Dreams are not so spectacular. No, to someone else, a splendid, a wondrous, a magnificent plan is just so many words. And we know how much dollar value is placed on talk. Sometimes, too, even the realization of a dream is not as stupendous as we may hope: in mathematics, for example, a paper outlining the proof of some monumentally difficult problem lies somewhat plainly on the page, for academicians to ponder, but not really ever examined by the mass populous. I think we must keep that in mind when we chase after them, those spirits of what could be. By no means, do not give up on your dreams, but understand that people see them not by your own eyes, and the heartaches suffered them do not often transmit well through lines on the folio, carefully rendered.
-Ariel
9:17pm monday, 19th january
Some other thoughts have come to me. When I was in the hotel in my mid- 20’s working, while I was meditating and concentrating on a bright light I could see just about my head, and I lost time. I scared me. But I am thinking now that it was fear of losing myself if I went into myself too deeply, of losing touch with the world. That is a risk I think that bad things can happen to your body when you are not fully in the experience of the body. I still would not want to do that without someone I trusted helping me. But truly I think that we can fully reach our center without abandoning the body. Abandoning it I think is a step backwards. We were spirit before, now we are an imperfect body and spirit. But we may become I think a perfect body and spirit. I think perfecting the body and bringing it into harmony with the spirit is a part of our growth, bringing all things to perfection.
Something happened, I think a light came on. I realized that what has happened is that I have become afraid of my feelings. This is what has happened this year, I have lost my center. I became afraid, and then afraid of feeling afraid. Thinking that my fear wasn’t normal, that it wasn’t reasonable, which amplified the distress of it. I have realized that this is not illness, it is growth. The fear of fear was the result of listening to the world and not to my own spirit. That is the cause of the distress. I finally heard you. The voices and hallucinations are nothing more than another experience of our existence. But the meaning of them if it is drawn from fear, and from comparisons with other’s ideas of what our experience ought to be, will result in the sense of losing oneself. This is because one begins to see oneself as abnormal in the worlds view. And it will result in fearful images, nightmares and voices. I see now that this “falling away from center” has indeed enriched me as I am now able to see it without fearing it. Voices and visions like all experience, can enrich or diminish us. There is nothing special about them except that they are another way of experiencing oneself in relationship to the world. For me sometimes they help me see things more clearly. It all depends on what meaning they have for us, and indeed, that meaning is our own creation if it comes from our spirit, from our center. The experience is free to be as it is, and because I have seen this it will not bring distress, only opportunity for growth. If there is no distress, there is no illness. I have persisted in tolerating this distress for over a year, and I will continue to persist in this growth, but the distress has a new face. And I have a new vision.
This is what my spirit teaches me. I am not afraid of unconsciousness any longer, because the fear of losing myself was the unconsciousness.
This is a moment of light, but the light has to be maintained by the energy of work or it will go out. I hope that I can maintain it and nourish it so that it’s brightness can grow.
You knew always that this was a spiritual crisis, and that it is the spirit needing to find it’s way into the body and world that surrounds it, the center grows into the whole.
I figured something out. When something traumatic happens, our minds start wanting to find reasons for it, logic for it. Sometimes the reason says if these things happened to me then there must be something wrong with me, and we start looking for it. Suddenly all of the experiences and habits and ways of our life take on a different perspective. We are sick, malformed, deluded, abnormal. Things that once we might not have seen as illness, becomes a symptom. Hearing a voice that once we saw as a spiritual experience becomes hallucination, dreams become nightmares, noises startle. Our reason for our trauma must be that something in us is not normal, that is what reason tells us. That is the explanation that our mind creates. As we think these things more and more about us seems aberrant. More and more fear finds a place with in us as we see ourselves not as we once were, but as some strange creature that we scarcely know and understand. We feel we are losing ourselves, the self we once knew. And indeed she is gone, floating without foundation. The stranger we feel within ourselves, the harder it becomes to relate to those around us. Our faces cannot hide the strangeness we feel, and soon we avoid being seen, withdrawing more into ourselves. But the deepest craving within us is the yearning for connection not only with others but with our own soul. For now we are ill in fact, for we have no soul.
-Ariel