heretical thoughts...
It is not the never ending battle with pathology that kills the ego…
it is the girl that kills the ego.
The route of constantly doing battle with pathology and shame, revisiting story again and again, hoping that by staying in the mud we will somehow find our way out, may be the very belief that keeps us stuck there. No...pathology, like mind doesn’t have integrity. Mind just wants to think and doesn’t care what it’s thinking about. Maybe pathology is just a sub-set of thinking mind; a little feeling is brought in...shame, judgment, caretaking and we think we’re doing our work, the perfect morph. So just as the nature of mind is to generate thoughts (which we think we have to engage)...so does pathology keep generating story...trying to engage us, figure it out. Just as we can’t think our way to awakening; it is experiential, we can’t think our way to becoming the girl soul. And so we are constantly picking at the scabs of our wounds, never letting them become the healed scars that mark our way home. We misunderstand and think that by staying in that place we will heal, find our way out...we won’t. That is what mind/pathology feeds on...we only think we’re moving through. It’s a closed loop.
It is the girl who leads us out...becoming her...feeling all our feelings...especially those that make us (ego) collapse. She is the lotus flower...not staying in the mud below...but ever rising through it. What did we think breathing water meant? When we are feeling it all...our pain...our love...our joy...our fear...our loss...all the process feelings where mind/pathology has no foothold. With each underwater inhalation we take in our feelings...we feel them...and in our willingness to let them move through us as they will, we are, in that moment, breathing water. Where there is the girl soul there is no room for unhealthy ego, because she is everything ego isn’t...the simple need to love and be loved.
The ultimate goal is not enlightenment, clear light mind…
it is again, the girl soul.
Enlightenment...schmenlightenment...I’m starting to suspect that this is still just another mind state, attractive as it may seem. Pathology carries the dark attraction, where ego thinks it can get in there and conquer it, that we will become better. Enlightenment carries the bright attraction that wants us to believe that the nondualistic connection with the ultimate truth is some sort of blissed out non-feeling place...when what it may be doing is very dualistic...maintaining our separateness. The ultimate truth may be the most nondualistic place of all…to love and to be loved...the whole essence of existence...in the body and out of the body...the eternal. Angels, Gods, Archetypes, the boy, the girl...don’t come to us modeling a Nirvanic mind state; they come to us with passion and love, inviting us to feel it all. People often say that ‘God is a verb.’ The need to love and to be loved may be the verb that is God. So I prefer the idea of ‘waking up’ to becoming enlightened. Being awake means I’m present to all that is arising...truly present. Being awake means I’m willing to feel all that arises. For me this is the place I would like to spend eternity...feeling it all...within my soul...within relationship with other and the Divine.
Mary Jo Heyen
Archetypal Dreamwork Practitioner
Dream sessions in person, via Skype or on the phone