The background to the article I wrote yesterday (1) – the beginning of that particular journey – lay in an Enlightenment Intensive I did perhaps ten years ago now.
I’ve told the story of how I processed a mammoth vasana there, only to find that the place I ended up in was … normal.
Not blissful, not ecstatic, not joyful. Just back feeling normal again, after what seemed a lifetime away. I was shocked.
All that kicking and screaming to end up feeling normal?
I had no idea that the way I’d been behaving under the influence of this vasana or core issue was not normal.
Another word for “normal,” to my way of thinking, is “innocent.” You remember what Pope Innocent said to St. Francis in Brother Sun, Sister Moon: “My dearest Son, in our obsession with Original Sin, we too often forget—original innocence.” (2)
Our Natural Self is normal, decent, innocent. Kathleen’s preferred word is “balanced.” When I experienced my Natural Self some months ago, it translated into a space of deep peace. All else was forgotten but the peace. The space seemed to me balanced, normal, and innocent.
It was as if the balance point “spatially” (the “here”) and the present moment “temporally” (the “now”) constituted a portal into a space of deep peace that was coterminous with the Self. And evidently that space keeps going, deeper and deeper.
To be there, I have to stop swinging out into the extremes, whether up or down, left or right. I have to give something up to be here now: my mood swings, my strong desires, my expectations, etc., things which pull me out of the middle, the center, the heart.
That, as far as I’m concerned, is the greatest part of the practice of Ascension.
Footnotes
(1) “There is a Place Called “Normal,” June 21, 2017, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=288353
(2) The Lessons of St. Francis: How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality Into Your Daily Life, at https://tinyurl.com/y8nh9ctt