. If we could actually view this as a process we would witness an astounding play of energies and possibilities. And often, we, in our ignorance, play with these mighty forces as if they were games to be amused by, or simple sensory pleasures that can be used without any consequence in our lives or in the loves of others.