Uniquely You

Emotions, and the openness to the inter-twining of them  to discern a sense of deep spirit, a personal sense of the uniquely form  you, is a central task in the spiritual life.
As many religious thinkers have written, it is in the opening of the self, the stillness of the mind that what is essential arises, that enlightenment becomes possible; yet it is not as a striving or as a goal, but as the natural result of a lived life.
By experiences we learn the meaning of ourselves in the world; the oneness of all in our place is what Moore in his books seeks to examine.

He writes that it is not intellect ultimately, but living knowledge that makes a self. Yet, he does at times, fall into philosophical banter. That is his background and his training.
As a Roman Catholic,Moore came of age in the time before the "great transformation" of the Church, before Vatican II, before the rise of Pope John Paul II. His experiences may be unlike other's. Despite this, he offers valuable wisdom about the simplest and yet most complex of life, the human mind.
Writing in his book, The Care of the Soul Moore addresses the deep soul as found in the "emotions, relationships and culture... a way to be spiritual that is honest, close to physical life and emotion... [not]the opposite of spirituality [which] is escape... [Life] is to be made sense of in the depths of experience, in the never ending efforts to make sense of life, and in the ordeals that can be seen as spiritual initiations rather than failures to achieve a self."

In his book, Thomas Moore allows, he searches out within the great tangle of human emotion, of perceptions and feelings, the great  impossible, the paradoxical, and the apparent failures that seem to comprise one's life.
He recommends in response to human emotional suffering "a shift from cure to caring." Trying to be cured might be another type of perfectionism. In the human life, when seen as a sort of comedy, we all fail, we all fall on our faces. Taking ourselves so seriously, we forget that it is human to fail, it is human not to be perfect. 
And it is human to love, even that what we don't fully understand, even that we see as lacking, like a child; still we love, in full knowledge of imperfection. In doing so, we may ultimately learn of a holy foolishness which broadens and deepens our spirituality, making the self more resilient, more durable in the process.

One of the ways through this life process is by emptiness, Sunyata. Moore describes the empty self as not a loss, but a liberation, an opening for the possible. "Spiritual emptiness doesn't lead to resignation, or depression... it gives hope, frees us from anxiety...free from having to be in control."
Yet emptiness doesn't work if it becomes a project, to be controlled and directed. Emptiness is an active stillness, an allowance of what is, or may be.
 It is the perception that an angry bull is charging to you in an arena and stepping aside rather than confronting as it passes by. "Emptiness itself has to be empty." As a way, it is both an art and a practice.

Spiritual Energy

Love is the great union of the universe."  Theilhard de Chardin

There is no subject in the world which arouses greater curiosity than spiritual, or psychic energy. The energy that animates a body, that enlivens the soul; it lights the eyes and attracts life to itself. Spiritual energy is that which is absent in the corpse. Yet there is scant, scientific evidence that it even exists. Most have an awareness of this energy by their own, daily experience. It is often encountered in the simple, everydayness of life, and as well in the profound.

While science is largely unaware of its presence in the world, its realness, none more opaque scientifically, spawns the whole of Ethics which rests upon it. "The nature of this inner power is so intangible that the whole description of the universe in mechanical terms has had no need to take account... but has deliberate disregard of its reality," wrote Pierre Theilhard de Chardin in his work, The Phenomenon
of Man.
"The difficulties we still encounter in trying to hold together spirit and matter in a reasonable perspective are nowhere more harshly revealed... the building of a bridge between the two banks of our existence-- the physical and the moral-- if we wish the material and spiritual of our activities to be mutually enlivened. To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul in a coherent manner: science has ignored the question... [yet]we must advance."

"The inner face of the world is manifest deep within" and we are most aware of through our concrete behaviors that the two energies do combine, but we cannot easily, or not at all, make out the method. It seems, according to de Chardin, that the method is made of both a dependence and an independence, thus a mutual inter-dependence arises as it occurs to us that the "soul" must be "a focal point of transformation" at which point all energy converges. However attractive it may be to suppose that there is a direct transformation, it becomes clear that in practice, in love, it is their mutual inter-dependence, as clear as their inter-relation arising, says de Chardin writing about the nature of spiritual energy and love.

His book, The Phenomenon of Man, deemed radical when it first appeared in 1940, was blacklisted by many contemporary theologians upon its arrival; today de Chardin now occupies an esteemed place in the world of theology. His ideas give rise to the idea of humanity as a unifying factor of the universe, and man its bearer.

