The Soul’s Journey- Engaging The Mystery

“All we can say for sure is that a mystery comes through us, seeking its own fullest incarnation, and that whenever we serve the mystery within us, we experience a linkage to the mystery outside. When we stand in conscious relationship to the mystery, we are more deeply alive.” James Hollis Swamplands of the Soul.

I encountered this quote many years ago, wrote it down without really comprehending its power and meaning. However it resonated; I began a morning affirmation: “To explore my relationship with the Mystery”, I began to examine the journey of my life in context of mystery. I kept track in a journal dedicated to recording moments of awe and wonder, remarkable synchronicities, and other mystical experiences.

Recently a friend of mine completed a soul collage, a practice to facilitate inner exploration and and told me her title was “Engaging the Mystery”. I felt drawn back to the original quote like a moth drawn to light. What does it mean to serve the mystery within us? How do we experience a linkage to the mystery outside? Does it result in feeling more deeply alive?

Defining Mystery

This is obviously a contradiction of terms, as if we could define the mystery. It would no longer be mystery. However, the mystery will at times represent different things, depending upon where we are on our personal journey. Eminent Jungian analyst and author James Hollis in his book Creating a Life basically indicates that when atheism and agnosticism no longer served him, he reluctantly concluded that it was all “a blooming mystery.” In my case it is the name I have given to the limited sense of transcendence I still sense. Once I had traversed various stages in my spiritual journey – God as the father figure, the universe as a benevolent source of supply, God as the lover, God as the arbiter of my conscious evolution, and various combinations of each, I came to the realization I could only see it as a mystery. I believe in something but have no idea what. I love the observation by Buddhist teacher and author Steven Mitchell, “as soon as we say God is anything we are a billion light years away.”

Serving The Mystery Within

I sense I began serving the mystery within without even seeing it that way. I began to meditate in 1994. I recall I started more as a stress reduction modality. A renowned Buddhist teacher Jon Kabot-Zyn extolled the benefits in terms of stress reduction, boosting the immune system and emotional stability. It was the first commitment I made to what I now consider a spiritual practice. In hindsight I suspect it was a catalyst for everything that happened afterwards. Perhaps sitting to meditate was akin to the obelisk in 2001 A Space Odyssey sending out a signal that I was ready to engage the mystery.

Now I believe there are two primary requirements for serving the mystery. First the intentional. We start to explore possibilities that work for us. I think each of us must develop our own lexicon of practices. Mine include: meditation, contemplation, walking in beauty and nature, listening to sacred music, soulful literature and poetry, engaging with the arts. My sacred texts include both the Spiritual and the psychological.

The second requirement is to pay attention to that which approaches us from within. This includes dreams, feelings, visions our own mystic experiences, energy, and emotions. Mystic experiences are hard to define as they are experiential and perhaps meaningful only to us. For example, last year I walked into Durham Cathedral in the UK where they were engaged in a choral service. In that moment, tears, laughter, confusion and mystery combined into a moment I can’t explain. I believe that this combination of intention and attention create a field of possibility for the mystery to engage with us in the external reality.

Experiencing The Mystery Outside

This is so personal, and mostly experienced through inexplicable stories. So conclusions are difficult to draw. My own experience suggests that the mystery can open to us in the outer world in a variety of ways – psychic experiences, increased synchronicities, an activated intuition, signs, somatic experience through the body, divination tools and oracles. All we can do is pay close attention, and do our best to interpret the meaning of such things. (Hollis refers to synchronicity as the manifestation of energies moving through the invisible world and entering the visible world as seeming coincidence.”)

Here are some examples from my own and other people’s lives.

⁃ I had a psychic love affair. Impossible to explain or even understand, but it resulted in a total change of my worldview and a pursuit of spiritual inquiry, which has never ceased.

⁃ A friend of mine woke one day with the thought “I need to see Trevor”. It appeared improbable as simultaneously I was at the airport checking for my flighty to the sun of Mexico. Except only my flight was delayed to the next day. Somewhat reluctantly I retraced my steps home and spontaneously walked to Granville Island. I decided to pop into his part-time office and see if he was free for lunch. He got his wish after all.

