CreativeMythologyCreating Personal Mythology

“Did you come here for forgiveness,

Did you come to raise the dead,

Did you come here to play Jesus

to the lepers in your head?”

“One”

U2

This morning before I got up I entered into a shamanic meditation, a guided meditation to my medicine place. A place of spiritual solace gifted by the Creator, however you perceive him to be. A place to receive guidance, to connect with teachers and guides

Over the past months I have neglected this source being too focused on the tasks in front of me as a Catering Manager. Whenever I have entered the space it has only been experienced superficially – no real depth to the communications within. And again this morning this was so. No depth of experience. While two of my guides were present I felt largely ignored by them, something that I have patently been doing to them.

One of the stimuli for this exploration of Sacred Sorrow was a dream a few weeks ago. In it I had found a piece of land I felt I wanted to buy on a corner in my old neighbourhood. It was an empty section with mounds here and there and hedges in the middle and the surrounds. I went away to source the finance. When I came back there was a bohemian couple living on it. I felt aggrieved that I’d missed out on this property. Not only that but the man came up to me and reached into my pocket and removed a shiny glass ornament, dripping wet, from my pocket with a red and blue symbol embedded in its centre. At the same time a piece of pounamo (jade, greenstone) with crocheted wings flew out of another pocket and alighted on the nearby hedge. I was noticing a sense of deep sadness within me as this unfolded. Underlying the sense these items were being taken away from me was another feeling of them being still present.

There’s a sense of powerlessness in some of the imagery. I know I’ve not been doing myself any favours in other areas of my life. Allowing my addictions a greater hold – TV, computer games, cigarettes, email, coffee. I feel powerlessness as I consider them and the ways I can break the habits.

As I ponder the last thought I see that by transferring that sense of powerlessness on to the objects themselves there are ways to divert myself from the sense of addiction. Seeing the objects as powerless diminishes their hold on me and my sense of personal power grows stronger.

Addictions are certainly manifestations of the “lepers in my head”. The verse in “One” those words come from also include references to forgiveness and raising the dead. By playing Jesus to the lepers in our heads we’re able bring to life that which may lie dead or sleeping within our psyches. Unable to forgive my own faults how can I expect to forgive the faults of others.

How often in the silence of my mind do the lepers take up residence and I hear myself saying I should do this, I should do that, I should have done this, I should have done that!? It occurs typically when feeling a need to confront my addictive ways. I have heard it described as “the tyranny of shoulds” or “shoulding all over myself”. There is a sense of doing things on a whim when should is mentioned. Powerlessness kicks in when I add have to the mix. I missed an opportunity. Poor me and into a downward spiral!

And yet “ONE” holds a positive message as well. As I consider it from a point of powerlessness I see the lyrics pointing towards an impotence in relationship not only with another but also with the world itself. Perhaps the “raising of the dead” can be acknowledged as we work with those parts of ourselves that we have left for dead in the aftermath of shoulds. Can I forgive myself for not standing up and being definitive in the path of a storm of shoulds? Can I hear myself saying I AM or I WILL when a “should” is like looking on the face of the Medusa, poisonous serpents flailing about her head, threatening to turn me to stone.

One love, One blood

One life, you got to do what you should

One life with each other

Sisters, Brothers

One life, but we’re not the same

We got to carry each other, carry each other

Can I find the power within to help myself in turn offering the same to others struggling.

Resources:

Going Home to Your Medicine Place Guided Meditation. Academy of Shamanic Studies

( http://www.shamanic.ac.nz/index.html )
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I visited Auckland last weekend to see “The Who” in concert. Absolutely Magic! Their last visit was about 40 years ago. Their music is expressive and powerful, laced with a virtuosity that defies description. It needs the raw experience to be fully appreciated.

Before the concert I had been able to wander the streets in what may have appeared to an observer as an aimless fashion. I feel guided and what seems random to others I know will have a purpose for me.

In my seven years in Auckland I had never entered Myers Park. When I came to the corner of Mayoral Drive and Queen Street the stairs leading down into ferns grabbed my attention. There’s something soothing about the shadowy places where ferns flourish.

Myers Park

The path leads up the hill towards Karangahape Road, between these beautiful old palms. The noise of the city seems to miss this little vale and there is a quietness. Where the trees end stands the statue of Moses, a copy of Michelangelo’s donated to the city by a benefactor early last century.

