Tosia H Zraikat

Being 'Spiritual'

 

 It has become fashionable to talk about spirituality as something that comes upon us with minimal effort on our part.  It has become fashionable to consider ourselves spiritual because we meditate, or go to ashrams in India, or light candles or live more environmentally conscious lives. All good things to do, for sure, and they can certainly be part of a truly spiritual life. But they do not make you into a spiritual person, not by a long shot.

Spirituality is a state of consciousness - an inner state of lovingness, compassion, self-awareness, self-acceptance, forgivenness, patience, connection with something greater than ourselves that I call God -  and being spiritual means actively and intentionally striving towards that state so that we can make it our usual, our normal state of consciousness. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being a spiritual person, one who naturally and easily expresses his or her spiritual being in the midst of everyday life,  can take a long time, our whole lives even, and we might - no, we will slack off now and then, lose sight of our goal, lose heart because we are human. Even the most spiritual human being can lose heart or get tired of following that path.

That's what spiritual practice is for, why it's important to be connected with a spiritual teacher or tradition, not only to help us get to that spiritual path and walk on it, but to help keep us there when we don't feel up to it on our own. That is all part of the spiritual life.

Even when we lose our way and fall back into a totally un-spiritual way of being, we can still pick ourselves up and get back on the path. Falling back can be a good thing sometimes, a wakeup call that we need to pay attention, keep our eyes on the goal and not take our progress for granted. Falling back and losing our way can be very humbling - and that is a good thing.

You see, spirituality is a commitment, a persistent effort to be transformed -  to consciously and intentionally transform our way of thinking, our way of seeing the world, our attitudes to others, how we treat others into a way of being that is both human and spiritual, the very best of our humanness.

It's not good enough to just hang out with 'spiritual' friends or go to 'spiritual' retreats. The test of a spiritual life is what is happening inside of you. Are you being transformed from a self-centred, self-interested, ego-driven person into a kinder, more selfless, giving, forgiving, patient, compassionate person? Does your behaviour in the world reflect that? Are you looking deeper into yourself to find and weed out all those habits you've developed over your lifetime that keep you from recognising the holy light within you and making it shine?

The way of Spirit can be a hard way, because it requires that we dig through all the mud that is inside of us to find and bring forth our inner divinity, our spiritual nature.

And that takes a lot of digging, a lot of humility as we find how much mud there really is - all that resentment, that anger, those unkindnesses, fears, selfish actions, all that pride, that desire to be special, to be admired. An awful lot of mud.

But it is also a joyous way, for in that mud, in that toxic sludge lies the seed of the beautiful lotus flower, and as you dig and clean away the toxic stuff, that seed is putting forth roots and stem. One day, that stem will rise high above the mud with its precious bud, the self-realising You, and that bud will open to reveal its unique, pure beauty and radiance - You - to the world.

Don't think you have to be a Lakshmi, a Jesus or Buddha to flower like that, that you have to be something special. No matter what your state of consciousness now, You can be, you have within you the divine potential to be that beauty, that radiance, a blessing to yourself and others.

 

 One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus is untouched by water.

                                                         Baghavad Gita

 

If you want to live as a spiritual being, prepared to be humbled, to have your illusions about yourself shattered, and your self-importance deflated. For humility melts away your inner resistance to God.

We all know that humility is not much appreciated in our society. It's seen as weakness, being a shrinking violet, not something that will get us recognised, get us ahead. Yet humility is truly the foundation of spiritual awakening, and along with love, the rock-solid foundation of a spiritual life. Without humility, we cannot open ourselves as fully to God consciousness, to the Christ or the Buddha or any other Teacher or Master as we must before we can be lifted up to a whole new level of consciousness.

