⚫The pain and confusion of the dark⚪

It is at least half a century since I lived the pain and confusion of the dark.

How much can I usefully contribute to comfort and encourage you in your dark time today?

In these happy years since I re-joined the Tribe, the peer group, and entered freely into open-hearted communion with like friends, I am rediscovering the world of connection as I go.

After a falling away of fruitless trying and trying, and the beginnings of acceptance had crept into and become allied with my day to day curiosity, the way out of the dark for me was to place myself in the way of making acquaintances and friendships.

It is a step which requires a certain amount of bravery. But not more than, say, deciding to run for that bus, and not just to let it drive off without me.

You are preoccupied. You may feel plagued. Stand back from the troubles inside, face outwards with curiosity and bravery.

Look to immerse your attention in person in the presence of other prople’s lives, however different or trivial seeming to what you feel you are enduring.

By being a listener, by giving your precious presence, merely as a sincere witness, both you and the one on whom who you attend will be transformed. It’s not like change; it’s about transformation.

Things began to dramatically shift when I was curious enough and brave enough to join small groups with regular activities.

After about half a century, I began to notice the mirroring in other people.

Yes, the groundwork during that long time span had been prepared by travels through various powerful epiphany experiences along the way. I have set them down elsewhere on my Facebook page. Search for “epiphany” in my EveryNow blog.

All my life, I had taken it for granted that my light belonged hidden under that bushel!

I had so often played down positive comments about me, even from my Mother and Father, that I had lost interest in myself. I hardly gave my morning reflection a second glance.

I began to understand that I had no idea at all who this person I call myself actually is. It was hard to see “me” in photos of me.

I had stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror. I had reduced my image of myself so far down in importance that I had stopped taking myself into consideration.

I received a terrifying and desperate shock when I was asked to describe my very earliest happy memories. I tried to recall the face of the blissful little boy I remembered who was strolling in a flower meadow in the early 1950s.

To my horror, there was only a pale oval where my childish features should have been clear to recognise! I broke down at the realisation.

I no longer recognised the person others recognised when they saw –  really saw – me.

This is not to say I never saw others. My desire to see others deeply, holistically and using all my intuition, mind and soul had always been accentuated by the ever-present ‘clouds of unknowing’ which surrounded my image of me.

Today I accept without reservation it is to some degree or other perfectly true to say we are all of us without any exceptions at all, amazing, beautiful, miraculous, even angelic beings.

Through my new found contact, sometimes very intimate contact, as in the joyful practise of regular Biodanza, I arrived at a starting point – the basic premise of which is that we are Love.

“I am Love”. Utter tosh? Wishy-washy slackness of mind?

When I first saw those words, it was in 2013. They made no sense. Read them backwards, forwards, in any order, I still thought some key word must be missing.

I was Love-blind.

I began to feel severely challenged when I tried to maintain my closed-off, shut-down, received attitude of “No not me”, which is inculcated into all of us from our earliest socialising years by wider society.

And then I surrendered!

I was obliged to stop and stand still, when I was brought face-to-face with the light of my original self by repeated “mirrorings” from new people all around me.

These were people I had begun to deeply respect. I began to see with my eyes, possibly for the first time in 66 years, the light of other people’s integrity shining with unconditional trust from their own hearts’ source.

I can never dowse the brilliant and beautiful shocking startlement of finding myself, eye-to-eye, momentarily in the shared sacred space of the heart of another!

I embraced – literally – that fact… I am Love. We are all Love.

“Go meet others” probably sounds trite. But triteness here makes it more, not less valid.

I am drawn to say that the unbearable absence of light and the terrible destructive pain of not being able to find some way of your own to fill the absence is all illusory.

Of course the pain is real. But only as real as the strength of desire aroused by the thought of eating some favourite, but unavailable delicacy.

Thoughts such as these that never lead anywhere but into the dark are an ever-present part of our human condition.

Luckily for our peace of mind and our sanity, with a minimum of training, such thoughts can be spotted as they approach, and we allow them to dissolve, long before they come too close, bite, draw blood, and embed.

If you seek the answer, do not question.

There is no question.

Nothing is buried hidden.

There is always only the answer.

What is the answer? The answer is like two children playing Hide-and-seek.

One counts to twenty, eyes closed.

When the eyes open, oh the shock! The other child never ran to hide, but stayed in front and in plain sight, grinning!

We are human.

Our hearts are not designed for loneliness and our bodies are not capable of tolerating much physical pain.

We are beings.

There is no such thing as a vacuum. No such attainable point as Absolute Zero. The reality of an atom is in an energy equilibrium composed of multiple particle-waveforms replete with unlimited potentiality in spectacular extreme motion.

So it is with us! 

A being gains in sentience from other beings, starting with its ancestral origins, and all throughout life and on.

There is no meaning and there is no value in the dark whirlpool.

All any of us need in order to feel a sense of completeness is the witness of true friends. A friend, or an acquaintance with a pure heart, who knows they are constituted of love can always bring me again into the light of my original being for the simple reason that I am love.

Fly! Decide to fly.

I cannot usefully say more. Life is sparkling, ever shifting brilliance. Be dazzled. Go well

~ Love is present EveryNow