“…you soon become lonely if you want to use your own brain to find answers…”
- Thought for today. (From Jo Nesbo in his book The Redeemer)
If what we suggest, Sena Folk - Quicksilver Times overt and covert supporters - and other crackpot visionaries and luminaries, is true, if this new age opens both the opportunity and the responsibility to take conscious control of our “temporal” and “spiritual” direction, then Jo’s statement is one that we’ve got to take to heart.
It’s inevitable that the conscious path will regularly lead us into loneliness. For some of us the loneliness can begin to feel like a natural state. In the isolation that comes with making conscious choices and commitments comes doubt. And with doubt comes fear. And loneliness.
Even inside many of the old time paths (yesterday’s translations) it was understood that “faith” without recurrent doubt was just denial. What makes the new individual translations, translations relevant to our moment, so difficult is that when doubt comes we can’t simply fall into pre-designed spiritual practices. Those practices were validated by teachers and times outside of ourselves. As such they ultimately became meaningless repetitions. These practices we were taught as children, or examined in our struggle to define our path were ineffective and counterproductive. They were, in fact, the primary motivating impetus to begin our search.
The primary facet of this new uniquely individual path that each of us chooses is its’ singularity. While that reality is fundamental to the individual path, almost paradoxically, it also most powerfully stimulates loneliness. As is inevitable on any path doubt will come. Either through external circumstance or in reaction to our life’s rhythm, bringing internal confusion and fatigue, doubt will come. And doubt quickly stimulates a sense of isolation, followed by fear, and a profound, accompanying loneliness.
Lets break it down. -
Why can there be no recognition of transcendence without doubt?
Short answer - Because without doubt we can’t recognize the limitations of conscious mind and finally open ourselves to an environment where we can experience transcendence.
Slightly longer answer - It begins with how deep the darkness is.
An example -
Understand. This is just one example, and one that is not meant to define how dark dark really is. It’s one infinitesimal example, new out here in the moment, offered now because it is real and an intimate happening in my particular experience of the world. One tiny horror among so many. However. To truly attend to one is to know them all.
Walk this part of the path with me. And mine.
My dear new love. Ten years deep this month. My love Linda.
Barely out of childhood. Her and her first love Michael. Married and in love. Young and immature and, like us all, imperfect, But in love. Wanting to bring forth.
And Linda then pregnant. Filled with joy. B.B,, Linda’s mom who many of you know and love, filled with joy. Two families filled with joy.
Nine months of planning and pre-nurturing and loving.
And Baby Michael Robert.
Born dead.
Linda bore him and named him. But never got to hold him. Because that’s just the way things were done back then.
Baby Michael Robert buried. But without Linda. Because that too was just the way it was done back then.
Linda delivered.
Baby Michael Robert dead.
Linda never touched him. Nine months she cradled him inside her. The nuns took him away wrapped like so much spoiled meat.
And that was that.
“God’s will,” the nuns said. “There’ll be other babies.”
Mostly Linda carried her grief like a silent vigil. For years. For decades.
Until husband Michael too died in a horrible instant.
Then with monumental courage she opened to the grief. For them both. And for her father who she had singularly nursed through to his death from mesothelioma only months before.
The nuns were right about one thing. There was another baby. Later. A wonderful baby girl, healthy and loved and nurtured. A baby who grew into a strong, conscious, loving woman.
That woman fell in love and married and birthed a most amazing girl baby. The many faceted family was filled with joy.
And one could not be enough.
Another baby conceived and carried. Loved and pre-nurtured by so many. With all the new technology everyone knew early. “It’s a boy.”
How perfect.
But hovering deep in the shadows.
Linda’s fear.
Boy baby.
She marked the fear. She carried it like a silent vigil. She would give it no attention. She would give it no power.
But the fear lived there in the shadows.
The time came for the birthing. The family gathered with joy. With loving anticipation. With such pride in the young mother, the young father, even the new big baby sister.
And Baby Harrison came.
He was perfect.
Not all scrunched up, beet red, and battered like some babies. Beautiful. Eyes open and already watching. All things well and wonderful. Healthy, healthy, healthy.
Linda’s tears, joyful, full with release, the darkness vanquished. But not too quickly. All day. Touching and watching. Medical folk coming and going, Linda watching, asking, being reassured, touching again. Light ascending.
Family together at home exhausted from travel and waiting and anticipation. In Linda’s heart the exhaustion of the silent, fearful vigil. But it was over. Baby Harrison was perfect.
To bed with joy bubbling up like a virgin spring. Tears of awakening, joyful acceptance and most profound thanksgiving.
Then in the morning light, the new day, hope became almost denial in the face of Baby Harry, healthy and waving his long baby graceful arms, beckoning, “Here I am, here I am, touch me, I’m finally here.”
The day passed with touching and petting and hugging and loving in every direction. At day’s end, as we left Baby Harry to rest and mom and dad to their steak and potato dinner, deep in the shadows the last flickering of the fearful vigil of my love Linda, died as all things finally do.
