47. How are your spirits? Bringing them home.

puzzle – by GDJ – Pixabay.

Before my spiritual awakening, I would have dismissed the content of this and my last post as fantasy, and self-delusion. I crossed some kind of threshold about sixteen years ago, finding deeper levers and pulleys that move our attitudes and preferences. The spirits appear to me in usually human form which I have come to call spirits, visually and auditory in dreams, meditations, and Focusing living through me consciously if I identify with them, sometimes unconsciously if I do not. They influence my behaviour and are the hand, in the glove that is my body and mind, and they constitute my soul. I see people struggling with them for years, in and out of psychotherapy, on and off medication and sadly sometimes destroyed by them.

Crossing that threshold in a spiritual awakening can be life affirming, and it can be dangerous. It is not surprising that so may choose not to cross over, choosing a life of being buffeted by them in turmoil. If you have not crossed this threshold, it is likely that you will not have a sense of this living in you, and through you, and will find this post and maybe my blog mere abstractions. It is not my purpose to convince you otherwise; my purpose is to offer those who are in this domain a safer way to navigate their way through.

I have been able to meet these fragments of personality within me, converse and understand them including what they want. I can bring them, and all that I am, to a better adjusted state.

Where are they found?

They are best recognised in the inner experiences mentioned above, and outer world encounters that produce a strong emotional reaction. The attitudes they bring influence our directions in life, what we choose to believe or not. If they are not recognised and integrated they can be expressed in exaggerated and dysfunctional ways, as we have seen so often in disruptive behaviours.

Approach – Attitude

There is an approach to have with them. It is a bit like a kindly shepherd receiving lost sheep back into the flock which want to return but have been cast out so often. Not wanting them to run away, kindness and equanimity are offered. I believe this is what Rumi meant in his poem This Guest House. Assumptions are not made, words are not put into the mouths of these beings usually of human appearance; if a question is asked, one waits for and respects the answer given. One is in essence talking with oneself and had better do so as one would want to be talked to, respectfully and heard, and not judged as good or bad, just as is. Is this being in Self or Yahweh, or as Ann Weiser Cornell has said, “Self in Presence” as an attitudinal mode?

Being Overawed

If one is overawed, and these spirits can be charismatic, powerful and insistent, it is possible to become subjugated and have them take over your life. The feminine can be beautiful, seductive and manipulative. The masculine can be heroic, charismatic and full of promise, things the perceiver may not recognise as themselves. Robert Johnston the Jungian wrote about a female client who met a charismatic male spirit in a dream who insisted she hand her credit cards over to him. She did and Johnston implored her to return to the place in active imagination and insist he returns them to her. She did not. In life, she went on a spending spree into debt and bankruptcy.  

I never hand anything over to them. Not the keys to my house (as was once demanded in a dream), or my credit card, even in this dream-like realm which may seem merely imagined, but it is very serious, it is what controls attitudes that drive the direction of intellect and physical behaviour. I have written about my Knife Assassin (see post number 11), where I submitted to what I thought was a force I could not resist, wrongly. Look into the world where people have behaved tragically, seemingly possessed, often killing themselves too, but then evil consumes itself, eventually.

Rejecting or Ignoring them

The opposite is to reject them. When rejected I find that they may disappear for a while, to return, more powerful and difficult to deal with. It is not possible to run away from that which is you! It can be difficult because they can represent attitudes we may hate and requires humility to acknowledge that they are part of us, our whole looking for the right expression. Or they may appear as someone in the world, and that can be much more difficult in many ways, as the history of human conflict shows.

Letting them into conscious expression

Once they appear I have to remember that they are a part of me, maybe that aspect of me that I think of as “Not me”! “I don’t hate.” says the hateful person, “I don’t steal.” says the person who exploits others’ original ideas, etc. If one can overcome this the task is to ensure their calling for acknowledgement is not missed, ignored or rejected. I do not want to be mindlessly absent from the next lesson, and the consequences that may bring, which may be karmic (their dysfunction lived through me reflected back to me).

So how should I deal with them? The clearest structured description I have found is in Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis, with the stages of integration outlined as; recognition, acceptance, coordination and synthesis (a full explanation of these stages is beyond this post). This is an intellectualised, deconstructed and rationalised interpretation of a fluid, heartfelt and relational encounter.

One has to stand firm but compassionate for this weary traveller in the spirit world and wholly accepting. Like my Mr Snoot (see post number 44), they evolve to take their place with optimal balance in the whole for expression in the right context. The potential or actual dysfunctional expression is tempered into appropriateness.

This usually involves a conversation, enabling it to reveal what it represents in me. I fully acknowledge the importance of that role in the context of the whole, it has a part to play in my life somewhere, blended with others. But I tell it that it can only live through me at the behest of the whole (meaning Self), and then I ask it if it is prepared to live in me in that way. After hundreds of such encounters, I have had no refusals. I have to conclude that it is what they want, to return to the whole, to wholiness, I might say, to God. On one occasion it took more than one conversation, and that was with a critic who was afraid to let go. Afraid for me, he felt his criticisms were protecting me in some way.

As one accepts them in, one ceases to identify with their opposite, and the optimal attitudes lie between in a mix of the polarities (the lesson of virtue), and the appropriate flexibility of character grows. So it is not a matter of making choices between two polarities, it is about bringing both into the mix for appropriate intuitive contextual expression.

This is in part how I believe the centre of consciousness moves from the ego into Self. The parts of character no longer serve ego, but come to serve the centre of the whole of being, the Self, no longer serve the will of the ego, but the will of Self. 

How do I change?

This journey is not over.

When they have come in I find the attitude is still there but at peace. They have calmed down and are able to be more considered and less triggered by situations.

I have resolved a large number of attitudes this way. It is now much easier to come to a place where the mind is calmed into silence and peace and live from that place without being buffeted by feelings and thoughts. There is less fatigue from inner conflict and poor sleep, with more energy to go about my day. Very different from my former life. I have found that this is reflected in the place in the world that I find myself.

Living in the World

As in me, as in other people. I cannot change others and they have their own guide, and if I am called to react in any particular way, then I can do so. To be with others, as one is with the spirits one encounters, has something of a becalming effect, and why should it not? Maybe the “shade giving tree” described by James Allen in Serenity? People say, there is a clarity about you, there is a peace about you. Much easier to live from that place when out of the buffeting of the workplace. Though not immune there is less chance of getting caught up in the wayward psychodramas of others.

Conclusion

I don’t think it is a quick fix, but maybe a lifetime’s or many lifetimes’ work. That there are so many of these spirits is not a reason to give up at the beginning because there are benefits along the way of such spiritual growth, through calming one’s uncontrolled attitudes and feelings. I have also come to see this as a process of coming into clarity and divine connection, as though these spirits distract and distort us away from this. One large part of my spiritual journey.