It seemed that this was no surprise even though I’d never visited this place before. The figure of Moses has been dogging my steps lately. I pick one of Doreen Virtue’s Ascended Masters cards

Doreen Virtue's Ascended Masters Cards

most mornings before embarking on my day and the Moses card and its call to “Take Charge of this Situation” is coming up regularly. I was uncertain as to which area of my life this pertained to. And to find this physical manifestation of what had been a simple card seemed to make the message more urgent. I knew I’d have to come back the next morning. I had a concert to attend.

I got back from the concert around midnight. This allowed me enough hours sleep that I could get up earlyish and revisit the statue. As I sat and allowed impressions to come I was struck by the sternness of his look and the strength he held. Closer observation showed the tablets almost hidden from view as though to Michelangelo important to have included them without making them the most important aspect of Moses.

Some person who I guess imagined they had a sense of humour had tried to apply lipstick though not very well, and had left kiss marks on his chest and shoulder.

I allowed the power of the statue to take a hold in my psyche and then walked through the peaceful park and out onto the streets of the city. It’s quite a privilege to watch a city wake up. The city seemed to be at peace with itself in the early morning, the sun, low in the sky, illuminating the faces of buildings and casting shadows. The homeless sleeping rough.

The city stretching itself as businesses open, people run, breakfasts are served and coffees fuel the populace. Little green carts with rotating brushes spruce up the footpaths, cleaning the teeth of Auckland.

Moses

I order breakfast and my thoughts keep returning to Moses. Red lipstick. The Red Sea and the parting thereof. I vaguely remember hearing something of a natural phenomenon that may have caused this and yet there is still the power required to gather the Israelites and lead them out of an Egypt beset by plagues.

These ideas lead me back to where I’m at in my life.

What path do I need to clear in my life to lead me to the promised land?

What are the things that are plaguing me at present that I must lead myself away from?

Blessings

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I’ve had a challenging week. I’ve been working and it has meant not attending to my blog. I’ve felt something amiss. Back to working in kitchens. Standing on my feet in one spot for hours. Preparing the same old dishes for the same old rugby games. Feeling the pain in my feet at the end of the day, looking forward to a day off and the pain to recede. Knowing its going to be the same old again when the next shift starts.

Arriving home last Wednesday and turning my computer on I found the message, “msconfig is missing or corrupted – use recovery disks to reboot your system”. And I knew what that meant. I’d loose everything that was there and I’d have to start anew. Starting anew. And that was the way I saw it a new start. I was back online by later that night. Downloading updates. My laptop is circa 2002. And the speed of cable broadband. A few hiccups and stumbles. Still stumbling even now. A toddler just getting up on his legs for the first time. Finding it interesting with both Firefox and Internet Explorer on my system after the recovery. Downloads not working in Firefox will work in IE.

Questions arise when things aren’t working properly. How do I make this work. Are the resources I have limiting what I am able to achieve. I was working on a website for a friend just prior to this happening, inspired by the tutorials I found on YouTube, and the templates in HostGator. I can do this I thought. And the more I used the little knowledge I had the worse it got. Am I meant to do this? I’d love to put this together for him. Playing with the templates in Photoshop. Sorting through the code, but not really feeling I know enough about more complex pages. Sure I’d put together a simple page but somehow this was different. I need to honour my limitations and be honest about them and either seek help or pass the project on to someone more knowledgeable.

The Code. A funny thing happened to me while I was in a bookstore. I found a book. The Code . ByTony Burroughs. It is subtitled 10 Intentions for a Better World. Was my sorting through html code in fact a pointer to a deeper code? A code poses questions. A code delineates an ethical basis for living. And The Code certainly does that. The 10 Intentions are: Support Life, Seek Truth, Set Your Course, Simplify, Stay Positive, Synchronise, Serve Others, Shine Your Light, Share Your Vision, and Synergise. Each of these intentions will beg a personal question or questions from us. How do I? What might I? Who with? Where will I?

When we set set an intention and walk with trust into our day we are posing a question of Life, of the Universal Intelligence, – “How will my life unfold now I have set this intention”. No doubt there will be wonder and mystery.