At home there was celebration, with wine and toasts, with laughter and silliness, and little big sister dancing, and Linda, finally accepting the victory. She was filled first with love, but the victory was Baby Harry, healthy and whole.
One hour then two more. Darkness came again into the moment and no one even noticed. Early night.
But the darkness is the darkness.
The phone rang.
A stillness.
A spreading silence.
Then quiet chaos.
Baby Harry.
Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.
That’s how you spell darkness of a different order.
Baby Harry three days old. With his chest open to the world, knives sharp, machines machining, skilled hands going about healing but hurting. Tubes and lines and ventilators.
Two more open heart surgeries in the next three years await Baby Harry. And maybe a heart transplant in the future. If he… Mortality for Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome is 65% to age of five.
Injustice, anger, frustration. Such darkness.
Mark this darkness and walk this unlit path with us.
Understand. This isn’t about why us? Why Baby Harrison? Why his mommy and daddy, why his big baby sister? Why the fuck Linda?
Understand. We are grateful that Baby Harry lives. Thankful for every breath. And rage with every breath. For Baby Harry. For mommy and daddy. For big baby sister who is confused and trying to comprehend what is just beyond her four year old capacity to comprehend, and ours. For B.B., the second set of grandparents, and the uncle.
For Linda. How cruel. How insidious to play this horrific trick on this strong, loving, courageous woman.
There is no explaining or understanding. There is only passing through the darkness together. Through all the stages of grieving, sharing love even when the light seems forever absent.
Understand. To do this, to mark and live through the heart of the darkness is not just a good thing to do. Or a good thing to share.
If you want a life fulfilled, it is the only thing to do.
Here’s how this works -
It’s a discovery we made working with dying folks.
We’ve been repeating it as many times, in as many forms, in as many places as we can.
Without passing through the darkness, in succumbing to the temptation to hide in denial, to pretend that if we somehow bury the grief the darkness always brings, we will somehow make the terrible truth of the darkness go away.
But it doesn’t go away. Ever.
We make a pattern of denial, make it a value. We tell folks to be strong, don’t give in to the grief. We admire stoicism and call it strength.
We teach ourselves to bury the grief back in some protected corner of our mind, unremembered but never forgotten. The more we hide the stronger the inappropriate denial becomes. We are able to see losses coming, how to deny them, store them, and call ourselves strong.
But after some time, some years - the number of which differs with each of us - a change comes into our lives.
All that unresolved grief begins to bleed over into out present, into our moment. We’ve buried as much as we can hold. Like Kubler Ross’ well of grief, it overflows. Into our moment.
So symptoms of the unremembered grief, the tears, the depression, the anger spill over into our present. But we don’t remember the old grief. So, as conscious mind is wont to do, and is singularly designed to do, we judge that our tears or depression or anger is the result of what is happening in the moment.
Dysfunction follows.
The process is more complex than this. For over thirty-five years we’ve been doing free workshops and retreats ( www.sena.org , senafound@aol.com), some as long as four days, creating environments where we can come together to allow ourselves to remember what we’ve hidden. To begin to pass through the darkness and heal. Together.
Because burying the darkness doesn’t just effect how we deal with the darkness and create dysfunction in our moment.
It intimately and inevitably effects the way we experience the light.
Here’s the way that works -
When we begin to deny the darkness there is another effect in our lives.
We bury the darkness because it hurts, it makes us afraid, we don’t understand it, and we can’t stop it from coming. We look about us trying to compensate for the darkness, looking for fulfillment, hope and meaning and respite.
And we see, if we are lucky… The light. The Love.
The light feels good. It fulfills us.
If we need to bury the darkness then surely, our weighing and measuring conscious mind tells us, we should reach for the light.
But just as the darkness comes and the darkness passes, so does this temporal experience of light.
We reach for it. We welcome it. We learn all the rules they teach us about how to get it. And still it passes away. Our conscious mind weighs and measures and judges. We’ve learned the rules, we’ve welcomed and held the light. We tried so very hard to own the light. And if conscious mind is to be truthful, it seems that the stronger we try to hold onto the light the more quickly it passes.
Conscious mind judges. There must be something wrong with us. It must be our failure.
Comes more dysfunction and pain.
Conscious mind takes one step further. It looks out into the world, It wants more love.
Can’t seem to manage that.
So out here, in the world. What feels good?
Food feels good. What will feel better? More. Sex feels good. What feels better? More. Drugs feel good. What feels better? More. Power not only feels good, it helps bury the feeling of inadequacy, the failure to find and hold enough light to compensate for the hidden, growing, unremembered, unresolved darkness.
What feels better?
MORE!
And so we quest for whatever expression of “more” seems to fit into our nature and circumstance.
So sad. Because no matter how much more we get it’s never enough.
Here we are, so many of us chasing an illusive, impossible dream that in its very expression triggers inescapable dysfunction and disaster.
Personal, cultural, global dysfunction. Economic, political, social, and spiritual systems based on validating MORE.
Greed.
Where does an alternative begin?
With you.
