This is one of those subjects I've been meaning to write about but just haven't.
I think that's a good thing because at the end of the day I really now can say I understand the purpose of the Dark Night of the Soul. Everyone goes through them. You could say that Job in the bible had a Dark Night of the Soul when he was ravaged by every imaginable thing to try and make him denounce God. Although, I personally look at that as a metaphorical tell instead of something that actually happened...it is a good representation of a Dark Night. Why Does It Happen? Dark Nights of the Soul seem to happen when we become to entrenched into a way of life. Sometimes we might feel stuck in some way just before it happens...but the one thing it promises is that it will absolutely break down all constructs we have about ourselves, our lives and the way the Universe works. Sometimes, we become so stuck in our Box of Perception...unwilling to change or move...that the only thing for movement to occur is for everything to breakdown. Most of the time there are little hints before hand that things aren't the way they're meant to be...there are little nudges by Spirit. We can work with these, if we are wise and have learned our lessons, but most often in our Scientific society we ignore them. After all, our gut feelings can't be real...can they? We are so out of tune with who we are we deny our own instincts. The Dark Night of The Soul We're going along and boom! Out of nowhere we lose our job, a family member dies or a relationship ends. Then we are plunged into a life where we question everything. This can lead us to ending up on Conspiracy websites and buying into really harmful ideas. We can want to see the rest of the world punished and suffer as we are suffering. We can end up hating life itself...possibly even suicidal. Or... A Catalyst A catalyst is something that increases the rate of production without a chemical being changed...think of it as a laboratory experiment. If you combine two chemicals they have an interaction. That's what a Dark Night of a soul can be...it can cause a reaction within you. As I said, it can take you into the deepest depression that you know and some people never leave that state of being. Yet, it also offers the opportunity to change for the better...to encourage the person to become a Seeker. The need for an explanation can led to a life that is absolutely transformed. The caterpillar may think that it's preparing it's own tomb when it's forming it's cocoon...but it emerges a beautiful butterfly. The Dark Night of the Soul prompts us to create our cocoon. We can choose to live in that cocoon too afraid to peek out the rest of our lives... Or a Dark Night of the Soul can lead to the ultimate liberation. The Tower Tarot Card Recently, I've been studying the Tarot as a archetypal symbol. Tarot seems to have appeared in Europe during the Dark Ages. They can be studied as archetypes...or universal symbols. The tower card shows people falling as a tower is struck by lightening. The tower represents the perception that we carefully put together about how the world works. When a Dark Night of the Soul strikes those towers crumble. As I said, this can be a wonderful opportunity for self-discovery or can lead to a permanent unhealthy mental state. I can't speak poorly or condemn bad things happening to good people because sometimes it doesn't make sense but it does lead, eventually and sometimes after a long road...to something better. Staying In The Flow After my last Dark Night of the Soul I never rebuilt my personal inner image of the world. I let go of needing a personal construct in order to understand how things work. I realized it's not necessary. The process was a long one, I admit, it wasn't as though I just wanted to let go and I did. Instead, it's more of a process of slowly realizing that it's not necessary for everything to make sense. That there is a rhyme and reason even if I don't know it in every moment. When something breaks down it might lead to the unfoldment of an even better opportunity. I used to try to force my will onto everything...I tried to make the world conform to my little box of perception of how things will be...but that's not necessary. That's not my job...the world is not my circus and the people on it are not my monkeys. Since letting go and realizing there is a much bigger purpose at work...that everything is an illusion that people create within their own mind everything has changed. All of the things that I was super scared of and appeared to be blocks melted away. All of the things I really wanted dearly have appeared naturally with no effort on my part. Life isn't easy. I still get thrown unexpected curveballs but I realize they are temporary. I embrace the temporary part of life...that nothing here lasts forever. Things come together and fall apart all of the time in an endless cycle. I no longer beat my head against the wall wishing things were a different way. I see the wisdom in how things are and I am grateful for it. I keep people in my prayers when they go through a Dark Nigh of the Soul...hoping that they will use it as an opportunity for personal growth that wouldn't occur if they weren't pushed out of their comfort zones. Conclusion Although Dark Nights of the Soul can be uncertain, scary and depressing when we are going through them there is so much hope. There is a silver lining and a purpose if we but see it...and use the catalyst as a means to experience a personal transformation. We can take comfort in knowing that a new state of being is under construction in our lives. We can see them as an opportunity to let go of all the ideas that didn't serve us and the chance to create new ones. We can also take comfort in the fact that all states of being in life are temporary. We are only children for a temporary time. We are only confounded by an abrupt ending in our life for a short period of time. We can adjust to almost any type of situation. Today is temporary no matter how unpleasant or painful the moment might be...and we don't have to perform perfectly every day of our lives in every aspect. We are allowed to make mistakes. We are allowed to be grumpy...we don't have to be nice to everyone. That same feeling makes the moment sweeter when it's good. We know that this wonderful moment of bliss is temporary. So we can allow ourselves to fully revel in it and immerse ourselves in that state of being. We can make small adjustments, like trimming our sail, when we sense these different state of beings. We become less afraid...and trust that things will change because that is the nature of our reality. That trust can be a powerful thing in the scheme of life...like the lilies of the field we know that we will be okay. The lilies don't count the days they are in bloom. They simply are and we can learn a lot from that state of being. Appreciating ever breath...every day...and every glimmer of beauty that we experience.
