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Like many people as I reflect on the closing of the fateful year of 2013, I can see that it has been a very difficult year; not at all what I expected in the heady days leading up to the winter solstice of one year ago! One thing you can always count on if nothing else is that life has a tragi-comic sense of humour! And so I was led to believe by countless channels and self- styled prophets and visionaries that I would be ‘ascending’. I find myself almost a year later, utterly broke, confused, perplexed and questioning even my most cherished and deeply held beliefs, as I stumble along trying to survive in a world that remains more or less as it was and yet even more surreal, in many ways insane and absurd to the bemused soul stuffed inside this body! I thought I was going to heaven, but end up even deeper in purgatory!
It is as if I have been reliving at a different turn of the spiral some shocking realizations that I came to after meeting a number of famous gurus in the 80s and 90s, that enlightenment is not a one shot and you’ve got it kind of deal, a glorious right hook delivered to the ego in just the right place – fight over – but more of an energetic continuum in consciousness that builds and builds the more you keep on track, so that more time is spent in that state or close to it, rather than in ego states. But it is a moment to moment now by now, in and out process, and the ego is always lurking to reassert itself. Perhaps this extends way beyond the human plane and higher dimensional ETs and spiritual beings can have ego too. They say Lucifer was originally an angel after all. I remember the example of a charismatic but highly eccentric former Teacher of mine, one of whose many names was Da Free John, who died a few years ago, somewhat by all accounts demented and bitter that he was not universally recognized as the Christ come again after spells of manifesting as most of the Hindu avatars!
Sri Aurobindo once said the higher you climb the further there is to fall and the greater the temptations that come to you, for the mind is far more honed and powerful than that of the average Joe; and the last temptation God sends you is success! - whatever ‘success’ may mean. Last night I was feeling particularly miserable and sitting on a garden bench having a bit of a temper tantrum at my Creator; God forgive me I even called him a tyrant! – a kind of ‘end justifies the means’ kind of guy. I cried out inwardly that I was fed up being stuck down here gathering data for some fathomless computer mind that craves and devours all manner of experience through the instrumentation of countless deluded, suffering, and separated beings! I know I won’t get the point of it all till I can see everything from Its point of view. Our Creator seems nothing if not a maverick, relishing the no- holes- barred, all or nothing, risk all, close to the edge, helter skelter kind of cosmic movie. Otherwise perhaps he would get bored! I think if history and the story of most human lives is anything to go by and gives us any real clues as to the nature of Divinity, then many of our traditional theological ideas, including old ideas in a new form, the New Age, need a radical revamp. As well as the Love and the Light we need to think more Kali, the Destroyer, “my God is an all- consuming fire”, the stern Taskmaster, the unpredictable Alchemist, the master story teller with a twist in the tale, supreme experimental philosopher and scientist, the Mind whose favourite question is: ‘what would happen if?’…. the Unknower , just as much as the All Knower.
How many planets have exploded, worlds and civilizations we do not even know about have vanished without a trace? Yet we are often told that if we but make it through this critical time all is going to be bliss and paradise on earth. But the inexorable ante keeps rising and who is to say that even greater challenges do not lie ahead, if we make it through this one; maybe going to even darker planets than this similarly in the mode of self-destruct and helping them?!!! We seem like spiritual pygmies having to undergo thousands of years of evolution and grow up in a few short years! No judgement, that is just the way it is; our souls perhaps in the image of the Creator, like climbers seeking out the steepest, most death defying approach to the summit. Yes, God is Love, I still believe that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary that shouts and screams at my senses, like the images of Syrian children on TV, but this love has an edge to it; it also has a kind of rigorous, no-nonsense, masculine muscular quality, not just sweetness and infinite cuddles. Perhaps it is as if as one commentator put it, the Divine Masculine that has been suppressed in our headlong rush into the arms of the much abused and neglected Goddess. In our guilt and horror at what we have done to our mother Gala we have created an imbalance at the other extreme, and many of us have surrendered logic and discrimination and our very will, in return for vague intuitions, the wildest visionary imaginings that often prove deceptive and elusive, the emotional roller coaster of waiting forever for the ‘Event’, that is always next month, next portal, for the ET, angelic and human cavalry that has so far conspicuously failed to show up, while people are still being battered and abused by the darker powers that rule this world.
It is a little like when you were a kid and you loved your dad but he was also huge, unfathomable and awesome and kind of terrifying, a stern taskmaster whose love was mixed in with an implicit discipline and demand. It is from the father we inherit that challenge to take on the mantle of will and warriorship, however, due to the often distorted transmission of male qualities in a harshly materialistic and unaware culture, the masculine became a monster in our eyes. But the true righteous and discriminatory power of the masculine energy, symbolized in Buddhist tradition by the Sword of Manjushri, is absolutely vital, just as much as the nurturing and loving energy of the Goddess, for our wholeness and our healing. I am not for one minute reducing Godhead to a big daddy archetype but the archetypal components of our psyche offer immense clues and insights into the deep structure of our existence we have only just begun to decipher. My conception of Creator just underwent a sea change: to something far less comforting, consoling, less something I can presume to be in any way causally familiar with, or some super entity I can importune and bend to my wishes like a big red jovial Father Christmas! – but something a whole lot more inscrutable; gone, gone, gone beyond, and like the universe, as yet mostly unexplored, unknown and unknowable.
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