LonelyWarrior – I feel there are three holy actions we all perform, most of us without awareness. The first is breathing; the second is drinking; the third is eating. I was thinking that perhaps this following experience has something in it for you.
"I had been exploring the inner worlds and I took time to eat. I had prepared some oats before starting. When I ate them I experienced the most wonderful awareness of hunger and absorbing, not just the oats, nuts and seeds, but also the environment, and all that I had learned and taken in from a woman I love. I mean by this the total environment, earth, air, water, culture, history, people. I felt like a hungry animal, cramming food in my mouth, loving it, and knowing I was feeding God as well as myself. I felt that if we have the courage, we are a firmament of experience. By exposing ourselves to experience, and allowing ourselves to really feel the pleasure, the torment, the passion of what we meet, we are feeding God. But we are more than a mouth, we are also a way of gaining insight, of integrating experience, and that is the real food of God."
Religions often see eating and drinking as a holy thing, but not often breathing. So I wonder whether there is something you are missing. As I see it, everything around us is a part of the eternal mystery that we are. And to breathe, eat and drink it to take that mystery into us and give us life.
I wonder this because twice it is Indian food mentioned, because India is for many people a source of spiritual wisdom.
Lighting the oil lamp can also link with air, food and drink. Because like any fire it has to be fed frequently otherwise the fire will go out. In our inner world the fire is seen as our life, that needs to be feed frequently otherwise our Light will go out.
Also I wonder whether you are trying too hard to grow spiritually. It is a hard lesson to learn that we, the ‘I’, does not produce spiritual growth. Just as you do not produce your physical growth but do have to feed it. It is something else, the mystery of Life that does it. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/#Two Powers
As Marie von Franz says in regard to Jung’s work:
"Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.
Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges, and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. The fact that we often speak of "arrested development" shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern."
As Jung said, this can happen if we "do nothing and let things happen."
Tony
