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Letters with C.L. Part 2
2/12/2000 Dear Ted, Somehow the idea "I am god trapped in hell" doesn't say it all for me, it sounds so dead end and hopeless. I am also god untrapping myself from hell am I not? Love, C. (Attached was the following:) I am a continuum. I extend all the way from the flawless perfection of God Herself to the endless permutations of the flesh and life in separation. Consciousness in extending out from its core perfection, meets obstacles and becomes entangled in lies. Healing is returning to the perfection, untangling the lies, seeing that the obstacles are permeable and understanding the truth: I am the flawless perfection of God entangled in hell, but I am also the flawless perfection of God untangling the hold hell has upon me. No one knows how long this untangling will take. I do not think it will be forever. But it may be a long long time. Joy is in the journey. (Later the same day) I am probably going to answer my own e-mail here. You can probably just stand silently by and chuckle. Or do nothing. I have re-read your latest essay on the banana fleas and see that my hopeless dead-end reaction-feeling to your idea of being god trapped in hell is premature. I now see that you didn't write these essays to make anyone feel hopeless and discouraged. But more in the vein of this is just the way it is. Hell will not go away. Even if I somehow manage to extricate my individual self from it, a part of my Self will still be there. And even if we all manage to extricate ourselves from it, it itself will still be there in form. It is part of the warp of the universe so to speak. ...I guess the issue I have with you here is that many feeler type people will go to depression with this idea as I did. I understand that pretending or believing that only light and love is real and thereby ignoring the whole realm of hell will get you nowhere and hell will remain unchanged. But is it possible to change hell? Will the ego always be the ego? Will a part of me always remain at level one? Or will that part transform? Or will I transform and the part just remain forever in level one. There's so much I just don't get! But I AM drawn to this question as a moth to fire. Yours in perplexity, C * * * * * * * * Dear C, Thank you for staying in touch. I really appreciate your sharing your deepening process. I agree that you are God(ess) untrapping yourself from hell. But perhaps better to say, untrapping yourself from exclusive or primary identification with hell. The internal hell may never go away, simply because being simultaneously infinite and totally confined is a bitch, no matter how you slice it. And the external hell will remain not looking so good for god-knows-how-long. My current best guess is at least many thousands of years. Why? Because: It is organic. Physical, organic reality has its own (slow) timeframe for transfiguration. Slow, at least, relative to our mental and emotional hopes and expectations. A few advanced souls who are ready for basic realization of unity certainly do affect the entire matrix quite profoundly, but for the end affect to look like our ideal of happiness and harmony - well, we haven’t even come close to that there in our little sangha. Too much purification. Takes years. Because all beings are connected, no one can advance too far beyond the others. It’s as if we’re all linked up with bungee cords. The deeper any one pushes against any edge of the envelope, the more tension that one feels, and the stronger an influence they exert upon the entire matrix. But we’ll need a WHOLE lot more awakened ones to be stretching before we see a dramatic difference. And even when we accomplish the monumental task of massive global awakening (and global wakedown shakedown, which will be a very interesting flavor of hell in its own right), we’ll be finding ourselves to be more different from each other than ever! With more challenges in finding harmony than we ever imagined!! And, even if it’s possible to arrive at some version of a goal of point #2, we are likewise connected with EVERY SINGLE BEING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!!!!! Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I call that God Trapped In Hell. OK, I’ll buy untrapping. But I’m done holding my breath.
You’re right that I didn't write these essays to make anyone feel hopeless or discouraged… only sobered. And my point is that we’re NOT going to extricate ourselves from it. IT is US! If people go to depression with this idea, FINE! What’s wrong with depression? In most people, that is exactly what is underlying the ordinary happy denial state, waiting to be discovered. Depression. It’s another word for dis-illusioned. Relieved of the burdensome illusion that life is somehow going to work out alright, if only X, Y, or Z. If everyone was being properly fed, it would all be OK. If there was no homelessness. If there was no poverty. If everyone would simply understand each other. If technology could solve all our problems. If everybody would simply awaken and be Christ-like. If interplanetary war was banished. If intergalactic war, if interdimensional war…. If, if, if. I’m not suggesting we all throw down our lives in hopelessness. I’m just suggesting that we throw down our illusions and go forward AS the very wound we have so fervently strived to overcome. If, as a global race, we can someday achieve this ultimate sobering and yet simultaneously dare to move forward with that wound as the living, beating guide in our hearts instead of the thing we have been trying to rip out, I’ll be standing there weeping with joy, knowing that we have finally grown up and taken our true place on the throne of Being. Love, Ted 1/14/2001 Ted, I just wanted to share this with you. J. and I went to Brietenbush for a couple of days and some sort of shift occurred for me, I'm not sure what. Brietenbush is a sort of new age community/old age hot springs resort where we stayed in a little cabin and hiked and soaked nude in outdoor hot pools. Nude was strangely liberating for my prudish self-consciousness and low body esteem. But that was only an outward shift. There was an inward one as well. There is a sense of power and onlyness. There is a feeling of devastation and loneliness. There is a level where I live a life of seeming waste and superficiality. And consciousness permeates it all and feels it all. The feelings go so deep they seem to swamp me. Amazing it is how feelings color the world. Perhaps the world is something else entirely. The mystery of it astounds me. Being ever flows and like a fish at sea swims in and out among the sensations and the emotional landscapes that are encountered. But that is only on the surface; down below in the depths of the encounter, something else is happening and I'm not sure what it is. There is a longing to merge and a despair at ever achieving this. There is a huge emptiness wanting to be penetrated and there is That which goes forth to meet it. But will the meeting ever consummate? Getting down and dirty where I live from day to day, that emptiness takes the form of mind numbing activities such as, you guessed it, computer solitaire and zit picking. (Well perhaps you didn't guess the zit picking part). The gulf between where I am and where I AM seems impenetrable. The attempts to penetrate it, so futile. The task so large, my means so small. And then, hopelessness becomes a part of the seascape Being encounters. Can you imagine this: a swamp where formerly I wallowed in endless despair now is a place I also float above. Perhaps the hopeless are not without their succor. And so, you say, what is the shift? It seems to be a more pressing awareness of the gulf. An awareness of the immense task before me. An awareness that I contain both these forces and that somehow I am the meeting place that they have chosen. As are we all, perhaps. It is an awakening to a great frustration. I wonder, is this what you call "being God in hell"? It feels a little different. As I recall, your frustration was that of infiniteness trying to squeeze into smallness. Mine seems to be the inability of infiniteness and smallness to ever fully meet, the frustration of unconsumed desire on the part of the infinite for the finite and of the finite for the infinite. With great love, C. |