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The Symphony of Life
In this final Creating Reality blog I want to finish off with Paradigm Shifts. At this point I think it's more than time to switch into the more spiritual aspect of things. In order to really understand how creating reality works and why we bother to create reality we need to look at it from the big picture of the Soul's narrative. This is, you could say, the connecting fabric between these two blog series. I am attempting to build this blog in a way to convey my current focuses. However, instead of just dumping you into the middle of a process that has developed for about twenty years I'm crafting each plate to be easily digestible. The Creating Reality Blogs are just the appetizers. Each soul in this world has a particular unique song. That song joins the chorus of all souls on this planet creating an even more beautiful and complex song. In my own journey I am currently learning to refine my own personal song and to have the courage to sing it. The Paradigm Shift is a very important aspect of this process. My Experience I first learned about Paradigm Shifts in High School. I was coming out of my more religious phase (1994-1996) when I first encountered the idea. We talked about a lot of strange subjects in my Honor's English Class. At that time I was very shy and not very good at participating in group activities. This was just many of the strange but unique spiritual situations I found myself in as a child that prompted me to have a never ending Spiritual Focus in life. A Paradigm Shift is: "A fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions." More or less, it is an idea or perspective that causes your view of the world around you to shift- to change into something different than it was before. You then begin to approach life in a different way. The First Paradigm Shift My first Paradigm Shift was reading the book Journey of Souls. I found the idea of reincarnation, let alone life in between lives, to be incredibly strange. I had recently delved deep into Christianity, reading the bible from cover to cover and Christian books such as The Case for Christ. The book of Matthew is still my favorite out of the entire bible. I even had several bible quotes on the door of my room when I was a teenager. The strange thing, when I was reading Journey of Souls, is that it did not contradict the bible. In fact, as I read the many case studies I was reminded of passages of the bible...and that was my first Paradigm Shift. Instead of rejecting Reincarnation because hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Christian authorities in the past and current time rejected it I discovered that it actually fit nicely. This is much like those who read or watched Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The idea that Jesus family has descendants is one thing entirely to comprehend but to add to it that Jesus might have had children is an entirely other. However, the idea does not contradict the bible in any way but it does contradict thousands of years of religious authority figures teachings. These teachings, when you apply a little research, seem to be based on ideas that existed over a hundred years after the death of Yeshua by people who did not know him. (Not to mention his true Jewish name being lost in time). Shifting Constantly Evaluating our Belief System is a very healthy habit that should be given serious attention. However, I did not include an important part of that idea. When we realize a set of beliefs are negative and produce negative results, we reevaluate it and apply a new belief- then we experience a Paradigm Shift. Usually, when I approach an idea that causes a Paradigm Shift I start off feeling dissonance (mental disharmony). Ideas that challenge my view of life gives me a sort of tingling feeling. Those who have a rigid set of beliefs feel uncomfortable and might turn away from the feeling. However, once I became used to it and learned to enjoy the challenge I discovered something fascinating. These days I seek out that which causes dissonance and my Paradigm is constantly shifting. I'm constantly readjusting or tweaking the way I see this world. I kind of consider it like Doctor Who when he's in the T.A.R.D.I.S. and he's turning dials or pushing levers to 'dial into' the location he wants to go. With each adjustment that I make in my perspective I feel I'm getting closer to the experiences I want to have. The people who don't believe that they can change anything, that they are stuck in a box, that reality happens to them instead of being created by them...probably can't imagine a life of constantly Shifting Paradigms. I feel sorry for those who live in such a world of black and white. Wrong and right. I can no longer imagine