⁃ Another friend, after a life threatening accident, began to explore her inner world. She later fulfilled her dream to become the lead guitarist for a major group. While performing recently she began to suffer from the “imposter syndrome”. She began to explore the underlying cause. Within a few days she received numerous spontaneous endorsements of her ability as well as a guitar manufacturer giving her two guitars as a an appreciation for her talent.

⁃ I was with a friend one evening and we drew Tarot cards. From a well shuffled deck of 74 cards we both drew the same card – the odds of this are .00018! The card read, “By love the dead are made living.” It meant nothing to either of us. The next day I got the sad news a friend of mine had died unexpectedly from a heart attack.

⁃ I am attending a retreat at Unity Village in Missouri. On the final day, a fellow retreatant handed me a cassette tape and stated, “God told me to give you this.” I threw it in my bag. Three days later I suffered a spiritual/emotional crisis and heard the still small voice in my head suggest I listen to it. It introduced me to the cosmic 2×4. I could go on and on. To me these are all ways the mystery inside engage in the mystery outside.

⁃ I am preparing an article for a newsletter I have interviewed a candidate and am struggling to find a coherent thread. My throat closes up; I think ”it is hard to swallow”, I laugh and move on to another story. My throat spontaneously opens again

It seems the mystery has a sense of humour!

In Conscious Relationship With The Mystery We Are More Deeply Alive

I think I feel more alive when I feel hope. Sometimes I think Homo Sapiens is a failed experiment but experiencing the mystery in these ways help me to believe that somewhere there may be something that makes sense of this mess. In addition experiencing meaning in my own life creates a sense of vitality and joy that invigorates me. Finally at 79 I still feel so alive and loving of my life. I cannot claim there is cause and effect. I have witnessed too many bad things happen to good people yet I do believe we can increase our sense of well being through engaging with this mystery both spiritually and psychologically.

This feels significant to me. James Hollis suggests that facing death it is important that we had a linkage with a larger order of meaning, some connection with the mystery that courses through history and animates the individual soul. Perhaps this is one way we can achieve this connection.

The Soul’s Journey – Spirituality vs. Psychology

My Spiritual Journey Begins

In the early nineties my second wife left me and I began an inner journey that continues to this day. As the trauma from this experience receded, I began to consider that perhaps my worldview was too limited. Then an unexpected psychic experience and encounter with a psychotherapist resulted in new perspective. “I was a spiritual being having a human experience” The result was a search for meaning, a commitment to find a spiritual path and to pursue the journey of my soul. Over the next fifteen years I dedicated myself to this exploration. I was guided to join the Unity Church, enrolled in a two year program called The Art of Spiritual Guidance, and even registered at the Vancouver School of Theology. It was intense, engaging and meaningful but there was a major problem. I really did not change. Despite all my efforts I could be the same reactive, hurtful, judgemental person; at times inconsiderate and lacking compassion. It was humbling and frustrating. My quest for enlightenment was failing.

The Spiritual Bypass

It was about 15-years ago over a margarita at happy hour in beautiful Sayulita I was recounting to a friend my curiosity about someone I met while on vacation. Following a relationship break-up, she had become deeply devoted to a spiritual path; which had become a major focus for her life yet I sensed that many deeper personal issues had been sidetracked. “Ah the spiritual bypass” my wise friend observed. Suddenly I saw the relevance not only for my friend, also about me. Was my quest for enlightenment actually another way of resisting my development as a human being? I wondered if I was inadvertently using spirituality as a means of avoiding what I now see as the real work – engaging with spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”. The term Spiritual Bypass was introduced in the mid 1980s by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. It one of the ways we resist focus on the most difficult work.

A Note on Resistance

I have lost count of how many blogs I have written on resistance (mostly my own.) Basically resistance, like a chameleon, has many disguises. – denial, distraction, diversion, food indulgence, procrastination, avoidance, rationalization and of course the spiritual bypass can all be signs. These are all ways we avoid doing that which calls us to a deeper level. Two millennia ago, St. Paul wrote, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.” We still unavoidably fall into the same trap.

The Beginning of Change

My first step to change was the awareness that I had not become the person I imagined I would become. I think I believed that through prayer and meditation, contemplation and belief in higher power, the change would occur naturally. My focus was to align with the teachings of the wisdom schools, yet I found love, compassion and forgiveness as elusive targets. When my spiritual enquiry failed to shift my persona, I searched for other possibilities. I remember encountering, Debbie Ford’s book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, and although the message helped me understand my “dark side”, it didn’t really facilitate much change. (However at least I now knew I wasn’t alone) It was not until I encountered a book “Why Good People do Bad Things” by an author and Jungian analyst named James Hollis on the bargain table at Banyen Books that I began to understand how challenging personal change really was.