I was inspired by my blogger colleague Marvin D. Wilson from Free Spirit where he poses the question, “Should Christian fiction provide answers or lead us to questions?”

Maybe that question could be posed for not only Christian fiction but also for fiction of a spiritual nature. And non fiction as well. As Marvin says, “In non-fiction, say the memoirs of a Christian missionary, or a theological discourse, or a texbook for seminary, then yes – of course – you are writing for Christians … present your best Christian ideas and revelations and lay out your premises for leading a good Christian life. Give me your scholarly interpretations if you have exemplary intelligence and enlightenment on the subject of Christianity and are able to explain the path in new and refreshing ways”.

These can also lead to questions about whether what is interpreted is a truth for me personally or whether I need to walk a different path in order to discover my personal truth. I prefer to exchange the words Christian and Christianity for the words Spiritual and Spirituality. They offer a more universal context.

Mythology arises from the spirituality of ancient and not so ancient cultures. And as a result we find questions arising as we study different cultures. Though there is a certain disbelief to mythological stories what are the things we can believe? What are the elements that we question? Are there questions we imagine will lead us to an understanding of our spiritual natures.

Questions create answers. Answers create meaning. To look more deeply into ourselves we need to ask the deeper questions of ourselves. And the more profound the questions the more wisdom becomes rooted in our psyche. I heard the term Coyote Teaching from a VisionQuest protector trained by the Tracker School in New Jersey when he visited Christchurch early last year. It seems this method invites trainees to look more deeply into whatever process is going on for them and to pose more questions based on what they discover.

Each question we pose of Life opens up more questions for us. There is no doubt that each question posed will open up cracks in the shell of the ego allowing the light of divinity to shine more brightly as time unfolds. Through questioning the Divine Sculptor chips away at the stone of our being carving out the beauty of our soul’s form.

Nothing is certain when following a path of intention. We’re not sure what the universe will provide. In the unknowing is a darkness and the deeper into darkness I go the closer I feel to the light.

Blessings.

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Somehow the pictures don’t capture the wonder of the day.

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What follows are ideas from the Soul Life audio retreat of Thomas Moore. A peaceful resting place on the journey to discover what a soul-connected and soul-centred existence might feel like. The qualities Thomas Moore speaks of regarding the Soul outline an internal rather than external reality.

Qualities of the Soul

Individual – He describes the soul as being individual. For me this idea asks that when I engage my soul consciously I may have to form my own values rather than those I inherited from my parents, my peers, teachers, politicians and others to whom I may feel beholden. I make my own choices of how my life will unfold, of how I imagine my identity in this world. This is a concept of having freewill. And in this I may have to be eccentric. What is it that is eccentric about your life? What is it you do that makes you different? Are you celebrating that difference?

Vast – The soul is vast as the words of Heraclitus expressed in the previous post. I see from my bodily perspective the physical universe, our solar system, the galaxies far beyond our reach and yet I may have something similar going on in my spiritual self. A vast potentiality within. A universe of possibilities to explore as a human. Logos, Moore explains as being the “mysterious, unfathomable nature of soul”. I was drawn to the word as it is used in English to describe the study of different areas (geo-logy, astro-logy). In a way this soulpath is a way to discover the mystery of who I might become in this physical existence. My Creative Mythology for this lifetime. From this vast potentiality within, what will I become?

Madness – Plato says the soul may require me to do something that to others will appear crazy. This mad act may be, by all appearances, detrimental to the life I’m living at the time. If, as has been suggested, that we have a sacred contract to fulfil in this lifetime then this madness may precipitate learning experiences for us or move us on towards the very things we have contracted to do. Or maybe open us up to a new way of being and give us a fuller experience of life itself.

Complex – Moore says the soul is also complicated. I wanted the explanations for the way my life unfolded to be simple so that I could just put it behind me and get on with living. Moore suggests that there are many influences woven together that make up our lives. And some of those influences come from the way our extended families functioned. I imagined that if I could lay the blame for what appeared to be my dysfunction in this life to parents or grandparents then all my problems would be solved. Not so. These threads that I inherit and spin together with the threads I have been given are part of the weaving of the larger tapestry that is life. I may not know how some random act of kindness I perform will affect the beauty of that larger tapestry. So I embrace the threads I am given and acknowledge those who played their parts in my creation.

