My Mind — The Guardian at the Gate of KNOWING
Friday Morning Coffee Time
I began in reflection of my helper session with Moira the day before. The notion of Prayer came up in my session – Praying to God, to Jesus Christ – the need to ask for help, for without asking help will not be forced upon me.
Prayer? I could see my authority images come up immediately. The authority – here God, or Jesus Christ – is, in my image, the one to be obeyed above all else. The authority is the one who establishes my sense of worth by praising me or destroys my sense of worth by criticizing me. The authority rewards for performance and obedience, and punishes for lack of performance, incompetence, stupidity, or disobedience. I have not experienced authority as one who loves me for who I am, warts and all, one who blesses me for who I am. I could not imagine asking this authority for help because all I would get is a law I am now to obey or a belief I am now to believe.
With authority I do not sense connection or relationship. My Soul longs for relationship, but doesn’t believe, or refuses to believe, that a relationship is possible. My Soul has no sense of what a true love relationship would feel like.
So again, the thought of asking for help to be me, to be nurtured in my Essence, would not even occur to me. Why? Because if I asked I would get only what the authority wanted me to be or do for the authority’s own benefit. I have no sense of authority encouraging me in my own true path, to be in my own integrity.
Prayer presupposes a trusting relationship. My image of love is that to love means to submit. This is a huge pervasive image. It blocks my relationships with others, and especially with authority, with God, with Jesus Christ.
After my rant, Pat responded with: Look at this huge distortion!
Gary: Sure, but this huge distortion is not erased by the will of my intellect. There is a much deeper resistance here to be dealt with!
Pat: How does one come to know reality when the Guardian at the Gate is this huge distortion? Maybe this is why Guardians at the Gate are represented by wrathful deities, or ferocious gargoyles! Maybe this is why people like Harry Potter who is going up against such forces of evil. Or Frodo the protagonist in Lord of the Wings.
Gary: Yes, these myths surrounding archetypal energies around us – our distortions. Archetypal and Mythical because they are beyond our capacity to comprehend let alone combat on our own. Reality is beyond our limited dualistic reality. We get a taste of this War of Life in our dualistic consciousness. In our dualistic state of consciousness we can feel overwhelmed and helpless and create all kinds of defenses against feeling the pains and defeats in life coming at us. They seem like pains and defeats because we are not in a state of consciousness that shows how this is all part of a larger picture, a Unitive state of consciousness, the Oneness of the Whole. To live life effectively we need to drop our weapons and wake up to a higher state of consciousness.
Pat: Yes, we engage and transform the forces in this realm.
Gary: Like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.
Pat: We speak of forces of Good and Evil, but in Unitive consciousness this is illusory. What is real is beyond Good and Evil. We need to be open to know the truth. It is beneficial that those before us have painted the analogies they did in the myths we have in order to give us glances of the larger perspective outside the view of our limited dualistic consciousness.
Gary: Reminds me of Initiation Rites. Awakening is an initiation into Reality.
Pat: In this place where this huge distortion blocks the entrance to something you don’t know – love, a relationship with the Christ. You say, “I have no experience of love.” This belief becomes part of the Guardian at the Gate. Yes, others pray to the Christ, or at least appear to, but how can you engage the Christ when the experience of Christ is something beyond what you know? Someone gave me a card with a Thomas Merton prayer: I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. Or the Buddhist idea that underneath all is perfect.
Gary: Yes, or as the Pathwork lectures suggest, there is a Divine Spark in us that desires to manifest love. But this intellectual knowledge simply frustrates me because I am blocking a felt sense of its truth.
Pat: Maybe your prayer is, simply, “I want to know the truth.” Truth is, after all, the Virtue of the THREE.
Gary: The operative word here is KNOW – with a capital K. This Knowing is on a basis beyond cognitive intellectual knowing. AND this KNOWING beyond intellectual knowing terrifies me, or terrifies a part of me, a pattern in me, my ego. So my intellect is an integral part of the Guardian at the Gate blocking my way to the Experience of KNOWing Truth.
This morning I was thinking about our next Holotrobic Breathwork session at the end of October. Your Holotropic Breathwork gives you a taste of this KNOWING beyond knowing.
