Saturday, November 24, 2012

From "The Three Feathers - A Spiritual Journey"

This is a small excerpt from the first draft of "The Three Feathers - A Spiritual Journey", the companion to "The Three Feathers". In it, we follow Joshua's quest as it symbolizes our own journey of Self discovery.

Imprisonment and Freedom – “Jump”
Once we have answered the call from our Self that reaches us from beyond time and space to go out and search for it; once we have committed ourselves to the journey into the unknown, we will inevitably come to the point where we begin the descent into the world of the unconscious mind. And just like Joshua did not want to enter Hollow’s Gate, we don’t really want to go down there either. We think we want what’s waiting for us on the other side but we don’t yet want to do what’s necessary. We are still paying lip service to ourselves. “Of course I want peace. Of course I want love. Of course I want to be happy.” We are at a point in the journey where we think we want those things but are not aware of the large iceberg beneath the surface that simply says ‘no’. The journey we are about to undertake is the exploration of that iceberg, the area that lies beneath the surface. Everything that is hidden from us and only visible when we know where to look, lies there. All that we have kept from ourselves; all the beliefs in us that stand in the way of accepting who we are in truth—our belief in smallness, in our own frailty, our vulnerability, our lack, our needs and wants, our puny grievances and pity angers. All that lies there. And we know it is there. No wonder we don’t want to get anywhere near it.

Joshua and Grey fall into Hollow’s Gate—a world 5,000 feet below the surface—during their attempt to free Wind, a Pegasus, from her imprisonment. And so it happens to us at some point: We find ourselves free falling with no idea where we are about to go, only sensing on the periphery that it’s going to be huge and scary and will hopefully not cost us our lives. As for Krieg, he did not fall. He jumped. The small section in the book after Krieg and Wind escape to the surface is worth mentioning here. It is about limitations and the almost impossible conflict within ourselves of both the wish and the tremendous fear to leave them behind. When we first ask the question if there could possibly be more to us than flesh and skin and bones we, for the smallest of moments, question our limitations. We stop believing in them for an instant and what could be—what is there hidden deep within us—looks up to the heavens and senses that there must be something in us that is greater than the sum of our parts. Then we cast our eyes down again and continue with our ‘normal’ lives.

Wind gives Krieg an outlook on his life that he did not know was possible. He always believed that he would be a war horse until the end. He thought that he was who he was—an old horse at the end of its life—and that nothing could ever change that. When he first agreed to help Joshua on his journey, he changed his own destiny. And when he meets Wind, she introduces him to the next chapter in his life. It is the chapter of questioning his limitations. He didn't realize that he had prepared for this moment for a long time and throughout all his struggles. In fact, his struggles were, in a sense, the preparation. They instilled in him the wish to be free of them. The struggles gave him the motivation to make the leap and jump.

In this section, Wind tells Krieg about how she has gotten her wings. The wings in the story are symbols for the freedom from limitations. She talks about the legend of the flying horses and how people have interpreted it wrongly in the past. Krieg had thought all his life that Pegasus foals came out of the womb complete with wings attached and ready to fly. Wind tells him however that they do not have wings at birth. They can’t fly initially even though flying is their birth right. “Don’t you know that we are horses?... We are horses that learned to go past our limitations. We have been given the chance to fly, to leave behind all that limits us and soar with the eagles high above the earth. We have been given freedom...” Wind indicates that it is a long and hard road to letting go of one’s limitations and to learn how to fly. The horses in Hollow’s Gate 1000 years prior to Joshua and his friends coming onto the scene not only have to learn how to fly. They have to learn how to grow wings. They have to overcome something that is embedded into their DNA. That’s why the sky people served the Pegasus in the City of Light Ruins. The Pegasus were advanced beings because they knew what it took to let go of one’s limitations and reach far beyond their little selves.

Questioning our limitations is an enormous task. Thankfully we don’t have to do more than that. We can’t abolish them but we can acknowledge them gently and look at them kindly and in doing so, pass through them to the other side. Our limitations are not the problem. It is our belief in them that is the problem. We believe that our limitations will, in fact, keep us from reaching our goal of peace. They can’t. As Wind says to Krieg: “Your limitations, you must not believe them. You must not fuel them with doubt about yourself. You must know they are not and have never been part of you. You must know yourself. And not only must you know yourself you must love it as well. Deep within, you must love… you.” We don’t have to work on loving ourselves. Our Self is love. We only have to question that which we put in between ourselves and love. We have to question our limitations because any limitation we experience is a limitation we placed between ourselves and our full awareness of love’s presence.

Krieg’s jump into the unknown is equivalent to our questioning our own limitations. This is not a one-time thing. For Krieg getting his wings is the beginning of his final journey. There is still work for him to do. He can still go further and so can we. But we can begin to realize, in time, that what awaits us on the other side of our limitations is freedom. We can “soar with the eagles high above.” We are not bound to what holds us down, holds us back, stops of from crossing the seeming chasm between how we see ourselves now and who we are in truth. We can begin to question the limited awareness we have of ourselves, of others, and of the world. We can grow our own wings, in time. The horses learning to fly in the story is our equivalent of seeing ourselves and the world from a completely different plain field. We can look down at the battlefield of our lives and, from up here, look at it with kindness and smile a little bit at the silliness of it all, rather than hold ourselves down in seemingly eternal imprisonment.

One more aspect here is worth mentioning, I think. Wind’s imprisonment was voluntary. She thought she had done something horrific, almost 1000 years ago during the time when the mines were still open and the sky people began to misuse their power. She thought she had betrayed her people in a selfish act and for that she chose to be petrified in stone. We think the same way. We believe, deep down inside, that we have done something unforgivable. To make this very practical, we think it is our selfishness that is unforgivable. And no giving to charity or helping others or trying to be selfless, makes us feel better other than temporarily. That belief is hidden so deep within us that we are not even aware of it. We are only aware of the limitations we now experience in our lives—in our body, in relationships with others, in our career or our home. However, those limitations have nothing to do with the outside world. The limitations are internal. They are the limitations we put in place in order to not experience love, in order to not see ourselves as completely forgiven. The limitations are our maladaptive solution to a non existing problem. We will return to this topic a bit later on but for now, let’s see what happens when we fall, or jump, into the unknown and enter the treacherous domain of the unconscious mind.