Transformations, part six
In part five, I had a Big Dream which enlightened me as to the need for a headstone for my father (envisioned above.)
The next night, after a Zhouyi reading that affirmed beautifully that I’d understood the message, I had a powerful dream of empowerment and completion.
My conversation with Undlela brought to mind what I’d read of the complex hallucinatory plant Iboga in Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head:
“By letting me perceive the shape of my past self, iboga also seemed to be freeing me of the burden of that past. The action of the drug actually was - as I had heard it described but wouldn’t believe - the equivalent of ten years of psychoanalysis compacted into one interminable night.”
Undlela similarly empowered me to ‘perceive the shape of my past self’ and then transform it. It taught me this without the radical extremity of Iboga’s dramatic one-night ‘wake-up call’, feeling not at all like something out of my control which demanded surrender, but more like a teacher gifting me with ongoing transformational insights as a direct result of me also ‘doing the work’...just as the Zhouyi does.
The fifth line of earth-under-water, union (above). here put into the first tense, expresses for me this ‘feel’:
“Those who come to me I accept, those who do not come are allowed to go their own way. I invite none, flatter none - all come of their own free will. In this way there develops a voluntary dependence among those who hold to me. They do not have to be constantly on their guard but may express their opinions openly.”
I don’t pretend to understand the mysterious inner workings of either Zhouyi or Undlela, of how of their wisdom forms a synthesis with our consciousness - and in this experience, with each other’s also.
All I know is how it feels to me; like a gentle and compassionate step-by-step assessment or diagnosis.
Areas of blockage or weakness are simply reflected back to me, allowing me to bring them to conscious awareness if I’m ready and willing to do so, then transfigured within my body, now become a healing matrix.
This is the nearest I can come to expressing how completely I felt - and still feel - held in a loving awareness. So different from the motivation-sapping cosy blanket feeling I used to feel when I smoked marijuana, and which I realized was ultimately keeping me stuck where I was, this is more akin to being enfolded within a field of vibrant, limitless potential.
What’s particularly striking to me is how rooted in the earthy reality of my own life are these insights.
I realise that I came to this teacher plant, renowned for revealing spiritual truths, with the common cultural conditioning that the spirit is somewhere otherworldly, most likely to show its face in an ethereal ‘out of body’ experience...the very same myth of dislocation which has helped to justify such cataclysmic desecration of our sacred earth.
As John O’Donahue put it,
“For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us...If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.”
In this way, the White Paths which Undlela guided me down led deep into my being, to a profound experience of being deeply, joyfully embodied.
Here’s an epilogue, including a wee video of the creative process of creating Dad’s headstone.