For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
~ Alan Watts
For Unless One is Able to Live Fully in the Present
The Myth of Normalcy and How to Break Free
“Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us into adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost.” ~ Emil Cioran
You are not normal. You never have been. You never will be. You are an animal at odds with itself. You are a creature torn between spirit and flesh, between having roots and having wings, between wormhood and godhood. You are a force of nature first, a person second.
Society would have you believe the opposite of this, that you are a person first. You are not. You are nature, and nature is you. You are primal. You are blood and bones. You are compulsive, anxious, sexual, tender, ornery, playful, dazed, and confused.
And that’s okay. Or, at least, it should be. But society breathes down your neck. Culture pigeonholes you, forces eye guards on you, keeps you “in line.”
It’s time to call “bullshit.” Especially on a profoundly sick society. If, as Krishnamurti said, “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” then it stands to reason that we turn the tables on the sick society by becoming maladjusted to it.
We maladjust to readjust the adjusted yet unjust society. We sow a little madness to gain a little sanity in an insane world. We flip the script. We push the envelope. We flatten the box that everyone claims to be thinking outside of. We eccentrically crush out.
This begins at home. It begins with realigning the all-too-adjusted self. Sometimes the halo gets so high that it must be forced back down into the mortal coil from which it sprang. Sometimes in order to see the forest for the trees, you’ve got to burn down the forest.
Have a sacred breakdown:
“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real—albeit very inarticulate—bid for health and self-knowledge.” ~ Alain de Botton
When society doesn’t provide a healthy sense of community or interconnected spirituality, the human animal must create it for himself. He does so through his powerful imagination. Through bold acts of creativity. Through insouciance and nonchalance. Through a devil-may-care attitude despite both the devil and God.
A mighty antidote to the mythos of normalcy is manifesting a strategic breakdown. It’s allowing yourself a sacred space to “go crazy” for a time. A place to be vulnerable despite an invulnerable world.
Where you are free to set a minefield in your mind field, to toss a monkey wrench into all the outdated machinery, to plant question marks in a field of periods, to upset the clockwork by un-cogging yourself. It’s a place where you are free to transform millstones into whetstones into Philosopher’s stones.
Sometimes you must lose your mind in order to find your soul. Sometimes the only way a higher order can be discovered is by sowing a little disorder into the current order.
As Terence McKenna said, “This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
Take a leap of courage out of faith:
“It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret.” ~ Machiavelli
Avoid having rigid goals. Change is the only law. Faith is good as a flotation device, it will prevent you from drowning, but it is horrible for swimming. In order to swim, and swim well, you must detach yourself from the flotation device of your faith. Transform your leap of faith into a leap of courage.
As Marcel Proust said, “We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.”
The only way to begin “the journey through the wilderness” is to first abandon the known. We must surrender to the unknown. We must take a leap of courage. This is how it has always been done.
We are conditioned to use the flotation device of our faith, to use the crutch handed down by our forefathers, to remain in the comfort zone provided by our culture. But we must recondition our cultural conditioning in order to discover our hero’s journey. In order to understand that the journey is the thing, we must first begin the journey.
The journey cannot begin while we are still floating, still leaning, still comfortable. We must swim. We must discover our own way. We must get uncomfortable. It is discomfort that puts our mind-body-soul into motion.
It is through scars that we discover sacred wounds. It is through pressure that the coal of our naivete becomes the pearl of our purpose. It is only outside of our comfort zone that we discover millstones can be transformed into whetstones.
Inside the comfort zone—filled with crutches and flotation devices and creature comforts—there is only rust, dust, and dullness. There’s only naivete, softness, and fragility.
Outside the comfort zone, on the path of our own hero’s journey, we see how the vicissitudes of life, the slings and arrows, the trials and tribulations, have the potential to transform our naivete into wisdom, our softness into robustness, and our fragility into antifragility.
Be anomalous:
“So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.” ~ Harry Crews
Leave an imprint on the world by becoming anomalous. Use the fire of your eccentricity to brand your soul signature into the flesh of the cosmos. Strangeness is power. Use this power to transform the world.
Embrace your strangeness. Double down on what makes you different. Discover a niche as unique as your own fingerprint. Stick to what makes you weird, odd, and eccentric. This is where the magic is at. This is where you are most free. Be free. Be wild. Be crazy, beautiful, hungry, and alive. Be fire.