How easy it is to get stuck in pride! We all want to feel special, every one of us. That's why every spiritual tradition teaches the necessity of eliminating Pride, Vanity, and of learning to be humble. That's why every spiritual tradition worthy of the name offers to genuine seekers the guidance and support of a teacher, a priest, a minister, monk or mullah, and why the teachers themselves have spiritual mentors, more experienced, wiser individuals who, among other things, help to keep the teacher's pride in check. That's why even the wisest, most spiritual of them turn humbly to God or whatever Higher Being they revere for solace, comfort and guidance. Gandhi did. The Dalai Lama does. The Pope does. Socrates did. So did Yeshua, the Christed One.

As one of my teachers often says, 'You cannot do it alone!'

If you are serious about following the spiritual path, you will have to get dirty, get into the dark, deep places of yourself.

For it is in those dark places that you can find and pull out all that is choking the seed of your higher self, holding it fast in the mud and not letting it rise. That takes humility, the humility, first, to accept that that sludge is inside of you, then the humility to find it and weed it, to clear away the mud that suffocates.

Then, that seed of your sincere desire for God, your yearning to be your True Self in the world, that seed that was being suffocated can now take root in the rich soil. But if you have not gone into that mud, cleared away that choking tangle, and planted that seed, you can be sure that your flower, your spiritual potential will not be able to rise and blossom. So do it.

Do the work and trust that eventually, you will feel your spirit emerging into the light. You will find yourself in Love - loving yourself as you are, loving others more and more, even those who have hurt you. When Love becomes your very sun, constantly sustaining you and shedding light on your every day decisions and choices, you can be sure that your true spiritual nature is blooming like mad in the world. Your task thereafter is to keep it blooming, clearing the way for seed after seed, flower after flower.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJs_JlWcPQc

http://mythologos.typepad.com/blog/2016/03/first-humility.html

 

 

 

Diving for the pearl of great price

Parallels in Tarot and other symbol systems

 

“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
                                                                                                                    - Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Nature

 

On my travels last month, I did some intensive inner work with my Tarot cards. After a few days of this, it dawned on me that the symbolism and practice of the Tarot are in some ways similar to the symbolism of the Medicine Wheel and the Pentacle, and that drawing on each of these systems could add a whole other level of significance and insight to my readings.

The forms and layouts might be different, but the processes are fundamentally the same: inviting the energies of the symbols in their particular placements to speak to me, and recognising their relationship to each other.

 

What triggered this huge (for me) insight was experimenting with other layouts than the one I usually use, the traditional the Celtic layout.

First, I did a personal reading with a four-card layout described in master Tarot reader Nancy Antenucci's little gem of a book, Psychic Tarot:

 

 

                                           Pentacles / earth

                   

                        Cups /water                            Swords / air

                                           

                                            Wands / fire       

 

The results were so significant, so deeply relevant to my life and current situation, providing such helpful insights into my own psyche and experience that I was eager to do more experiments with the four-card layout.

I also noticed that that layout almost corresponded with the Medicine wheel:

 

 

 

 

(image from mayankin.com)

Since I use the Medicine wheel in my spiritual practice of calling on the powers/energies of the four directions, I did another reading with the cards laid out according to the Medicine wheel, with mind on top, wands on the bottom, and earth and spirit on left and right sides.

 

 

This is my Medicine wheel/Tarot 4 card layout:

 

                                                swords/air, Mind

 

  pentacles/earth, Physical                                         wands/fire,  Spirit/Creativity

 

                                               water/cups, Emotion

 

 

In the centre, I also lay a card chosen from the Major Arcana to represent the Sacred Pole of the Medicine wheel that connects Mother Earth and Father Sky. In the Tarot reading, I interpreted that centre card as representing an overall spiritual perspective on the readings of the other cards from my spiritual guide or the Divine.

Once more, with this new arrangement, I obtained a most powerful and insightful reading, and that night, had a dream (nightmare, actually) that shocked me into a new and very disturbing realisation about an important past relationship and an unresolved issue that I still carried from it. It took several days to recover from that and attempt another reading.

 

Having already recognised correspondences between the  pentacle and the four-card Tarot layout and Medicine wheel, I thought I'd try a reading with a pentacle layout, in which spirit is treated separately from the elements earth, air, water and fire.