Visionary Experiences

Our twenty-first century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination
--Robert Johnson

No one in fact, "makes up" anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate from somewhere; that is the unconscious, asserts Robert Johnson.
Writing, "the prejudice against imagination... is reflected in things people say like, "You're only imagining it," or "that's a fantasy, not reality," yet imagination more properly understood, is a channel through which unconscious material flows to the conscious mind. Johnson writes, "to be even more accurate, imagination is a transformer that converts the original material into images the conscious mind can perceive."

The prejudice against imagination is so strong in modern society that experiences understood almost intuitively by our ancestors have become swamped in a sea of rational, scientific thought. Modern thinkers have need to rediscover what the ancients knew: the mind is conceived with a power to convert the "invisible" realm to conscious, visible, forms that can be detected and contemplated. As the Catholic Christian creed records, "we believe in the seen, and the unseen..." The ancients thought of it too, as the place of the gods, the region of pure spirit. It was, and is, a place of power to make images, enabling us to see.

In ancient Greece, the place of fantasy, or place of producing poetic, abstract and religious imagery, was nearly unquestioned. This inner world was thought of as a place of ideal forms, of the expression of the gods; they gained meaning from imagination and dreams, both in the spiritual and aesthetic realms. "These meanings could then be held in memory and made the basis of thought and reasoning."

"In religion, the imaginative faculty was the legitimate path of religious inspiration, revelation, and experience." The simple fact that information comes to one through the unconscious mind, or imagination, in no way discredits it as a form or a reality. Experiences of poetic imagining are not mere whimsy; rather they express in symbols the real happenings of a human life experience.
"Humans depend on the imagination's image-making power, and its image-symbols for creative endeavors such as poetry, visual arts, literature, sculpture, and essentially all philosophical and religious functioning." Without imagination, Albert Einstein, for one, would not have deduced the intricacies of the natural world; indeed he states that many of his most important ideas came to him through imaginative intuition. This imagination, then can serve as a great contribution to both individuals and society.

In Carl Jung's positing, he came to the thought that humans are endowed from the eons with archetypes, powerful symbols that spring from deep within the universal, collective, human nature. In all "cultures and religions since the beginning of history, the idea of a soul has sprung up spontaneously... human kind has always intuited the existence... that was invisible, yet active." The soul has often been referred to as feminine, present in poetic, and religious symbolism. Sometimes the soul is seen as an inner woman, regardless of one's exterior gender. Muses have often inspired great thoughts of religion or arts. And not only does the soul function as an inner reality, but it generates a set of symbols, universal to all.

These symbols are, in part, what makes us human-- universal, yet unique individuals. Carl Jung deduced that the psyche manifests itself as androgyny, neither male nor female, but both, one and the same. Within our collective conscious there exists the seed of both the male and female, the anima and the animus.

Thus the inner self is a plurality, like the Chinese idea of pairs, such as yin and yang. While they may appear to us as opposites, the great challenge in the spiritual life is the reconciliation of this paradox. Because in fact, the two are one; they are two parts of one stream of energy.

The end product of this evolution, writes Johnson, "is something that we can sense, feel and describe intuitively--even though we have not obtained it, a sense of wholeness, of completeness. This wholeness is the totality of our being," our Oneness. Totality can be expressed symbolically in ways such as mandala or divine geometry.
Failing this, "the self may well lapse into a place of mental disorder, of compulsions and neurosis."

Often we refuse the awakenings of conscious, repressing the best parts of ourselves, both the light and the dark; we come to view large swaths as negative. In viewing the offerings of unconsciousness negatively, as good and bad rather than in degrees of integration, in oneness, our richest parts bear no good fruit for us in our lives. We reject them, relegating their energies to some dark place where we just will not look.

"Even the voice of God, can be and is rejected." The soul is then left to "stealing or appropriating" what it needs-- our time, our energies, falling into dark corners "where incomprehensible and odd behaviors arise, in unprotected places the ego lets down, and the part of us that would otherwise accept, and believe this is gold, is left without a place to turn.

"Curiously people usually resist their own good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negatives." Yet to achieve a balance, both must be regarded evenly. A practice of writing out your imaginings, dreams and musings will help to balance oneself, bringing clarity and peace to a life. Most importantly, actions make initial imaginings concrete, into a form that can be seen clearly. The use of rituals, both in symbol and in religion, are also quite valuable and lend a concrete avenue for modern man to attend to his own unique, spirits and longings.

What part of it do you believe?
~Robert Johnson, Inner work

The Idea of Maya, or What Part of Me Believes That?

The woman who gave birth to Buddha Shakyamuni is called in the scriptures, Mahamaya, meaning Great Maya, or Mayadevi, the Goddess Maya. In Tibetan, she is called Gyutrulma. In English, she is generally called Queen Maya, a designation that obscures more than it reveals.