Let the rest of the world be moths if they choose. You cannot control that. But you can control if you are fire or not. You can control if you are a moth or not. Don’t be a moth, enviously fluttering around the fire of others. Be fire. Fire plus fire creates greater fire. Burn the world with your own inner light.
Being fire is being anomalous. It’s tapping that passionate part of you that makes you come alive. Fire is desire, anger, love, art, hunger, pain. It does not allow for repression or suppression. It burns through all things. It transforms all things into ashes. It gives birth to high art. It gives birth to the mighty Phoenix.
The only way you discover your own inner Phoenix is by burning through your cultural conditioning. By burning through your faith, your flotation devices, and your crutches, and turning them into mere kindling. By burning through the mythos of normalcy and embracing the authenticity of your weirdness.
By burning through invulnerability and discovering absolute vulnerability. By burning through sanity with wild creativity and sacred insanity. By burning through the profoundly sick society and creating a healthier society out of the ashes left behind.
Image Sources
Breaking Free by Volture
You Haven’t Messed Anything Up
You haven’t messed anything up. You haven’t taken the wrong path. You haven’t sabotaged your destiny; you’re living it. All that you’ve endured was, and still is, a part of the master plan. Your impatience is a sign of your spirit drifting away; reel it back in. At times like this, when your soul feels tired, gratitude is the best antidote to turn to. At times like this, when your heart feels lost, faith is how you’ll find your way back.
At times like this, when your mind is going off in different directions, stillness is the only answer to your questions. You’re being prepared for something grand, that’s why your soul has been put through one test after another. Raise your head to the sky and thank the Universe for the blessing that’s coming; your time in the dark is ending. A new chapter filled with light, love, and abundance is about to begin.
~ Esther T
Sophia, the Gnostic Goddess and our Search for the Divine Truth
Gnosticism, one of the most mystical movements in our history, has been buried and forgotten centuries after the spread of Christianity. This vision is now slowly re-awakening and winning people’s hearts. Maybe it is because it tells the story that humanity itself needs to listen again, and to remind us of our true nature…
“This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.” ~ Lesley Hazleton
According to Gnostics, which means mystical knowledge, there is an ultimate truth when it comes to the creation of the world and human suffering as a consequence of the deception we are trapped in.
Sophia, the Gnostic Goddess and the Ultimate Truth
The ultimate truth is that Goddess Sophia (meaning wisdom in Greek), the creator of this Universe, in her intention to shape this world, wanted to create species that would have enormous freedom to play and explore, to enjoy, to feel pleasure, and to create by themselves anything they wanted.
Sophia did not separate herself from the thing she created. She was not an impersonal God that dictated what was right and wrong. Sophia was so fascinated and passionate about the creatures she dreamt about, that during the creation process she could not step away from her project as other Gods would do. Instead, she wanted to be involved in her creation and observe her creatures, and so she fell from the edge of the Universe i.e. the Pleroma, the totality of divine powers, full perfection.
During this fall, she split herself in two parts; her most irrational passion became the world of matter – the Universe, and her higher part remained celestial.
Nevertheless, she did not know that her fascination and involvement for her creatures would also have consequences. Due to her irrational passion and in her fall from the Pleroma, she cast the shadow of evil, incarnated and got entangled in the world of matter controlled by Demiurge.
The Demiurge, according to Gnosticism, is the entity that possessed the world of matter and this entity was driven by greed and envy. The Gnostics believed that this entity wanted to take credit for the world Sophia created, claiming to be the true God, and wanted humans to worship him as the true creator of the Universe.
He wanted to enslave the human race, and keep them distracted from finding the Truth that everything in this world had the divine spark of Sophia and that all humans had this divine print because Sophia is within all of us. Humans are beings of energy living in a body, and that we are much more than our physical boundaries, and knowing this is where our potential lied to transcend our limits created by our belief system.
According to the Gnostics, as Demiurge had control over the world of matter, he tried to suppress humans as much as possible in their psychic power and visions. He wanted humans to believe that the only true reality that existed was this world of matter and what we could see with our physical eyes.
How Gnosticism explained the development of our society
He could control the human mind, especially of those who sought power based on feelings of greed, envy and fear. He immersed himself in humanity’s belief system firstly as the monotheistic and patriarchal religions that took shape on Earth and later on modern societies were built based on fear of sin, and guilt.
This new God dictated that only through suffering the doors of salvation will open to humans. He suppressed the original sexuality and pleasure of humanity – as opposed to the way Sophia wanted her species to experience the world.