  I guess because I tend to do readings from a spiritual perspective, inevitably relating all other aspects of person back to spirit, the pentacle reading didn't work so well for me until I included the Centre, the World Pole that represents the descent and ascent of the Divine, the Holy.

That allowed me to read the top point of the pentacle, the point of spirit, as spirit being manifested or not manifested in my life, as indicated by the other four points, and then to read the overall spiritual perspective from the higher sources, the uncreated Mother/Father, the Divine Principle as intuited or suggested from that central card.

 With such good results all around, I am now totally convinced that it doesn't really matter what symbol system one uses, for we are being continually offered guidance. It is all around us, like a ceaseless ocean running all through the cosmos for our erudition. It's just a matter of learning how to use the tools, read the signs and trust a higher wisdom to open our eyes to the message.  Gratiea Dea.

 

 

Nancy Antenucci and Melanie Howard's Psychic Tarot (2015) is simply the most helpful Tarot book I have found (and I have a few) for developing and refining one's Tarot reading abilities.

 

Medicine Wheel Animals

The very first mandala I made was a layout of things gathered in my garden ... rough, spontaneous, and invested with much meaning.

 

(Medicine wheel of the Four Directions.)

 

Over time, the symbolism of my medicine wheels has become more refined as I have gained a deeper understanding of what I want to express and what symbols to use. Much of it, though, is intuitive. Every time I make or enact a medicine wheel, I gain insights into the significance of the directions and the symbols I am using, so each wheel carries much meaning for me.

My medicine wheel also provides the pattern for my calling of the powers of the five directions: north, south, east, west, and the vertical of the Central pole or Tree of Life that draws down to me the blessings of Mother Earth and Father Sky.  For a while, I kept trying out different power animal symbols until I chose some that felt just right to me .

My power animal for the East, direction of beginnings, the new day, inception is the deer, to me a symbol of grace, lightness and alertness. She reminds me to walk with care, aware, watchful, and to approach all things, all undertakings in the spirit of grace and beauty.

 

For the South, direction of work, productivity, growth, activity, and plants, my animal is the bee who labours long and unselfishly for the common good, and whose work produces something of great sweetness and value.  So must I humbly and diligently do what work is required of me, for the greater good of all.

 

My power animal for the West, direction of holding, retaining, storing, is the little squirrel, who gathers and stores acorns to nourish itself and others through the cold, barren times. He reminds me to be fore-thinking, be prepared for whatever may come, to hold onto life's sweetness, lessons learned, wisdom gained. But also not to store or hold onto resentments, regrets, anger or fear, anything that will pull me away from goodness and truth.

 

For North, direction of wisdom, the ancients and elders, teachers, withdrawal and cold, I chose the snowy owl. My first choice was the wolf, one of my favourite animals, then the bear, but there is a cold and aloof beauty to the white owl of the Northern regions that reminds me of the principle of non-attachment.  The owl sits silent, patient, unnoticed then quietly falls upon its prey. So must I  learn from the wise, the elders and teachers to flow with silent power and grace towards my chosen object.

 

Interpreting a dream- two ways

The more I work with my dreams, the more I find that the most important message of a dream is not always the most obvious. If a dream is particularly clear, or if it stays with me, I make sure to look deeper into it, not with intellect (which is always limited by its current beliefs and expectations), but by getting in touch with the unconscious mind.

I find Jung's methods particularly helpful for dreamwork.  For my most recent dream, I used his 'active imagination' method, where one brings a particular dream image to mind and lets the unconscious make its own associations. Here's how it worked for me.

 

Dream

I am sitting on the floor in a lovely, elegant but sparsely furnished house, near a fireplace, unpacking boxes of books for the house owner. Out of one box I draw a large, thick book bound in very finely worked soft leather or suede, very beautiful, and lovely to touch.  It is a Russian-English dictionary, and it is surprisingly light - unrealistically so.

