This message was attributed to the Oracle, and inscribed at the Temple at Delphi, in Greece. Note that wisdom states to first know thyself, and then the knowledge of the Universe and God may become available.
- Does love come to, from, or through us, if it ever comes at all?
- Why does the racing, turbulent, “monkey mind” develop, causing deprivation of peace of mind and the absence of sacred silence?
- Why do many decent, caring people remain unacknowledged for their worth by their communities until their final eulogy?
Do you have any interest in finding the answers to these questions, and do you perceive that they are related to each other?
If your answer is “YES”, then you are already on the path to healing, and the following missive may have value to you..
The empyrean realms of human experience are reserved for those willing to consciously unhitch their spiritual wagon from their troubled pasts and skewed understanding of life. In the lifetime journey of self discovery, therefore, some of the hinterlands remain beyond the reach of those not in search of such realms, such as the superficially oriented, indifferent or spiritually antagonistic traveler. There must be a deep desire to see beyond the limited vision of the self, to get to the deeper reality hidden within the soul. There, the potential for an inspired and higher powered human experience lies buried under the detritus of a traumatized history. This can be perceived as being dangerous territory for the uninitiated heart and mind, and often elicits fear and distrust of the process, even though profound healing may result from this interior journey.
My intense desire to “Know Thyself”, coupled with the incredible spiritual strength and wisdom of my life partner, Sharon, helped to guide me back onto a long forgotten, though profoundly influential, internal path of memory. At the path’s starting point, when I first became verbal, began the creation of my own internal tomb for my spiritual potential. A lifetime of not adequately addressing and healing from the disease of my spirit led to two profound insight experiences in 2017.
For the first cathartic event, I was preparing to go to the Pilates class that Sharon and I attended each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at our athletic club. Typically, I get there a little early, so that we can warm up on an exercise bicycle, with a little aerobic activity that I still enjoyed participating in. I no longer ran, having retired the last year after a lifetime of enjoyment, and pain. It was 9:15, and I was fully prepared to leave, while Sharon remained on the telephone, talking with a friend. As it turned 9:19, I spoke to her, in my most innocent of voice,
“Can we go now?”
Sharon had a series of humorous and minimally derisive responses that I won’t repeat, but three things that she said coincided with me entering a “spell”. I felt the presence of something so basic, so fundamental, so raw, so real, so hurt, that I raged for a couple of minutes, declaring several times:
“THERE IS SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL HERE!”
The trapped energy of a lifetime was released. I became aware of a pain so deep, and so all-encompassing, resulting in an anger from a source that I had never touched before, at least as a verbally conscious human being.
Sharon and I went our separate ways for a few hours, while we both tried to understand what the hell had just transpired. We had only two arguments or angry exchanges our entire nearly three decade relationship, and this exchange was quite shocking. Leading up to this experience, I had been intensely exploring the entirety of my life experience, having written 70 pages about my early childhood, maturation process, addictive and self-destructive cycles, and glimpses into higher possibilities for living. All of this writing had placed me, without realizing it, into the psychic world of the pain and suffering of a pre- four year old being (I developed the capacity or willingness for speech very late, at nearly four years of age),
After a meditation, I had a realization. My wounded essence had actually cried out for the first time and I actually listened to it, without my ego repressing it as it had for 61 years. And I also saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents.
I finally had experienced the most basic nameless suffering of an ignored child, or baby, and I have now given it verbal description:
“MY VOICE/CRIES ARE WORTHLESS, AND I MUST HAVE NO VALUE, AS NO ONE RESPONDS TO ME, THUS I DON’T FEEL LOVE WHEN I NEED IT MOST. I MUST BE ALONE IN THIS WORLD.”
And, a most insidious false assumption about life and love came to me at age 5, a little over a year after I began to talk.
“If there is any love in this world, I have to compete with others for its grace and experience”.,
As a lonely five year old boy, I began to fantasize about saving someone’s life, so that they would feel obligated to love me. I also learned to attack myself by minimizing my own value to others, so that they might take pity upon me, and spare me from their own desire to be punitive. Ultimately, it led to the idea that I would kill myself when life had lost all meaning, and the accompanying pain became too great. . My “tricksters” were already well established, and erroneously informed my perceptions from the very earliest of ages.
Sharon paid the price for a couple of hours, while I witnessed the wounded baby within me, and I paid attention to its long muted cries. Through this process, I had an insight that still informs me daily.
I saw how we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding according to the dictates of our “heart center”, which in most people, ESPECIALLY MEN, has been scabbed over by our own early spiritual wounding. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women and children are usually victimized, and/or those with sensitive and/or non-confrontational natures.
“Our unhealed emotional issues and traumas become entombed within our bodily tissues”.
When our personalities have been formed by the layering of our egos upon our own unnamed, unrecognized dark/unconscious energy, we end up with an energy exchange dynamic where we “project” our shadow onto others, and make them wrong for it, not recognizing that we were the source of our misplaced judgement. That judgement may have arisen from one’s own personal experience, and/or drawn from the experiences of others..
We just can’t quiet our minds long enough to listen with our hearts to what is being said, and respond accordingly with our heart. We are much too eager to respond with ego programmed responses, which, typically, are based on incomplete perceptions or someone else’s ‘knowledge’, and it remains our attempt to control other people’s perceptions and experience through linking our own unhealed energy with their own.