The original religion of the Earth, since the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, was based on the Goddess and the symbiosis of sexuality and spirituality, sacred and mundane, humans and nature. This ancient religion was slowly repressed and persecuted as new forms of monotheistic religions started to have more power. The original gnostics, pagans, witches and shamans – all of those who worshipped the Earth and Sophia – were tortured, burned and killed during the beginning of the 1st century A.D. and later.
The question that also modern gnostics think of is: what if hunger for power, greed and envy controlled the mind of humans carrying those atrocities? Which true God or Goddess would have wanted those terrible things to happen? For the gnostic was clear: only a fake God controlled human mind through a stage of anger, fear, and guilt.
“The true Gnostic understands that there is a difference between religious activity and spiritual truth.” ~ David Tresemer
The spiritual truth according to Gnostics
As the gnostics believed and also the pagans celebrated in their ceremonies, the presence of Sophia within all of us on Earth. The Earth itself is Gaia, the Goddess creator of Life that wanted us to feel joy and pleasure.
Societies that were connected to Nature and the Earth did not allow this new wave of belief system to dictate their way of living, because for them the doors of salvation and to the divine would open through joy, respect to nature, collaboration, pray and love. Consequently, many gnostics died defending what was true to them.
The old religious system fell apart, and greed-driven corporations, consumerism and totalitarian governments took the place of the new God. This was interpreted by the Gnostics as the new way of the Demiurge that kept us blind to our true nature – our origin as creatures of Goddess Sophia.
If we look at the world we live in, we see how humans have been exploiting the Earth, digging her minerals and precious substances with machines without any respect or thought of sustainability. Technology has been a big step for us to allow faster communication and have higher life standards. We have freedom to create, as Sophia wanted us to do.
But are we really following her original desire to use our full potential and creativity, or have we gone in the wrong direction?
The lungs of our planet are being destroyed by continuous deforestation and exploitation of the land to get more profit. Oceans are being contaminated, the air is polluted, and wars continue to ravage our world. Is this the consequence of the disconnection to the Goddess, as it was in ancient traditions? Have humans lost their connection to the spirits of Nature and finally to the divine spark which is the print of Sophia, the origin of our Creation?
Perhaps we are unconsciously feeding our greed and allowing the Demiurge to take over our inner mystical origins and forgetting the sacredness of the Earth and ourselves. Is this the consequence of our belief that the world of matter is the ultimate reality, worshipping materialism and closing our spiritual eyes?
“We are in times of great wings, swiping across our world. May these wings swipe away what we not longer need, and bring us back home to our true selves and all that is.” ~ Medicine Song
Nevertheless, as society is changing at a fast pace, we are now in a new wave of awareness. Our own consciousness is evolving, as more people are reconnecting to the energy of the Earth, to the compassion for all living beings, to the unconditional love to others and the healing power that is available when humans remember the divine spark that is within them and all creatures.
As the Gnostics predicted, humanity will wake up and realise the deception that has trapped them for a long time, impeding them to encounter the Goddess, the primordial Mother and force of the Universe, Sophia, which is the real longing of the soul and desire of human beings.
“I am the Queen, source of thought, Knowledge itself. You do not know Me, yet you dwell in me.” ~ Ancient Gnostic texts
As the Gnostics and pagans believed, the most beautiful thing ever created is the Earth – Sophia herself materialised. We humans spend multiple lives trying to remember that we are part of Her as She is in each one of us.
We have forgotten this Truth, and it is time for us to wake up from the dream we are living, to acknowledge our true desires, to find happiness within, to connect again to the source of Infinite Love, through healing the Earth and giving back to her all the Love she gave us when she sacrificed her own divinity to create this living universe and finally, us.
Image Sources:
Art by Helena Nelson Reed
Balance, the Alchemy of Life
One of the main ways to create content is to look at sources for additional information. To be honest, I’m an avid reader, when I start I get so immersed in the book that the entire world stands still.
Not much to Bhavika’s liking as she has to break this cocoon to get me to help with the household chores, and then every moment I get I try to get back to an incomplete book. But to have healthy content coming in, I draw inspiration not just from experience, but by standing on the shoulders of giants as well.
On that note let me introduce you to a very famous book by Paulo Coehlo ~ The Alchemist, what’s interesting is just as much as I like the story in the book, the introduction to this version talks about how he struggled with getting the book to sell and how from selling just one book in a year or two, to becoming a bestseller.
Don't let this stop you, show us some love and subscribe to continue reading!
If you're already a member, please login.
Image Sources