At first, as I carefully put the book away, I think it is the whole dictionary, but it turns out to be only one of four volumes.

Somewhere in the dream, I am praised by the house owner for translating something from Russian into English. I tell him that my Russian is very poor, but it doesn’t seem to matter, and I am pleased to know that he is satisfied with my work.

I return to unpacking, noticing a few other cartons to the side, different from the cardboard boxes that I am emptying, perfectly square, well made, lidless and empty. I wonder what will be going inside them, and feel that they are waiting for something special.

Associations with waking life
For me, interpretation is a process that begins with considering the surface content. What associations can I find between the dream and my waking life? Most obvious is the importance of books. I love books, I have many of them that I simply cannot bear to give away, and keep collecting more, and I am constantly reading them. I have a beautifully made book from Venice given to me my youngest daughter a week AFTER this dream, different from the dream book but also covered in finely tooled leather, and quite special.

I also love language, and am moderately fluent in Russian, my mother-tongue, and somewhere among my books, I have a very heavy, very thick two-volume Russian-English dictionary that I have never used.  Then the house, it was just the kind of house I used to dream of living in, a gracious home in the quiet countryside. 

Everything in the dream reflected things that I value and want to include in my life: books; knowledge; beauty; grace; refinement; craftsmanship; peacefulness and solitude, as well as having my work valued and appreciated.

First Interpretation
My initial interpretation of the dream’s message was to do things I love to do, to do them well, and to trust that others will recognise the value of what I do. This is definitely a message with great relevance to my waking life, because I often feel that I am not really good enough, and that I will never be appreciated for myself. I have also received this same message in other dreams where, most often, I am going to teach a class and find that I either cannot find my materials, have no idea where to go, or I cannot get there. I sometimes awake from these dreams with my heart racing wildly from anxiety and frustration. So I thought that I understood the dream, and that the book represented learning, knowledge, the beauty of mind and such.

I have always been interested in symbolism, so looking at dream symbols is a big part of my dreamwork. Using Jung’s active imagination technique for getting into the symbols, I explored the major image in my dream, the book, and here are some of the inner visions that came up:    

         pages coming together on their own as if by magic

        old man writing in a small stone room,     

          girl sleeping with head on book,    

book embedded in ancient stone wall

                  hands yearning to write 

          words arising, each as an image

             angel watches a writer at work

  an open book is a landscape of hills with trees, like a child’s painting,  

        someone painting a small picture 

       walking into a book that is a great dark forest with unknown beings watching from the shadows   

All about books, I thought: reading them, writing them, losing oneself in them. Of course!

Second Interpretation
Last night, however, I dreamed about that dream, a short dream of which I recall only bits and pieces, but those bits and pieces gave me a whole new insight into the dream and the  symbolism of the leather book. 

In last night’s dream, I was in that great dark forest that I had seen during my active imagination exercise, but the rough path I was following disappeared into an increasingly dense forest with tangled undergrowth. The forest began to feel restrictive, darker, gloomier; my initial delight turned to discomfort, and I noticed goblins and strange figures looking at me from deep shadows. What had at first seemed a place of refuge and enchantment, a place where I could read in peace, now felt like a prison, a place of entrapment from which I might not get out.

Still in the dream, I recalled the man writing in a small dark room (another image from the Jung exercise), and I realised with a start that he was stuck there, alone in his ivory tower, and had forgotten the world outside.

Waking from that second dream, I understood in a flash of insight that the book of my dream was also the dark forest, the lonely tower, the dungeon, the place where I retreated from life. I had not opened the leather book in the first dream because it was not life, just a collection of words, a place to hide from my fear and self-doubt.

 

My first interpretation of this dream had been true, but only on one level of meaning. Now, I had another, and both were equally valid, for dreams, like symbols, are never what they first seem to be.

 

(Images: Dreamer, by Edward Burne-Jones;   Snow White, by Arthur Rackham;   St Jerome in a dark chamber, by Rembrandt.)