Maya is actually the Sanskrit term for Illusion. So Mahamaya actually means the 'Grandest Deception, or Illusion' of all -- that which convinces us of Existence. Maya along with the other two who are 'Shakti,' that is Activity, and Prakriti or Matter, what we can call Nature.

There can be no life or existence without any of them, but we rely especially upon Maya. It is her conduct that makes the others perceptible, for without her we would have no access -- we would not be able to read existence or, reality.

Maya is not a Trickster in the sense of an spirit that purposely misleads or misguides. She is not Mara in disguise. Her majesty, ingenuity and intricacies generously permits us, or inspires us to glimpse the possibility of "enlightenment." It is our own self-preoccupations that distract us from this objective.
--Source unknown

Maya as the giver of insight is also a focus of many of the books written by Robert Johnson.In his book, Inner Work, he writes "sometimes the generative power of the inconspicuous is so strong that it creates fantasy (meaning:to make visible, to reveal) filled with vivid, symbolic images, capturing the mind so completely it holds our attention for a length of time." These "mini-movies" are a primary way our unconscious mind attempts to express itself--through the imagination (meaning: to transform to visible images), using the symbolic language of charged feelings. It just has to get our attention!

Another way we may experience unconscious thought is through a sudden surge of emotion, emotion of all types. There may be profound joy, love, anger, sadness which invades the conscious mind, and takes it over. These flooded feelings make little or no sense to the conscious mind, because the conscious mind did not produce them. We are often left with a feeling or thought later wondering, 'where did that come from? ' What was that about? ' Why did I do that? 'we often think or feel that the emotion came from somewhere outside of ourselves. "

In fact, these riotous, fractious, ungovernable emotions come from deep within oneself, from a place unseen, unknown by the conscious mind. It is precisely because it is intangible that it is called the "unconscious." At times we sense that we have carried these unseen, unknown elements within us for a long time, but how--but where? There is another part of the mind's self which lies completely outside the boundaries of the everyday, conscious mind.

It is a world of possibility, of promises, hopes and fears. It is also a world of energies, forces, and forms of intelligence, even distinct personality, lying within the unconscious. It is the source of much of our daily thoughts, feelings, and daily behaviors. We are more under the influence of the unconscious than we might suspect. Many of us have an intuitive feeling about the unconscious. We have had the feeling of being somewhere else, or perhaps, have driven or taken ourselves from one place to another, all while in deep thought, and not recalled the trip--only that we've arrived. This is the unconscious taking over some of the conscious functions, freeing the mind to do its imagining work, some call "daydreaming."

At times, feelings and emotions arise, and suddenly we are confronted by them, "I didn't know that I felt that way." When we suddenly blurt out these things, learning to recognize them by asking, "what part of me feels that way," is a very valuable exercise, and tool for self realization.

Sometimes these previously concealed identities or attitudes are embarrassing, or even violent and we are humiliated by them. At other times they reveal themselves as our own strengths and good qualities. For example, we may find that they are resources available to us that were previously hidden; we may express new wisdom, or speak in ways that show love or understanding previously unknown in our day to day life.

By gaining a true sense of our self through better acquaintance with the unconscious, we become more whole, more complete; our self is strengthened. By developing a relationship with the mind's eyes, the conscious and unconscious, we live richer lives. Most people however in todays modern, scientific world have lost touch with that place of dreams and imagination; they most often encounter the inner world only when they must--in times of psychological distress.

The mature self is a balanced self between conscious awareness and developing creativity derived from the power-storehouse of the unconscious. When out of balance, the power of the one or the other can become frightening, paralyzing us in our tracks. Unable to perceive the world outside or inside, we find many types of decision impossible in this state.
The purpose of learning to work with a whole, complete mind is not simply to resolve psychic distress or simply resolve conflicts; rather it is the source of our deepest feelings, our strongest religious longings, our great strength, and growing wisdom.

A great wind of energy originates in the integrated mind. We, in fact, as human beings, depend upon it, whether we know it or not, for all its image and symbol making power, for poetic, literary images, for math, scientific discoveries, for all artistic endeavors and for religious functioning. Without our native ability to generate these sense-symbols, we would not have the ability to function as a person in the day to day world. Thus it is hasty to denigrate the imagination--it is essential for much of our living.

In the case of dreams, imagination has the utmost power to convert the invisible forms of the unconscious into symbols and images that are perceptible to the waking mind. Sometimes dreams are so vivid, it's as if we were awake and experienced, in the day to day way, the contents of the dream. However real the symbols may seem, Johnson in his book, Inner Work cautions that one not take them literally. They are after all, unique symbols, your symbols speaking directly to you alone. A "spirit guide" contained within. Listen to their rhythms.
What part believes this? And what do you live for?