With your heart and an alliance with your conscious mind.
And here’s how that works -
What we discovered those thirty-five plus years ago, as we began to work with dying folks in the last six months of their lives, was that the grief process had a beginning, a middle, and an end. That if we gave our families, and ourselves permission to pass through the process we could heal. We could heal from current losses. We could remember and heal all past losses.
When we did that we found that for our families, and for ourselves, our relationship to the darkness had changed. And so had our understanding of our conscious mind.
We understood that we couldn’t explain or justify or understand the darkness. It was beyond the capacity of conscious mind’s ability to weigh and measure. But not beyond its capacity to pass through, one painful step at a time.
The miracle came not with our new relationship with the darkness, but our new relationship with the light.
Our alliance with conscious mind, our acceptance of letting go of the denial and passing through the darkness, redefined our experience of the light.
We accepted that here, in the reality of our ongoing moment, the light, like the darkness, would pass. But in the environment that was created by the act of becoming current with our grief we no longer needed to hold onto the light. We no longer needed to own the light.
Just as the darkness was unexplainable and immeasurable, so too our experience of the light. It had become infinitely more precious.
And while the conscious mind had to let go of the task of weighing and defining the darkness, so too it now only had to experience the light, not hold it or own it.
Unencumbered by denial and distress, the light was of a new and wholly, holy order.
That new balance, because that’s what it was, between being open to the darkness and unattached to the light brought the next miracle.
It can best be described by a phase used by Buddhists. The Middle Way. In the new balance, in alliance and in concert with conscious mind, there came the capacity to let go, an extension, really, of being in the darkness and not knowing how or when the light could ever reappear, that allowed us to experience the transcendent One.
And here, as I’ve so often had to say in the past, the words begin to lie. No matter the good intent, not only does conscious mind not have the capacity to measure the infinite, neither has it the capacity to describe it.
However, it does have the capacity to experience it.
Now to some practical application -
What we’re talking about now is spiritual life. Life of the spirit. Transcendence.
How can the alliance with conscious mind that allowed us to overcome our denial of the darkness and attachment to temporal light help us define and discover our spiritual life?
If you can connect through one of the old time translations that is your blessing.
If you can’t, here is another way.
First I need you to think about yourself.
In this moment. You in relation to everything out here in the world you know to be true. Think outward. You where you are, in your moment. Out, out into the universe. Allow conscious mind to, as best our feeble minds can, understand your individual place in the universe. Out, out as far as you can project.
Tiny.
You.
Now project your mind backward. Think about how long this universe, this movement has existed.
Tinier.
You.
Now do the same looking forward. How long does your conscious mind reasonably suspect this universe, this rhythm will continue forward?
Long, long, long time.
And you here in this moment.
A bit overwhelming. Words like inconsequential and insignificant come to mind. Can make the strongest of us shaky at times.
But there is another side to this reality of you in the universe.
In all that movement, in all that space and time, in all the repeating rhythms, never, ever has there been another you.
You.
Unique in all the universe.
Finally you.
How precious are you? How precious you are. To be here, now, in this moment.
Given that incredible uniqueness, why should you be surprised that your spiritual life needs to be as unique as you are?
I discovered early in my work with dying folks that when I was invited into someone’s dying, someone who was in that illusive and often temporary state of acceptance, I found myself sharing moments of what I can only call, transcendence.
It was rare. It was momentary.
And what was almost equal to the experience itself was how what I shared had nothing at all to do with the particular path each person was on. My best explanation is that, and again the caveat that, here, the words lie, when these folks allowed me the blessing of sharing their acceptance, I stepped inside both the spiritual labels and practices of both myself and the person who invited me to share. And inside the descriptions and practices the experience was exactly the same.
It was experience of the One, the Tao, the Spirit of Jesus or Yahweh, the Union, or any other of the ten thousand names of god.
It might well be of help to visit www.sena.org. There is a free book there, Remembered gifts and New Directions, and chapters 38 - My God - Your God, and 39 - Thee in me, might help make this clearer.
Were my experiences transcendent? I’m not here to convince you. I don’t want your money, I don’t want to control you, I don’t want or need followers, and I only want to share with you if it is beneficial to you.
With the alliance of your conscious mind you have the capacity to task that fine mind with weighing and measuring the results of your examination of your individual, unique path. You can put it to the task it was designed to do while letting go of what is beyond its capabilities. If what I’ve shared here doesn’t work, you’ve lost nothing. It’s even possible that in your attention to the words I share you might ferret out the truth - for you.
Your path is already marked for you. You have to attend to it. Finding and following it doesn’t require subjugation of the conscious mind, or falling into someone else’s translation.
And while no one can offer you a path without pain (although should you discover one give me a call, I’ll be down with it in less than a heartbeat) I think that Jo Nesbo’s insight into loneliness can be altered. If you will share your path with me the moments of darkness may be faced together, and the lessons you learn will help teach me to more clearly see the next step on my own. And neither of us will be lonely.
I love, you.
- Bill
July 2,2013
