When I finished the blog entry yesterday I felt a little down. While it is important for me to be honest about the spiritual path as it occurs for me, deep down I don't want to believe that the only reason I have the kinds of spiritual experiences and insights I have is down to an uncorrected lazy right eye. It is the one thing which keeps me in a permanent state of uncertainty...the fact that I don't know. Also if these experiences are soley as a result of having only one properly functioning eye, then the experiences and insights are not going to be available to everyone like I thought they could be. Available to anyone who has faith that they are possible and the commitment to do what it takes to achieve them. I can't see people going around with pirate like patches over one eye just to have these kinds of experiences. Surely there must be more to it than this.
But the universe always finds a way to ease my turmoil at least temporarily. Yesterday my friend took a book out of her bag saying 'here I'm giving you the loan of this book, I think you might enjoy it, it is similar to yours'. I didn't think much as I thanked her and took it. My friend came in from work and we had a nice conversation and she cooked some dinner. When I was going to bed I picked up the book and looked at it properly. I was aware of a kind of tightening in my stomach when I read 'A personal spiritual journey' and a feeling of resentment that somebody else was writing about their journey in the same way as me welled up which I noticed. . This showed me still how strong my ego personality is. It was a threat to me as a writer which is ridiculous and against everything I stand for. I want as many people as possible to write about and share their journey's. To make the invisible visible and to stop hiding it behind techniqes and practices. So for me to feel this petty jealousy is really shameful.
But I know to look deeper. That feeling is there, it is there. It is not right or wrong that it is there, it is just there. It has been brought to my conscious mind so that it can be looked at without flinching or making myself wrong to have it and then dissolve. This is exactly what happened. All too often what happens is we judge ourselves as bad to have negative feelings of anger, envy but these are all natural feelings which if we allow them to surface without being afraid of them or feeling the need to act them out then they lose their power.
The view that anger is a natural feeling was brought home to me once when I was on one of the meditation retreats in Devon. I can remember sitting in a comfy armchair looking out of the window with nothing much in my mind. Suddenly I had this overwhelming urge to throw a plant that was in the corner of the room out of the window. I had this anger but where had it come from? Nowhere, it was just a natural feeling. I could see it was natural because there was no trigger in the environment in terms of people or an event to set it off. After that I realised that anger is a necessary agent for spiritual growth. If it's not allowed to have free expression it becomes repressed and then becomes charged. At its most highly charged it becomes rage. Needless to say I didn't throw the plant out of the window.
I curled up in bed and started to read the book. It is called 'Hidden Path' - A personal spiritual journey by Vanessa Graham - ISBN No 978-0-9555617-0-2. I was amazed at how alike we were in our thinking about the need as she says to make visible the invisible journey. Her background is that she was a wife and mother who when she hit 50 searched for something to fill the void which was always there. The emptiness that was there even when she was doing enjoyable things. The book is written as a series of essays through which she documents her own life. I would just like to quote from the third paragraph of chapter 1. This to my mind says everything and much better than I ever could. Speaking of entering the consciousness of spiritual awakening she says:
'There is no magic wand that is going to be waved one day and that enlightenment will happen just like that. It is a lifetime's journey where you continually learn ways to make yourself available to it. Do not expect this journey to be easy. It can be challenging and enlivening but never easy. I have had to turn myself inside out to discover who I really am and it is an ongoing process. I have had to revisit, and relive past experiences to find out what made me the way I was, in order to bring about change. With that realisation I had the choice to stay or change the way I was'
This to me is superb writing. A stating of the journey the way it is without any embellishment or making it seem anything that it is not. It is obvious that she has achieved achieved a high level of self-realization and there's no mention of a dodgy eye, so it is possible with faith and commitment. I particularly recommend her chapter on meditation and knowing. She details much about the events in her life and the self-awareness that she gained as a result. I'm interested in those paragraphs where I see increasing self-awareness. Then I will trust that there is the accompanying spiritual consciousness.
What I also look for is some evidence of the movement of energy within the body. I found it on page 93 where she says 'Towards the end of the two weeks (she's referring to a yoga holiday), when I sat in the meditation posture of crossed legs on the floor, there seemed to be a vortex of energy ascending up from my base chakra to the top of my spine. This created a twirling feelings whereby my whole body joined in'. She makes no mention of the surrender which is the usual end point of a bodily experience of this kind although she has a chapter called 'surrender'.