Cyclic – The wheels of soul turn eternally in the grand scheme of things. And as I spiral upwards I may require in the interests of the divine evolution, a downward slide. And it maybe one step forward and six steps backwards with the soul. The same themes may come up. Sex, money, relationships. Why the difficulties with these universal themes? Have I not got it yet? Have I not yet understood the difficulty. And there maybe only one theme behind it all. The soul crying out for me to be conscious of it. Difficulties are the soul calling to me. What does it want? And as the soul engages the difficulty may fall away. I breathe a sigh of relief and with the next revolution my tyre is punctured in another way. Life is never boring with the soul engaged. An extra gear that clicks in when Life might be at its lowest, or perhaps I’m racing ahead and getting out of touch with what is important.

Shadowy – Another reason why I felt these ideas may hold a key to what I’d been going through was based on some of the ideas of Carl Jung. He spoke of the animus & anima. The animus being the male aspect within the female; and the anima, the female aspect within the male. And both being integral to the nature of the soul. Why are they shadowy? In today’s world these aspects are little understood and what is not understood can lend shadow to our world especially if these aspects are making their presence felt in the unconscious. Because they want to be acknowledged. They are part of the archetypal realm. In that, they are a part of the shadow world, they are formless, even though on a subtle level they have a certain power. They are abstractions, and enable us to form experience around them. They engender emotion as they present themselves. Jung’s description of archetypes include the images of them being; “active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions”; and he also calls them “inherited possibilities of ideas.” The ‘idea’ being an image that holds the deepest or greatest potentiality, in the grand scheme of things. And those potentialities remain in shadow until they come to the fore in the ebb and flow of life. As they come into our consciousness the light of our awareness shines upon them.

Jung also protrayed the anima as having four stages in it’s development.

First Stage: Purely instinctual and biological relationship.
Second Stage: Romantic and aesthetic level still with sexual characteristics.
Third Stage: Love with the aspect of spiritual devotion.
Fourth Stage: Wisdom going beyond even the most holy and most pure.

I can understand the first three stages from my own experience and also the fourth. My imagining is that a wisdom that goes beyond what is most holy and most pure would not be easily understood by everyone. My understanding is that all experience even that which does not appear outwardly to be holy or to be pure is honoured in the Godhead. And so a sense of detachment is required. Honouring the pain, and the darkness of our existence while acknowledging that it will in time pass.

Also the shadowy nature of the soul can manifest through those experiences that we envision as having dark overtones in our lives. Those times when we go through a passage of suffering, when the only friend we imagine having is our misery, when we’ve sunk into a blackhole and are unable to find a way out, the list goes on. And yet it is through these experiences, if we can allow ourselves to feel fully the emotions which arise, and to embrace the darkness that we begin to see the beauty of this shadowy place.

Other – When I mention the anima/animus aspect of the soul I’m drawn to Moore speaking about an otherness quality to the experience of our individual soul and also his ideas about the daimon, which he translates sometimes as angel or guardian. He talks about living in tune with the daimon. Honouring what the daimon requires of us in this lifetime. Being in accordance with what the daimon wishes to evoke within us he refers to as “eudaimonic living”. “Eu” in Greek meaning good. To the Greeks the daimon was a personal intermediary between god and human. They make possible the birth of the soul into the physical body. In some ways we both possess and are possessed by the daimon. The path to be able to fully express through our daimon is blocked on occasion by experience of the demons of our nature.

Sandra Lee Dennis has written of her experiences in “Embrace of the Daimon” and for her the imagery was what might be termed demonic until she allowed herself fully accept it in all its montrous nature. When this happened the imagery transformed into something beautiful. What seemed most figural in her stories were snakes, either singly or as groups and there were other manifestations, human and animal. And this seems to tie in with Moore’s ideas that this other may present not only in one manifestation but also as a multiplicity of images.

Resources:

Thomas Moore
Soul Life:How to Nourish and Deepen your Everyday World. Available here
Thomas Moore’s site:Care of the Soul

Sandra Lee Dennis
Sandra Lee Dennis – Embrace of the Daimon

Carl Jung – http://www.cgjungpage.org/

Anthony Stevens – Archetype: A Natural History of the Self

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