Hello beautiful family,
We've heard many analogies comparing this transition to a rollercoaster, a merry-go-round, a road trip, a journey, a transition, the bursting of a dam, a flood of light and energy, and many other things. I'm going to make another analogy here that I believe is more like a homology, to paraphrase Bruce Lipton. I hope that you find it gives you strength, wisdom, hope, and peace.
I see life as a dream. In my travels around this labyrinthine, spiraling dreamscape, I have experienced the same things over and over again, realizations that build and build until I finally become as if I am lucid inside this dream. On my way I cross the same thresholds and face the same gatekeepers. Each time, the details are different, the experience is a little bit different, because throughout it I have grown and changed. It's pretty striking, however, to realize that the same themes, lessons, people (or types of people) and general feelings seem to cycle through my life in a way that paints a pretty clear picture. For example, at times such as these, I find that I always turn to Joseph Campbell... so, I must be crossing another threshold.
Each soul is different, each path is different, although in all my optimism I’d like to think we are all going to get to the same place eventually. That place where all are free to be as they wish, where no harm is done, where life is as abundant as our unbridled imaginations, where love is the norm and fear does not exist. Heaven? Paradise? Utopia? Nirvana? I don’t know what to call it, but we all know it’s there in our collective heart, and we all want to get there. The path is not a straight line, and it’s full of lessons to learn - that’s all I really know about how to find that destination.
Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (my favorite book along with the collected works of Rilke and Mists of Avalon), said, “Instead of clearing his own heart, the zealot tries to clear the world.” I guess we can all call ourselves zealots in this case. I know that you all know, though, that it’s true that when we process information, make choices, heal, dream, love, fear, distrust, analyze, realize, surrender, fight, overcome, succeed, fail... it comes from within us and not from outside of us. I know that you know that this RV process has been encouraging us -requiring us, even- to go within, to clear out the muck and mire in our own psyches that have been holding us back from reaching that awakened, heavenly state. And I know that we are all very altruistic, that it wouldn’t feel right to reach Paradise ourselves, but leave the people of Earth behind. “All go or none go” has a deeper meaning when you put it in these terms. So I think it’s all right to have zeal, to want everyone to be lifted up, to think of this as a zero-sum game. I’m sure that’s because it’s part of what we came here to do - to lift up everyone we can into their highest potential, to at least give everyone the option to grow in hope, love, and abundance. It does appear that many on this planet do not even have a choice but to live in a survivalistic, fear-based reality, and we want to give them the best shot at becoming fully awakened embodiments of love, just like parents try to give their kids all the opportunities they had as well as the ones they feel they didn’t have. Those who awakened before us gave us a hand up, so I guess maybe we see it like we’ve come to a plateau, and we want to reach back and give people a hand up to the same plateau - the end goal being we can all move on into the new paradigm together. Is this the correct way to be? I don’t know. But it is the way I choose to be, like many of you.
Let us not forget, however, that we are also here in this biological suit to have a conversation with ourselves. Our lives are just one big chat between our conscious self and unconscious/subconscious self.
I’ve been told, as have many of you most likely, that when you dream, every symbol, setting, and person in that dream is an embodiment of a part of you. I find that looking at my waking life this way is also accurate. Especially so when I notice the same types of themes and characters popping up in my life at times when I’m feeling or thinking a certain way. So when I say that I want to assist the masses to live their lives in peace and prosperity, is that because there is still something inside of me that needs to be lifted up? When I feel that the people in my life care about me very much but do not really see me for who I am, that they only care because they see me as a reflection of their own desires, is that because I’ve achieved a certain level of self-love but I still do not understand myself, that I’ve been trying to use myself as a tool to get what I want instead of getting to know myself, really experiencing my own potential? When I spiral past the same experiences over and over of forgetting and remembering, as I fly through past-life memories, as I realize I was looking at something but not really seeing it, as I run away from something or someone only to find myself facing it/them again… am I really just playing hide-and-seek with my own subconscious?
It’s empowering in a way to see the world around me as a dream I’m creating, or helping to create, and to try my best to remain lucid while still allowing events and experiences to flow. It’s empowering in a way to think of all of this as a way to become fully conscious by viewing as if in a movie everything my subconscious is trying to show me. To be able to be lucid in this life-dream would mean that we could create whatever we wished with ease, and that is certainly the goal of raising one’s consciousness. Is the process of spiritual awakening really just awakening inside this dream? That is certainly a profoundly liberating idea.
Like Joe Campbell said in the same book, “The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.” It would be tricky for the only partially-conscious being to realize that the spirit within us has the power to create. Maybe that’s what “they” know that we don’t? Egos with power running amok on this planet and here we are trying to use it responsibly, go through the steps in order. Sounds about right.
It’s also very lonely to see this as a dream I’m dreaming. I don’t want to think of all of you, of my family, of the people I love, of all the people on the planet, as merely symbolic representations of a lesson I’m trying to learn. Merely characters in a dream. My own face reflected in a hall of mirrors. If I can get over that, though, I might actually be able to make my inner dreams into outer reality. A happy ending/beginning. Another trip around the wheel, but this time fully awake.
“The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“And then a memory from Avalon surfaced in her mind, something she had not thought of for a decade; one of the Druids, giving instruction in the secret wisdom to the young priestesses, had said, ‘If you would have the message of the Gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats, again and again; for this is the message given you by the Gods, the karmic lesson you must learn for this incarnation. It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.’”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
“Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Time to cross the threshold. I hope you join me.
Love,
Your sister Sarah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yam5uK6e-bQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUlTtxufQes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3RFuJ15U_k
“And then a memory from Avalon surfaced in her mind, something she had not thought of for a decade; one of the Druids, giving instruction in the secret wisdom to the young priestesses, had said, ‘If you would have the message of the Gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats, again and again; for this is the message given you by the Gods, the karmic lesson you must learn for this incarnation. It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.’”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
“Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Time to cross the threshold. I hope you join me.
Love,
Your sister Sarah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yam5uK6e-bQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUlTtxufQes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3RFuJ15U_k