Soul Work Must be Both Psychological as well as Spiritual

This was the insight that allowed me the slow process of personal change. The saying goes that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. In my case, the teacher was James Hollis, and from 2009 on he has been the guiding force behind my understanding of the unconscious and its power to shape our day-to-day reality. I learned that many of my conscious reactions were shaped by buried complexes, historic energy centres that rush from their subterranean depths like Jaws and possess us. Carl Jung once commented that once you realize the power of the unconscious, you understand you are no longer master in your own house. It is only by doing the intense work of understanding through dreams, reactions, patterns of behaviour, emotions, signs and synchronicity, that we can begin to comprehend this. I made the commitment to unravel my own psychology and slowly, but surely that is making all the difference. It has been a 15-year long journey that continues to this day!

As I look back I realize that beliefs change, circumstances alter, and at times it is like chasing a moving target but as Hollis says, “there are only answers that make sense you at this moment in your life and they will fail you tomorrow. What is seemingly true today will be outgrown when your life or soul brings you a larger frame through which to view them.” What matters most is to keep on regardless. It isn’t always easy, you don’t see immediate results but it makes for an interesting life.

The Soul’s Journey – Reflections on Grace

Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost, but now am found

Was blind, but now I see.

I have always loved this refrain. From my days as a young evangelical Christian, believing that we were saved by the blood of Jesus, to my senior years, 70 years later, I am still beguiled, mostly by the exquisite melody. Today I explored renditions on YouTube from gospel to bagpipes, Andrea Bocelli to a group called Celtic Woman that combined vocal, bagpipes and a full orchestra. This rendition had over 92 million views. I am not alone!

My perspective on the word Grace has modified many times over the years. The more religious, traditional definition “divine assistance, being saved, a state of sanctification, a virtue from God” has mostly evaporated like a morning mist. I became more attached to the concept of “elegance, refinement and courteous goodwill.” (Merriam-Webster dictionary).

Frequently, when I walk in the countryside of North Devon, I walk beside fields bordered by what looks like grimy, algae filled ditches, yet I will invariably encounter one or two beautiful, graceful swans that regardless of surroundings are the epitome of charm and beauty. To me grace flows elegantly, has a dignity and refinement. I find palm trees swaying in a tropical breeze graceful, there are graceful sports such as skiing and roller blading. Grace also seems to me to carry joy. The world would be poorer without grace which I think enriches us.

Yet there are other perspectives to grace that I have come to appreciate. Eminent Jungian analyst and author James Hollis suggests that “ Grace obliges the strength of character which enables us to forgive ourselves and others for stupidity, cruel, ignorance, narcissism, and inattentiveness.”

Then the teachings of theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich who suggested, “. Grace is being accepted even though you are unacceptable.” Both perspectives suggest grace is a gift not only from an external perception but from an inner perspective as well.

A friend of mine offered the perspective on grace as a benediction, gift, offering, often unexpected and maybe undeserved which aligns with Paul Tillich. This resonates with me as reflecting on my life it seems to have been guided by events beyond my control that shaped it. Perhaps I now see them as somewhat metaphysical, perhaps spiritual and more aligned with the theme of the lyrics. They form part of this mystery we call life.

As I think back on the amazing journey I have experienced over the past 79 years, I can see moments when life brought me what seems undeserved positive experiences that helped shape the future.

⁃ an unexpected psychic encounter that reshaped my worldview.

⁃ The teachers that crossed my path at exactly the perfect times.

⁃ The fellow travellers on this amazing journey who are always there for me.

⁃ The dreams, signs, serendipity and synchronicities that emerge unexpectedly to guide my path.

My grandma used to sing, “Count your blessings, name them one by one”. A lovely practice that still has relevance today. The grace I experience seems far more significant than the “saving, one dimensional grace of my childhood”. It seems more adult; it results in me taking more responsibility and finding direction to my life. As the wonderful graceful poet Hafiz wrote “ now is the time for you to compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace.”

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