A Time of Purification?

Triggers just seem to keep going off. I have to be supervigilant not to launch into extreme thoughts and behavior.

And not to then swing out onto the other extreme and super-protect myself from them, until the guardian again becomes the guard. (1)

Giacomond

How to stay in the middle and yet be strong, resolute, determined? This is truly Giacomond’s territory.

Part of my job is to give a running narrative, an ethnographic account of my passage through this territory and the others leading up to Ascension.

This stretch must be what Homer meant by picturing Odysseus strapped to the mast and letting him hear the siren’s song.

We’re all strapped to the mast and obliged to hear our siren’s song in this stretch of the passage. If you’re like me, our deeply-hidden issues and often-childish thinking are now arising to be seen and acknowledged.

Jesus tells us:

“There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” (2)

I think we’re in the time of self-revelation he spoke of, a time of purification for us. The criminal shall be stopped (this seems to be happening) (3) and the seeker shall be purified?

This time isn’t what St. John of the Cross meant by a “dark night of the soul.” (4) But it’s what we commonly mean by it – a really bad time, a time to hunker down and get through.

There’s very little chance I’m (or anyone else is) going to emerge from this looking good and sounding right, either in our eyes or in others’ eyes.

The desire to look good and sound right is a large part of what keeps a vasana in place. We have to be willing to look bad and sound wrong if we’re to get through this one.

When I look at the vasana that I just went through – or rather am still going through – I can focus on how right I was or how far I take things.

I can be highly principled and yet not acknowledge that the real issue is how far I’m taking matters.

As a justification, in my mind, I’ve taken my Dad’s anger issues and hooked them up with my past-life military background.

I justify my willingness to speak my mind anywhere as being fearlessness. It isn’t.  Except in my own mind. It’s simply bad manners in the eyes of 99.99% of others.

This is me reparenting myself on the matter of my “straight-talking” (another justification). I find reparenting necessary to counter the habitual tendencies. Vigilance without paranoia.

I have this lingering sense that this is not the last core issue that I’ll face. (5)  I’m reminded of Isaiah:

I think this is that very process. Increase the energies lifting us up and whatever wants to hold us back rises to protest. But every crooked place shall be made straight, whatever we say or don’t say about it.

My words of comfort are of course that, relieved of the burden of our dark side, we’ll feel radically better, as I did in 2015, basking in love.

This release of old baggage is en-lighten-ment. We’re rising to a new level of vibration both by the effect of the rising energies and by our ability to drop our limiting burdens.

But first they must be exposed to at least our own gaze.

Footnotes

(1) See “Sitting on My Inner Child,” Aug. 6, https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=312346

(2) Jesus in Matthew 10:26.

(3) See  Trump & the Q Plan – From A to Z in “A Look at What Trump and the Q Team have (Actually) Accomplished,” July 24, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2020/07/24/a-look-at-what-trump-and-the-q-team-have-actually-accomplished/ GAoG does not agree with all the views stated in the video but posts it to point to the series of meetings President Trump ids alleged to have had in 2017 and their purported outcome.

(4) He meant a time in the seeker’s life when all the senses go still, silent, unseeing, etc. One believes one has been abandoned by God.   See Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans. Complete Works of St. John of the Cross. Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973.

Bernadette Roberts gives a good, succinct description of it:

“In experience, the onset of this process (of God-realization) is the descent of the cloud of unknowing, which, because his former light has gone out and left him in darkness, the contemplative initially interprets as the divine gone into hiding.

“In modern terms, the descent of the cloud is actually the falling away of the ego-center, which leaves us looking into a dark hole, a void or empty space in ourselves. Without the veil of the ego-center, we do not recognize the divine; it is not as we thought if should be. …

“From here on we must feel our way in the dark, and the special eye that allows us to see in the dark opens up at this time.” (Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991, 131.)

This stage being beyond Brahmajnana (seventh-chakra enlightenment), it has to be preliminary to Ascension.

However I don’t think this generation will be obliged to make such a difficult passage. All the rules have changed and our gradual ascent may make the rigors that St. John and Bernadette went through unnecessary.

(5) I already feel the next core issue in line is about shame, embarrassment, humiliation. It’s just waiting for me to be done with anger and fear.

(6) Isaiah 40:3-5.