It was a day of struggling to find the presence of perfect poise. I only felt it momentarily a couple of times. That moment of first connecting with it was long past and the necessities of life seemed to be battering at the door. Find employment, let go of your addictions, follow your dreams, find your passion, open yourself to beauty, be grateful for all that you have now.
As has been the pattern for the last few weeks I began by posting. I wasn’t sure if it was my best that I was giving. I had in the back of my mind a movie I was wanting to reconnect with on Sky. They were playing Scent of a Woman, one of my all time favourite movies. The plot summary is at the link. Al Pacino is brilliant in the character of Lt Col. Frank Slade. Chris O’Donnell is very accomplished as Charles Sims who has taken the job of looking after him over Thanksgiving weekend. Slade takes Sims with him to New York on what he’s planning will be his last hurrah. He plans to commit suicide after allowing himself a few last indulgences.
There are many wonderful moments when you’re touched by the soul of the characters, in particular Frank. Beneath his tough exterior there is the softness of a soul that has experienced moments of bliss and these are rendered even more exquisite by the fact that he is blind.
Charlie shows his mettle when confronted with Slade preparing himself to take his final step. Charlie is also struggling with a demon of his own unsure of what to do in the circumstance.
As Charlie has saved Frank, so Frank takes Charlie’s side in the film’s final showdown.
That’s the power of perfect poise. Allowing integrity to be your guide. That scene always brings tears to my eyes. I’m moved by it. I wonder where that place might be in me. The power to change my life. Have I yet to reach that low point where I say enough is enough? That depth from where power finally comes in such potent fashion. I’m in awe of the sight of someone standing in their magnificence.
I’m at a crossroads, in fact each conscious moment is a crossroads where I can choose to stand in my power or shrink away. Frank says he always knew the right path but never took it because it was too hard. It seems this is a mirror for my own life. Each time the right path becomes clear and I’m asked to choose it, I have shrunk away from it. And yet life will keep offering the right path to me maybe unto death. Each time the circumstances seem more difficult not to take it. It’s like life is saying to me, “What are you going to do now, pal”.
Ok. I receive your message. It’s loud and clear. Life wants me to expand my conception of who I really am. It’s as if the waves of the big bang are still expanding the universe and everything in it and we can’t help by being carried along with it. The line “Get busy livin or get busy dyin” from The Shawshank Redemption comes in here as well. What am I doing when I feel most alive?
Having said that there is stuff going on the background moving me forward. Paths taken. I know I’ll get there. Those around me are assisting in however I experience them.
On my way to the Gnostic seminar late in the afternoon I had a loop going on in my mind about everything being bullshit, illusion. That maybe those proponents of being in the light are increasing the amount of darkness we experience. After all is not the world always in harmony? Is it not always seeking balance? The feeling I get from these Gnosticians is a sense of this balance without a need to create or bring more light to the world. They are there with what is.
In the seminar they were speaking about their Creation Myth. In their experience the path is the divine finding its way downward into Man and then once established within, Man then projects this sense of divinity outward into life itself. Part of that experience they call The Being. The way it was written up I imagined it was an entity. As I contemplated it further and connected with it as a quality and sensed again the wonder of perfect poise.
Before I arose this morning I read a little of the The Serpent Grail. It made reference to the Gnostics and their relationship with the snake in the form of Ouroboros (the snake with its tail in its mouth) which to them symbolises eternity and the world soul. And again the coiled snake loops back to the labyrinth I was speaking of yesterday, the journey within.
The labyrinth was also likened to the way our brains are unfolded within the skull. I was present to a conversation yesterday discussing enlightenment by having the corpus callosum severed. I googled it this morning and while this particular excerpt didn’t mention enlightenment within this context it did say that people that had undergone this procedure could do some things seemingly impossible.
Wheels within wheels within wheels…..
Blessings