Pat: Yes, Holotropic Breathwork, especially that last hour, gets me to a vertical dimension beyond my mind. When the horizontal dimension is all I see, nothing works. As we develop the capacity of the vertical we can be in the world without being of the world. The AIP practices I do take me to experiences of this vertical dimension beyond the mind. How do we make contact and engage that which is beyond our current limitations? First we come to accept that, at present, we do have limitations, but also faith that they are not permanent limitations – rather, that in our Essence we do have this capacity for greater Knowing.
Gary: Maybe the Pathwork Guide works for me as a key for me into the Mystery via the intellect. I realize that for twenty years – well into my forties – it was this way with Scriptures. The theory was that the Holy Spirit worked on our souls via Scriptures. I do not know about “the Holy Spirit working on me” as a modality, but some words of scripture did have a certain resonance with me.
But it was not a pure resonance. There were fundamental aspects to it that did not work for me. And the many trappings added by formal Christian religions of all sorts – including and perhaps especially my conservative Lutheran dogma – did not help. Scriptures became for me rigid rather than living, a looking backward rather than forward. By contrast, the Pathwork Lectures resonate deeply with my Soul. I recognize my Soul’s thirst for this Pathwork water. I do not have to theorize that some Holy Spirit is moving my Soul. Rather, I experience my Soul move and arise through the words of the Pathwork Lectures. This has been true so far of no other writing – not A Course In Miracles, not Wilber, not Adyashanti, not Byron Katie, not Tolle, not Meister Eckhart, etc. I am not saying in any way that these are “wrong.” Quite the contrary. These words serve so many. But they do not seem at this time to be the key to my unique Soul’s lock. Sometimes Almaas and a few others come close, but not in alignment as much with the Pathwork Lectures.
And this having been said, I have also explored outside the mind in Breathwork (rebirthing and Holotropic varieties), Tai Chi, Sweats, intimate relationships, massage, tantra, AIP, Yoga, and the like, but so far I keep coming back to Pathwork. But I notice that at present I am also sticking with Faye’s Progoffian-style Journal Writing, Mary’s EmbodyBeing practices, SoulCollage®, Hakomi, and Andreas/Regina’s Holotropic Breathwork. And I have special hope for the latter at this point. So this is my Soul’s scouting curiosity for Truth beyond the mind.
Pat: Your longing for Truth manifests all these opportunities for you. This comes, then that, then the next, then that, and so on. Each piece broadens you, opens and refines you. Cynthia Bourgeault in The Meaning of Mary Magdalene points to this vertical dimension in the relationship between the Christ and Mary Magdalene. This longing for Truth in you is not just you. It is a co-creation. Your longing is a movement up – “I want to Know the Truth. I’m open to Know the Truth. Help me to be more open to Know the Truth. Show me how to remove blocks. Help me.” Spoken consciously or not, and not being sure really to Whom, this seems to be and has you’re your Soul’s prayer as long as I’ve known you. So you are praying! More than you consciously are aware of. Your prayer is coming from your Soul. Then the Truth comes, literally flows into you from all over. Even from your relationships with special women, from all what you mentioned above. Certainly the Pathwork lectures have been huge for you here. But more, too. The longing and the openness. Then the integration. Your prayers are being answered.
Gary: Expanding, feeling separate, then reuniting in connection, integration. As without, so within.
Pat: Yes. This “As without, so within” is just what I was just reading in Cynthia’s book – pages 54-56 (see below). I particularly like her words describing the awakening. We have two modes of awakening: 1) Sudden insight, or, 2) the long tough slog through the minefields of ego.
We both relate to “the long tough slog through the minefields of ego!” We smile.
Gary: Feeling grateful.
References:
1) Becoming Fully Human From: The Meaning of Mary Magdalene By Cynthia Bourgeault Pages 54-56
2) The Complexity and Formative Power of Early Life This quote from Pathwork Lecture 87 The Next Phase on the Path; Questions and Answers, lays out how early life experiences so powerfully form our images (our main image, our idealized self-image, our God-image), patterns, pseudo-solutions – all of which govern our thinking and behavior from our unconscious.
3) Pathwork Lecture 72 The Fear of Loving