I have just finished reading this book and I would recommend it. It is a raw and moving account of the spiritual journey abeit a personal one. However each spiritual journey has the same stages even if the life events which herald each stage are different. I found it easy to read and authentic. It is more personal and less theoretical and therein lies its appeal for me.
This morning I woke up without any alarm at 6am and got up to do some meditation. It was a struggle. It was time that was the struggle not thoughts. I kept looking at my mobile clock and thinking 'I must have sat here longer than that'...aagh....this has to be the definition of frustration to be wide awake and yet not be able to meditate. It feels like one part of my mind is looking and laughing at the efforts of the other. 3 minutes before the allotted time I could bare it no longer and I hopped back into bed. But there was no chance of sleep.
I heard my flatmate get up and shower and then I called her and we had a chat before she went to work. I think she envied me resting in bed and I envied her going out to her new exciting job in publishing. How ironical life is sometimes. I turned on the radio and lay there for a while. Suddenly I remembered that I had not received any notification of when my next out patients appointment was. I got up and called the hospital. I explained that I was told that I would be seen again this week but I had not received any notification. She went on the computer and then said quite non-chalantly 'you have an appointment tomorrow at 11.45am'!
Now...I had a choice, I could make a big deal that I hadn't received any notification or I could be fun and freedom around it. I chose the latter. I said in a playful friendly voice 'well isn't it a good job that I called this morning then', she answered me in the same sing song voice 'it's good you did'. This only served to further irritate me but I pushed the irritation down and just confirmed the date and time, thanked her and hung up.
In any encounter it's not what we say often but the way in which we say it which either placates or offends. Tomorrow when I get into out-patients I am going to raise the issue in terms of its impact if I had not called the hospital. I think it is important to bring to their attention that their system failed, not to make them wrong but to ensure that it doesn't happen again. This is not coming from the ego personality.....at least I don't think so.....
The spiritual journey is relentless. Sometimes I want to forget all about it. Stop the constant vigilance and interpreting everything within a spiritual context and dare I say it just be normal but I feel that it's gone too far for that now. I think I am writing like this because in the post today came some information from the Lucis Trust. This is the publishing company that publishes the work of Alice Bailey whose work resonates with me like no other. On the spiritual journey the two most important things are Soul and Service. From these everything else flows. I'm creating an access to the Soul but in the realm of Service, apart from this blog which I write with the intention of service, I'm not very active. Deep down I have known this but haven't wanted to look at it.
Today I receive in the post from the Lucis Trust details of a World Goodwill Seminar called Evoking the Soul of the Nations which is going to be held on 10 November in London. Usually I don't attend events like this. I prefer to stay at home reading and keeping myself separate. This event is pulling me beccause Alice Bailey is said to have received her writings through the ascended Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul (D.K). When I was doing my Reiki parts 1 and 2 training the Reiki master had cards of all of the ascended masters and he put them face down and asked all of us to choose one. I didn't think I was drawn to any particular card but when I picked up the one I had drawn it was the picture of Djwhal Khul. When I looked at it I felt a warm glow of pleasure that he was the Master I had picked up. Even though before I did this training I had no idea who the ascended masters were. Neither had I heard of the books of Alice Bailey. All of this came afterwards. It is the Alice Bailey books which have given me my greatest and deepst insights and understandings and for that reason I feel in some way connected with this great Tibetan Master.
What I have just written requires a leap of faith, for me also I have to confess. I have never seen or spoken to an ascended master yet I accept that like the physical world there is also a metaphysical world where such beings reside. I feel certain that the developing insights and intuitions are imparted to me during my sleep from the higher realms. I have no evidence for this but occult literature always maintains higher level ashrams which take students whose egos are now serving the Soul and not the personality. Nothing personal is allowed in these ashrams everything is universal and for the good of the many not the individual.
I'm drawn to one sentence, it seems to be screaming out of me from the promotional copy for this event. It says 'One radiant, creative life, consciously using the heart or throat centres, can carry inspiration to hundreds'. Why is this resonating so much, what does it mean.... It's all a bit much now so I'm going to finish this blog here and watch a mind numbing DVD....
