We cleanse ourselves of our core issues or vasanas and we separate ourselves from their residue – our conditioned responses.
The statue’s lineaments are freed from the marble. (1) And what we’re left with is our normal and natural selves.
More conditioned responses go off, but their intensity lessens over time.
Surprise, surprise, we’re just normal again! What we do is natural. How we speak. How we react. All of it normal and natural.
And we ask ourselves how long have I been away? And we’re told “thirty years,” “a few minutes,” “the space of a dream.”
I want to be normal and natural again. I’d have fought it like the plague decades ago, when I loved the extremes of drama, but I surrender now. I’m tired of kicking against the thorns.
I want to be normal and natural.
Ye must be like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven. I’m ready to be like a child.
Footnotes
(1) “Withdraw into yourself and look. … Do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautified: he cuts away here, he smooths it there, he makes this line lighter, this other one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you this, too.” (Plotinus in Elmer O’Brien, ed., The Essential Plotinus. Representative Treatises from the Enneads. Toronto: New American Library, 1964, 42.)