Basements, Love, & Universal Law

reflections on accepting our necessary suffering

I want you to know that it’s going to be okay - maybe not exactly in the way you imagined, with eternal peace on earth and a fat 401K - but cosmically speaking, we’re par for the course.

There are two particular concepts that help me understand how. One of them is the interconnectedness of all things seen/unseen, and the other is a sense of scale. (And maybe another, secret one is Jesus on the cross, whispering “Hey, I know this looks like hell, but it’s gonna be okay.”) Spiritual folks often say “as above, so below” and that is what I mean in relation to scale. Outwardly, universal law operates on our level the same way it does for an amoeba or a galaxy; inwardly, in heaven as it is on earth . I’ve always thought Rumi explained this holographic phenomenon well in his famous lines: You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.

We must realize we are participating in a cosmic story or else everything becomes painfully nonsensical.

I see it like this: I am one cell in the celestial body of humanity which expands across space and time from the mythical conception of Adam until the omega of our total extinction. I appear to arise at a certain moment in a certain form, and I do, the same way a mushroom pokes through the dirt for one day or two and then returns to the mycelia from whence it came. The vast menageric collection of humanity - past, present, and future - is the mycelia, under the soil of space/time. We pierce the veil of matter for a moment to do our job, the one written in the spore of our being, until the job is done and our physical life dissolves. We might return on mission many times, and all along, the mycelia spreads.

A mycelia does not create itself and even it has a lifespan, as well as a job to do. Like the dinosaurs.

“Problems” arise, for people and mushrooms, but mostly people because I never heard a mushroom debate good and bad. We experience problems on the scale of our physical body, like illness, and problems on the scale of humanity, like war. But because we only hold a vision on the scale of our time and our body and forget the mycelia of which we are part… we assume our suffering is in vain, toward no greater end which may demand struggle and pain. Don’t you know about the constriction of a butterfly or a baby to enter this world?

At a recent gathering, Cynthia Bourgeault was recorded saying:

“Progress comes through the voluntary acceptance of constriction and diminishment. And that’s the unpleasant bottom line. Because all of us think that evolution comes through expansion. But it’s actually, spiritually speaking, in the opposite direction. It’s in the leaning into the conditions that you at first experience as intolerable, and gradually realizing that they are exactly the conditions that bring something new forth, something that can’t be born forth in any other way.”

Listen, I’m not making any commentaries on world events, but I am saying that YOU only create more suffering by resisting your own suffering. Eventually, if you really want to, you can begin participating in the transformation of suffering into love for the maintenance of the multiverse - as that is where we’re headed here - but ain’t nobody gonna make magic like that if they can’t first accept their own unconscious darkness and be humbled to the dirt by their nothingness without God.

I know it’s triggering for some folks. The nothingness and darkness and death. Why’s it gotta be like that? What about light and love? What about pleasure? Joy? Bliss?

Joey the Astrologer is helping me answer these questions through deepening my understanding of the energies at play in my own being. Someone else might be your pleasure-hack teacher, but I am your friend who walks with you through the valley of the shadow of death because it’s the only path I’ve yet found to enduring joy and true liberation. I have been that way once or twice, and my own discoveries reveal the perennial lesson of death and resurrection. Only in walking down to the basement at night did I free myself from the basement.

It’s going to be okay because the Way is supposed to look like this, on the scale of your life and body, and on the scale of humanity unfolding like a sheet in both directions beneath space/time, one, holy wrinkle for right now.

I didn’t write the universal law, but it says friction, tension, constriction, struggle - these experiences we’ve demonized - are required for any new arising, any hope manifested. If you wish for the further evolution of love in yourself or on the scale of our planet, then you request your own diminishment. Until. We begin to recognize the pattern and to welcome hard, uncomfortable, and even intolerable conditions, knowing and trusting their purpose on a longer cosmic arc. Then it doesn’t feel like diminishment, then we accept what is, free of our distinctions. Like my dear friend June says, your hardship becomes a “compliment from God,” a wink, if you will, that more is possible for you and for us all.

If ever you feel helpless under the sorrow of being alive, locally or globally, let it remind you that you can face your own sorrow. If you look at your own sorrow with a long loving gaze and do not turn away, if only for a moment or two, it will dissolve a drop at least, then there will be less for us all to carry.

It’s going to be okay because people like you and people like me are willing to look, even into the basement. Basement-gazing is an acquired practice to be sure, and one doesn’t want to spend too much time mining the darkness, but it is in our willingness to consciously bear the dark that we are empowered to wield the light.

If you spend a little time in any ordinary basement, before long, you start to see again. But for the devoted student of inner transformation, something crazy happens. It’s not that we skitter down the stairs out of the light, into the dark, and later emerge again. No, no… we ourselves become the light, fueled by the energy of the darkness, and the house, with its many levels, disappears.

☼

The following poem was found on the body of lifeless child in a Nazi death camp. For me, it will always be a pinnacle symbol of our salvific, human power to transmute even the blackest calamity into love energy.

O Lord,
Remember not only the men and women
Of good will, but also those of ill will.
But do not remember all the suffering they inflicted upon us;
Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to
This suffering—our comradeship,
Our loyalty, our humility, our courage,
Our generosity, the greatness of heart
Which has grown out of all this, and when
They come to judgement let all the fruits
Which we have borne be their forgiveness. 

☼

It’s going to be okay because it is not and never has been about our individual life or death, our personal sin or isolated salvation, our success or failure according to the cultural zeitgeist.

I think it takes great courage and enormous faith to accept our cell-hood in the collective human body which is yet a necessary arising for the evolution of Love on the scale of God. When we situate ourselves here - “a spec on the eye of a grasshopper” as one woman in my circles described it - we start to see the insignificance of our daily anxieties, and to come into right relationship with the unfolding of our lives, even with our unrequited dreams, chronic pain, tragedy. We realize the “success” of another is our own success because we share an origin. Maybe we start to open our hands around our pursuit of comfort and security and the sensation we call “happiness.” Not because those things don’t matter, but because they are not the point.

By the inspiration of David Hawkins:

God, I wish to be a servant of the Lord today, an instrument of Divine Love and a channel for your Will. I ask for divine guidance and assistance, and surrender all personal will through my devotion. I dedicate my life to your service. With your help, I choose love and peace above all other options. I commit to the aim of unconditional love and compassion for all of life in all its expression, and I surrender all judgement to you.

MAY WE ACCEPT OUR HOLY HUMAN POST IN THE COSMOS. MAY WE RECEIVE OUR SUFFERINGS WITH CONSCIOUSNESS AND GRACE. MAY WE RECOGNIZE CONSTRICTION AS THE PORTAL TO RESURRECTION. MAY WE SAY YES TO LOVE UNDER EVERY CONDITION AND AT ALL COSTS. MAY MERCY RISE TO MEET US.

PS. IF YOU ARE A PAID SUBSCRIBER, PLEASE ACCESS THE LINK BELOW SHOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET FOR A VIRTUAL COFFEE. These meetings are open almost every Thursday at 10:30 am central time and last about 45 minutes. We can just shoot the breeze or I’m happy to explore a specific question/topic with you. I think I write better than I talk most of the time, but in general I’m not bad company and I relish any opportunity to really know one another better!