what it is like to live in a world without the color of the rainbow...for each perspective I have experienced as I go about this journey seems to have its own tone and color. In The Flow When I was young I read books such as Celestine Prophecy and The Way of The Peaceful Warrior. Both of these authors wrote a story that has the basic set up of the Heroe's Journey (which I will coverlater). Joseph Campbell was the first to tune into the story of the Hero's Journey, realizing that it is the basic set up of any good myth or story. No doubt it was Joseph Campbell's contribution to Star Wars that touched the heart of millions making it a main stay in popular culture. In these cases the author used the methodology of parables that Jesus used to illustrate spiritual concepts and the spiritual journey. Jesus used these because the ideas he taught were so foreign (such a different paradigm) to the ordinary people he had to speak their language. I personally think, as a society, we have graduated from this basic idea. People are initiated and are ready for the openly frank discussion of spiritual concepts. There is an urgent need to put away the secrecy and divulge the information as many have had their spiritual appetite whetted long ago. Now in these stories they would talk about some mysterious thing called the Flow or the Zone. I couldn't comprehend it when I was younger. For the Star Wars people, let's call this The Force. Then I worked at UPS and while loading trailers I experienced 'The Zone' that athletes describe for the first time. There is this moment where the mind and the body act in unison but there is a strange detachment. There is no thinking, no planning, no trying to make something happen...you just do it without really thinking. I would create beautiful seamless walls of packages in that zone without trying. I experience this also when I'm making drinks as a barista, I seem to move with the fluidity of a dancer without a real conscious thought...just instinctively effortlessly creating. I am also in the flow when I'm writing. The conclusion at the end of this blog is one of the moments where mind, body and soul seem to work in unison so that the words simply flow out and onto the computer screen effortlessly without much 'thought' on my part. Constantly shifting paradigms in the flow is my favorite experience at the moment. Life seems to unfold much as a blooming flower does with an over abundance of experiences in tune with my current spiritual focus. If there is a discordant note I know that there is something I need to focus on in my belief system that needs to be tweaked so I may bring that into harmony. Conclusion Life is similar to a symphony. Our belief systems are the musical notes. If we live in a way where there are only a few notes we experience a simple song that is bland and repetitive...often times jarring. When we open our eyes to other ideas, we shift paradigms, we begin to add notes to that symphony and sometimes entire instruments. Then we can start to experience the whole symphony instead of focusing on two notes or a single instrument. As long as we are focused on perfecting an instrument or note we will never experience the entire creation. However, I cannot judge those who choose this focus in their current life as that too is a perfectly worthy experience that will lead to other lives where they can experience the entire song of creation by perfecting their unique part. When we hear a discordant note in the symphony we can seek out the belief system causing the disturbance. We can then research or meditate on it until we reach a paradigm shift (there are always options and choices)...that then change the note to one of harmony. Eventually, we will be able to flow with the music, adjusting it here or there as needed. We aren't necessarily the conductor, but we work with the conductor to create the symphony so that all of us (including the conductor) can share the experience. Once we are working in harmony with the whole our experiences simply flow naturally just as a brook flowing in it's naturally cut channel without any forced conscious direction. |
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Thank You For Visiting
Brave Soul! May Your Journey On The Path Of The Seeker Bring You Joy and Peace! I'm currently posting every Saturday. With a new addition the family I have pre-scheduled most posts through December 2022. Full Moon Posts will contain up-to-date content when I can get to them. Thank you so much for your support and understanding! This is a place where you can encounter new spiritual ideas that have helped me develop as an Individual On The Path of the Seeker. Take or Leave this information as you see fit. Archives
April 2024
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