Becoming Your Own Priest [or Priestess]
In these times, we may be well served to look to poets for their mystical insight and prescient wisdom. Look for example to the American poet Walt Whitman: “Soon there will be no more priests, their time is done. Everyone will be his [or her] own
priest.” This is the imperative of our time; this time, not tomorrow, but now. We can no longer defer the embodiment of our individual sovereign authority.
We can no longer refuse our magnificent and grand stature, nor the gentle and/or fierce generous bounty of Grace that ensues from living out one’s own life: Often, we live out the designs of another. One’s own life: One that is in direct continuous connection with the informing universal intelligence and Wisdom, one that is in alliance with other people too; one in coordinated continuous motion with the larger system of oneself, and the Mystery; so too, a life of your own creative self expression.
The personality stands in the way of claiming one’s own life. It impedes one from being hell-bent, in a peaceful relaxed way, on living one’s own life in one’s own way. This notwithstanding, the personality is not the nefarious artifact that contemporary psychologies inform. Rather, the personality has been conscripted into the service of one’s culture, and thus rendering it out of alignment with the person, and the nature of the human heart.
The culture’s continual coup in co-opting the personality generation after generation has been, and is accomplished through an improper diet. Individual personalities eke out their existences on the most meager and foul of dregs. So too, these bits are lethally toxic: The diet consists of fierce cultural invectives, shame inducements, self-diminishing self-indictments and criticisms; and, anti-confidence, anti-worthiness and anti-dignity potions. As the mystic Martin Prechtel informs: “You can’t sell religion to happy people.”
Whether the “religion” we are being sold is one of the world’s well known ones, the religion of science, of one’s culture, or the New Age, we have conformed our personalities to the will of something distinct from ourselves. We distort the personality to fit the thinking of the ideologues in our cultures rather than to the Mystery’s Wisdom and universal intelligence – the gently nurturing Grace available just beyond thought. We have willingly dined on the foul anti-nutrient cuisine bespeaking our individual impotence and irrelevance.
In digesting and assimilating these falsities, the personality has rendered itself out of sync and at odds with the nature of the Mystery and possibilities of the human heart. The neutered personality then acts incorrigibly in its boisterous attempts to present as substantive an illusory power and strength though its proclivities for conflict, upheaval, struggle, saying no the life and the Mystery, and its insistence on the anti-poetic.
Yet something in these times is rousing personalities from our feigned impotence – from our slumber. People are saying enough! It began in Spain. Then to Tunisia. Egypt…other Middle Eastern countries, again to Europe, and the USA. Many mischaracterize these actions as political. They are not! They are statements instead of human decency. The insistence. The revolts. The resistance. The revolutions. The gatherings in public squares and streets are movements toward a remembering to remember our individual dignity, innocence and beauty.
These are acts of self-love and compassion. These are life-affirming movements toward and into alignment with the larger system of a self and that which lies beyond. There too is something else, something more for us to learn from the actions of those in the streets. I invite your awareness on the following…then, invite again the return of your attention to your own direct specific life circumstances – to that which is personal for you – to that which the Mystery asks of you!
1) The crucible for those having personally experienced the indecencies that moved them to the streets has been vitally important. Those intense pressures have forged changes in them. Without such pressure, they would not have changed. Without such pressure, love and compassion would not have been roused. So too, the intense pressures resulting from the counter measures of the respective nation states are the very fires necessary to further forge more individual change and more movement into our proper alignment with the Mystery.
2) The external constraints imposed on people the world over (poverty, starvation, terror, brutality, absences of freedoms, etc.) are also occurring, metaphorically, within each of us. What will it take for you to stand up to the heartless dictator inside you? What will it take for you to go to the streets of your personality saying enough to the impoverishment and constraints under which you are living? You see, “All war is Grace!” Whether outside a self or within a self, “All war is Grace!” This truism is both literal and metaphorical.
3) “War” prompts love and compassionate intelligence into the foreground of our lives. Albeit, as we are peoples inured suffering, we endure unconscionable degrees of horror before we consent to the love awaiting within the human heart. As such, our personalities, entranced conscripts each, have required inordinate amounts of steely fierce and difficult Grace to rouse us, to prompt us to look to love that awaits.
4) Too, while we are rousing our individual energetic and spiritual motion, we need, too, to properly nurture and care for the wary personality that is but a constituent of a self. The personality now is returning from its induced cultural servitude of falsity. It is moving into its proper orbit of the sovereign Being whose place it is to host and animate it.
5) As the being and personality become properly centered and grounded in the physical body…as the personality takes its place…as its vital creative role is consented to…as it discharges these duties as a sacred constituency of a human being…it will then begin fulfilling its promise as the powerfully expansive and creative force that it is.
6) In support of such movement, the personality requires a proper diet…one in confluence with its character and charge. For this I draw from the inspired Wisdom of the mystic Paul Richards (www.sentecenter.com) and his “Five Essential Messages.”
a) Daily let the other human beings in your world know that you “see” them. Congruently tell them daily: “I see you.” This is seeing beyond, personality and body. It is seeing the other’s presence and the Being within the human character
b) Daily let the others in your life know that you appreciate them. This is really a statement of letting the other know that you unconditionally love them: “I appreciate you!” Love the other without demands. Appreciate their presence and uniqueness.
c) Daily, without taking responsibility for another’s difficulties, offer your congruent regrets and apologies for the difficult life circumstances of those around you: “I am sorry for the difficulties you are experiencing.” “I regret the arduous circumstances in your life.” Etc.
d) Daily tell the others in your life whom you are close to that they belong. “You belong in this community that we share.” “ You belong in this family.” “You belong in this organization.” “You belong in this partnership.” “Couple.” Etc. The intent of this message is one of letting the other know that they can relax. You are there and looking out for them. They are not alone. Their belonging is secure. They too can rely on your strength.
e) Lastly, daily, let the others know that they are safe with you and from you. Rather than feeling safe, many feel degrees of jeopardy. Tell them “You are safe with me and from me.” Then when necessary protect them from others. And, always, and in every moment, protect them from any and all unkind and fierce aspects of yourself.
Ask others to do this for you too.
Are you now in the streets of your own life? If not, what will it take to get there?