Somewhere, sometime, someone turned the light on us.
To my mind, it all began with Freud, with his glaring assertions that he could look inside me and tell me who I am.
And then came the obsession with everyone, everywhere, telling everybody else everything there was to know about them.
When I was three, I tripped over a tree root in the forest and got a bloody nose.
And so on.
It came, I think, from the belief that things known, things brought to consciousness, are good things.
That in order to heal, knowledge is key.
Knowledge, in today’s thinking, is our saving grace.
Leaving aspects of our lives in our unconscious is considered unhealthy.
It assumes, of course, that healing is up to the human being; that God and life and time have little, if anything, to do with it.
A scrubbed soul is a good soul.
I remember when I first began studying soul structure, and, perhaps because they were unique and somewhat easy to study, I began with evil soul structures.
The big guys – Satan, the devil, and the antiChrist – had their own distinctive formations. But along with them, as I studied other souls that marched by me – something along the lines of the formal dress competition in a beauty pageant – came a number of interesting studies.
One was of a woman who did not like it when anything real, anything tangible, came into her soul.
A soul is made up of the “dirt” of our lives. The experiences. Good and bad. Everyday experiences. Sudden catastrophes. Whatever. It all goes into our souls. What we do with this “dirt” is pretty much up to us. Do we take our lives and work with what has happened to us and use it for our own good and for the good of others? Or do we look askance at this event and that occurrence and judge God and life and everyone around us for “letting” it happen to us?
The first way of handling life, quite obviously, results in a healthy soil. A place where our spirituality, our connectedness to God, can grow and flourish.
The second way leads to a spiritual base that is starved of health. Slowly losing its ability to create its own soul energy, it will do what it needs to to get energy from others. Rape. Theft. Gang violence. Evil is just a method to steal from someone else the energy that keeps their souls alive and active. This is why, sometimes, people who have been traumatized by another person can’t find their way back to a happy life.
To a sense of worth and contentment.
So imagine what happens to a soul that won’t even allow any residue from experiences to get into her soul in the first place.
I called it, the anorexic soul.
I imagine that her obsession with keeping an ever-clean soul came from the idea that everything in her life should be out there, out in the world, not buried deep inside.
And yet this not only puts the responsibility for life in the hands of man alone, it takes away any benefit that comes from non-action. From rest.
From leaving things alone for a while.
I am using the word, knowledge, to mean, the knowing of facts.
But I find knowledge to be a living thing: something that grows (or shrinks); that modulates and transforms. That actually changes with time and increased experience. It is truly amazing how what we think we knew when we were one age becomes just the base for what we know at a later age. And this growth changes the actual meaning of the facts known.
Knowledge is not a static thing. It is ever-changing.
So how then can it be the key to healing?
Know your past, and you will be healed as though touched by a magic wand.
But our knowing of our past is also an ever-changing intelligence. The significance of events can change with time and shifting perspectives. (There is nothing like having one’s own child to fill in some of the blanks describing our parents’ own choice of actions.)
In addition, we can learn facts throughout our own lifetime that reshapes the whole package.
Knowledge is a prism that reflects different pictures by holding it in front of changing light. And darkness.
Understanding, on the other hand, to me anyway, is absolute.
It’s the right key for the lock. Once in and turned, the lock is opened.
An absolute act, with an absolute result.
There is an old joke about the feet representing understanding: because they stand under you.
But I have taken this joke to heart.
And combined it with other lessons to view understanding as the actual standing in a situation in order to experience the totality of this experience itself.
It’s not just an accumulation of data. It is the final weaving together of the meanings that come from the facts.
The final product.
This whole musing really has to do with shadows, or darkness, or rest.
We can have all our facts, our knowledge, lined up neatly, categorized, with tabs separating the sub-sections, even, and really know nothing. Nothing that leads to healing, anyway.
But let that knowledge sit, steep in time and inactivity, and the pieces come together like a long-simmered stew, melding and blending.
Plants, and pre-borns, and bugs, and all sorts of things in nature show us that darkness, inactivity, is a vital part of growth.
If we try to deal with God always in the light of day, in the glare of reality, then all we will get is a harsh comprehension of our relationship with him.
If we allow ourselves to be inactive, passive, quiet, still, then we find our ability to perceive God coming to us. God acting on us. God reaching out to us.
In my lesson of re-creation, which is essential to the understanding of healing from a God point-of-view, it is clear that when we are wounded in our souls, wounded by life’s events, that God will send us little rockets of love to try to resolve that wound. To heal us.
I used to call these wounds, heart stones. In that they could clog up our hearts. And I used to watch as incident after incident would come into my life and aggravate them. It took me a while to realize that these incidents were meant to come into my life. That they were sent to break up the rocks that stopped my heart in certain ways.
It’s not our own knowledge that will heal us ultimately. It’s God’s knowledge of us that will give us what we need to become whole again.
If we allow ourselves to be still.
And know that God is.
Amen.