Time for truth
"you very well may completely embrace the entire universe before you embrace the totality of your own humanity."
-Adyashanti
Having had a week where every spiritual trick and transcendent practice brought only temporary relief from a mental and emotional battlefield I decided that perhaps it was time to stop trying to escape and instead start paying attention to what is REAL-ly going on.
This is no easy task for me as self inquiry brings out the worst in my ADHD and the best in my intellectual self defence mechanisms, but I stuck at it and began trying to probe the thoughts with which I most easily identify, the beliefs they are founded upon and the emotions they generate. This feels at times like an inescapable labyrinth and despite my apparent lack of progress I did at least manage to develop a new determination to get to the truth of what was going on.
As an example of the way my mind works, even the idea of 'truth' ignites an internal debate. "There can be no absolute truth", "truth is contextual", "life is a paradox in which what was true yesterday is no longer true today". By the time I have played with that for a while I am suitably distracted and too tired to delve deeper!
However, this theme of truth kept coming up and as luck would have it I watched a great interview by Sandie Sedgbeer with Robert Rappin and was so moved by his authenticity that within hours I was talking with Robert about his work. His master class is called Speaking Truthfully and, with a gulp, I am embarking on a series of sessions with him, determined to at least learn to speak truthfully to myself.
Those of you who know me realise that such a spontaneous action is not typical, and I believe that my prompt commitment may have set something in motion, perhaps Goethe was right when he said "the moment one commits oneself, then providence moves too." Something in my commitment allowed my attention to be drawn to relevant information which, although not new, I was hearing in a different way.
Reassured by Adyanshanti's assertion that being totally honest with ourselves is the hardest truth of all, I kept listening and feeling, often through sleepless nights, trusting that my truth (or a version of it) would eventually begin to reveal itself, or I would at least recognise it in the words of others. Paying attention works and those words kept dropping in from all angles: the most open conversation I have ever had with my Dad whose dementia took leave for an hour; exchanges at work, with my kids and clients were all pointing me to something I had known at an intellectual level for a long time but was able to really feel at last. They are expressed in a quote from Suzy Miller...
"...love really does have to start with us and regardless of what we've learned about ourselves, what experiences we've had, our patterns will remain until we love those aspects of Self that we were programmed to believe are unlovable."
The years I have spent trying to understand and unpick my patterns, and in particular the deepening spiritual search have at times, paradoxically, distanced me from my human experience. My attempts to live 'better' have dismissed my emotional and mental confusions and pain as illusory, somehow not real and a distraction from a deeper truth. That focus on a deeper truth, in my case, trivialised perhaps the most relevant truth of all and that is that the pain is real, certainly at the level it is experienced, and any suppression or rejection of that simply delays and compounds the suffering. My withholding love from any aspect of myself and my striving toward some idealised version of me where the pain simply couldn't exist is missing the whole point of the human experience.
The very force which pulls the human experience into alignment with those higher spiritual realisations is love. Love closes the gap between the two, and it is by loving the whole of my humanness, the beauty and the horror, that the pain is released.
By withholding love from myself I have been unable to love as fully and as deeply as I would like. And that hurts. That is the pain. This insight has given me an increased awareness and understanding of my patterns and behaviours and if I am to complete my education on Earth, which I sense in my case is to learn to love fully and deeply, then I must choose from love, and that starts with self.
No easy task but hopefully providence is on my side.
Wish me luck....and love,
Bill