Wednesday February 13, 2019 5:15 PM
The false Paradise could be a lot of things. It could be a Utopia, or (in practice) a dystopia. It could be the limits of perfection. It could be external or internal or both. It could be an unhealthy relationship or family dynamic. It could be an addiction. It could be your comfort zone, a state of stagnation or complacency. It could be your lower nature. It could be a job you hate. It could be a life that isn't aligned with your true calling. It could be a state of indoctrination. It could be privilege, implicit biases or any other problematic belief about oneself in relation to others. It could be a state of ignorance (ie ignorance is bliss.) There's some truth to that saying. Ignorance can feel blissful. You think you're happy. And maybe you are. But there's a greater, a much more real sense of fulfillment and meaning that exists outside of the echo chamber of comfort. The false Paradise is a house of cards; the more you build it up the more fragile it becomes. One wrong move, the slightest disturbance, can send it all crashing to the ground. When you inhabit a false Paradise of any kind, your identity, your sense of reality, your entire existence is every bit as fragile as a house of cards. You have to go to great lengths to keep it all from falling apart. It's like that old adage about lies. When you tell one lie you have to tell 10,000 more to cover it up. When your world is based on one big lie, you have to constantly lie to yourself to keep your world in orbit. When you inhabit that kind of world, the truth can feel like an apocalypse. But contrary to popular belief, the word apocalypse doesn't mean “the end.” It's Greek root apokálypsis actually translates to “an uncovering.” When the end of days is described in the Bible, it says there will be a new heaven and a new earth. But before that, all hell literally breaks loose. Sometimes, evolution, growth and progress feel that way. The truth can only end you if you cling to your house of cards. If you're willing to let go, if you're willing to surrender to the unknown, “the truth shall set you free.” When God said to Adam and Eve not to eat of the knowledge tree for they would “surely die” he was partially right. What he left out was, you have to die in order to be reborn.
7:41 PM
I'm currently experiencing my death and rebirth. I say death AND rebirth because they're occurring simultaneously. There's no clean cut line between one and the other. Death becomes rebirth. Just like the seasons. Contrary to what our calendars would have us believe, the seasons don't begin and end on a certain day. Each season contains traces of the one before it and the one after it. The caterpillar mourns the loss of its old self while rejoicing in the new. Lately resistance_the parasite_the devil_the lower self have been busy. This means I'm really making progress. The new me is emerging. The pursuit of truth, of my true form is setting me free.
Photo: Graham Henderson