Death - letting go. Participating in an end, sometimes The End.
What does it mean to die your thousandth death?
Perhaps even one thousand in a single lifetime. I feel as though I have just left my own four digit death scene, leaving behind a someone whom I no longer could be - becoming as I am, continuing to Be by letting go of what no longer Could Be.
I was asked by my spiritual teacher to visualize what balance looked like in my life. At the time, I felt very much out of balance between my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies and was out of alignment. I also was in a bad place with work and knew I needed to get back to a health balance.
Kindness, Tolerance, and Acceptance are kind of like the Three Musketeers of spiritual protection. Don't ask me which one's Porthos or Athos or Aramis, but suffice to say, you are probably D'Artagnan in that mix (as you'd like to join them). There isn't an assault by any evil Robespierre that these three can't out-maneuver and overcome.
This recent New York Times article (http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/travel/17Ecuador.html), with its favorable description of an ayahuasca ceremony experienced firsthand by the writer is, I believe, one further indication of the Western world's growing acceptance of ayahuasca shamanism.
Why are we so attached to outcomes? Don't we know that change happens, whether we participate in it or not...whether we resist it or allow it.
There is a flow to all things. A living, ever changing flow. It is like a song. Its like our emotions. The world, as it is, is like this. The earth is like this.
In the quest for truth, I find, more questions are made than answered. Almost as if the universe itself is trying to make it as hard as possible for personal development. The farther I travel along my own personal path of understanding one thing seems very clear, every question I answer, the more fractalized the information becomes, like some type of mutating weed.
To me, many difficult situations and problems in life seem like a chinese fingertrap. Resistance is futile. When one puts their fingers in a chinese fingertrap, their first reaction to get out of the trap is to pull away from and out. This makes it harder and just about impossible to free one's fingers from the trap.
It’s been about 34 weeks since my last entry on Evolver. In that time I have come to many realizations that I am still trying to grasp the essence of. I believe one of the biggest problems of our time is having this need to care so much that it is affecting our clear judgment or should I say our ability to be non-judgmental toward ourselves and the world we live in.
Moderation. Something that I find so incredibly important. When I encountered my first bout of enlightenment I felt like it was a shotgun burst...but in reality is was more of a burst of light. In this burst of light I understood everything there was to know. But in reality the burst of light was just that, a burst of light. The darkness follows soon after. There is nothing wrong with this.
As we evolve and bust through our gender-identity roles, we see changes across the board. Some of the more dramatic shifts come with embracing homosexuality and transgender issues.
We are all subjects of our own culture. We see our everyday world through a lens crafted by our enculturation. I am not saying this is a bad thing. American culture has it's low points, as does New England culture, as does rural town culture (all categories I would place myself in). All of these cultural identities also have wonderful, and often times, beautifully quaint aspects.
I'm new to this whole spiritual growth thing, as of a few months ago. I had always been interested in spirituality, and I was always an accepting, relatively kind person. Although up until earlier this Fall, I was very cynical, depressed, and doggedly agnostic; and I was pretty OK with it.
Acceptance - is it really all that's it's cracked up to be? I never really got it personally, I probably never will.
If you accept the current conditions as they are, there will always be people who do not; these people shapes societies, have shaped the past, and will shape the future. These people are the power players.
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