In our attempt to be “heard”, we instead try to program people, unconsciously, to behave and react more in accordance with our expectations. When they don’t (they rarely do, unless they are our impressionable young children), we are very disappointed, and feel rejected, and, in the absolute, we feel betrayed by the sum total of exchanges between the parties.
Why do I submit such intensely personal information? I do not want a life that has been lived in vain. I also see a world where the majority of us still suffer from the same, basic issues that I have tried to describe here. Even amongst some people closest to me, denial reigns supreme, and I have only a small measure of hope that the “personal truth” that I am trying to convey here will actually be heard, and applied by others that I care about, which now includes the entirety of our planet Earth.
“There is something fundamental here.”
As a baby, my parents placed a blanket around my baby body, and deposited me in a car in their garage so that my father could get at least 5 hours of sleep a night. My father was “chasing the American Dream”, and worked two jobs at the time.
I don’t need to remind any of my loved ones of the profoundly damaging effects of denying love and interactive time to a developing human being. What I might need to remind myself at times is that others, no matter what their age, or how much that I think that I know them, deserve my undivided attention, as they attempt to reveal who they are in this moment.
It is funny, sometimes when I share some of my creative work (which, incidentally, just started happening in early March of 2017), I get the very strong impression that some “important” people in my life just don’t have the time to listen. Oh, how that trickster tries to convince me that nothing has changed since my infancy.
Another clue about our own, or another person’s listening intention, is when we try to share a profound life event, and are immediately run over by another with more knowledge of the subject. Sometimes we, or the other, either have too much book knowledge, we have the certificate, we already have read about it on the internet, we have memorized something from a class that we already took, or we have a friend who has already “been there, done that!”
Trust me on this one. If I do not want to grow anymore, I will stop listening to what others are really trying to say. If i don’t want to be of service to my fellow-man/woman, I can just stop listening to what they are trying to express, and just layer my own ignorance and judgement, over somebody else, and not let them reveal to me who they Really Are in this special moment.
Our religious and political leaders are masters at this, as well as family members who promote their “control dramas” in the place of loving, open communication. Please don’t inflict this same treatment on the ones you love. It is like putting a blanket around our heart and soul, and putting us into the car, so that those with a dehumanizing or monetizing philosophy can continue to oppress others, while keeping themselves spiritually asleep.
We all deserve to be listened to. I don’t need to remind any of my loved ones of the potential of the damaging impacts to our relationships with others, by merely not taking the time to listen with our hearts, to the other’s deepest meaning. Most of my closest connections already practice this, and do not intentionally ignore the needs of others.
We are all developing human beings, no matter what our age. And, we are all God’s children, and God speaks through us, whether we can hear the “truth”, or not. Sometimes the “truth” is so difficult to hear, that we shut down emotionally, and we either ignore what is said, or substitute our own story for what the “other” is trying to communicate.
What is it within me that causes such a disproportionate reaction to other people’s deafness or indifference towards me?
UNHEALED TRAUMA.
It is in “knowing thyself” that one finally comes into conscious contact of what is the foundation of our own limited sense of self, so that we can mindfully manage and consciously dismiss those lies generated from our own traumas. Our unconscious traumas, many of which have been internalized since birth or before, are guards who stand at the gate preventing our access to our higher possibilities. When we remove those guards, we access the sacred, and secret vault that is within. We are then free to wander upon new paths of consciousness, where spiritual prosperity reigns supreme, and “the Universe and God” may reveal their true nature.
The awareness and the healing of childhood trauma places us squarely on new paths of consciousness, which leads us into sacred realms.. Without such freeing insight, we continue on the older, more familiar paths of painful existence, where replication of errors of perception continue, suffering predominates, and the profane reigns supreme.
Please see into self, and find the willingness to be set free from its pillory, to reveal our Self.
For most people, healing requires perseverance and patience, to bring the us the fullest measure of healing. And, until the final release from ego’s grasp, we must remain vigilant through insight and mindfulness, catching ourselves whenever we stray back upon the old paths. I took several photographs of my baby and early childhood self, and grieved with these images of self my loss of innocence and healthy self-esteem.during the early years. It is heartbreaking work, and the floodgates of tears opened up, threatening to drown me, Yet, this grief, like the unexpressed anger, are the most important contributors to the letting go of the old, familiar lonely path of feeling ignored and unloved by the world.
It is important to acknowledge that we tried to love ourselves since birth, and we also tried to love those who did not appear to return it back to us.
The truth is that our world does not heal, until we do.
“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”—Anais Nin
The new name for the guards preventing our entry into our eternal self is Anger and Grief. We must identify their source within us and face them directly, without judgement or condemnation, or we will be prevented from assuming our rightful place in the spiritual universe.
We can’t give to others what we do not feel to be true about our self.
We can save the world . . . from our limited sense of self.
Our anger and our grief are the keys to the door to our lost kingdom.
Once the inhibiting power of trauma is recognized, the desire for freedom erupts, In the seeing of this embedded trauma, the seer is transformed, eventuating in liberation of the heart and mind from the pillories of the past.
The Universe and God preexisted our civilization and our religious and philosophical misinterpretations. Our unique self preexisted our family and our culture’s misinterpretation of who we really are.
The journey of a thousand lifetimes culminates in the union of the Universe and God, and our unique Self.
Look out from our new eyes. As far as we can see, unto eternity, is our Self. How we see our self today determines the quality of our life, and of our relationships.
