Crossing the Great Waters

This week I am reposting one of the most read posts of this blog site, fro 2015, because it is quite relevant to our focus on the Life Them of TRAVEL this month. Enjoy!

 

From the I-Ching (Taoist Book of Changes):

Hexagram 5:

“Perseverance brings good fortune.

It furthers one to cross the great water.”

Water; cross the great water

Central notion of the traditional interpretation of the I Ching. Meaning: to finish the old (and take final leave of it) and to address the new.

Crossing the Great Waters is a mode of Crossing the Threshold referred to frequently in the Taoist I Ching, or the Book of Changes. Crossing the Great Waters is about a major departure by which you leave behind that which no longer suits your life and venture forth into what might even be uncharted waters in order to arrive at a greater life destination.  Water is an important element (literally!) for this sort of transition because it is fluid and flexible. Your destination might change in the process of casting yourself upon the Ocean of possibilities and challenge. A Sea Voyage can be transformative; ergo the expression of a Sea Change to refer to a major shift in life potentials and outlook.

Gandalf collecting Frodo and Bilbo at the end of Return of the King to usher them onto an elvish boat that heads out over the waters is an apt conclusion to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle because after their heroic adventures have transformed Bilbo and Frodo, how can they remain contented in their life at the Shire? They are heroic adventurers; they must go where the winds and the waters call them!

What about you? Have you ever crossed the great waters? What did that action require? What have been the results?

Or is there a calling for you to yet cross the great waters that could transport you to the fulfillment of your life purpose and the realization of your Life Dream?

Some departures are ready made adventures, built into a committed course of action. Graduation from high school or college ends one state of preparatory training so that you are ready to embark upon a life changing process that often involves relocating and taking on new responsibilities and relationships.

Other Crossings require foresight and visioning. Take the time you need to contemplate deeply about life’s possibilities. Envision the best direction to take if you would aim to achieve a yet unrealized goal. How then can you cross the great waters to arrive at this destination?

Death itself can be considered a matter of Crossing the Great Waters, but any true departure is like a death and rebirth into another mode of Being. You do not have to wait for this lifetime to be completed before venturing forth.

I welcome your insights and stories!

Threshold Guardians

After Heeding the Call and setting forth with your well-considered Departure, you are set to approach the first Threshold so you can Cross the Threshold into the full engagement with your Adventure to achieve your Quest. But wait! It is not quite so easy as that.  Approaching the Threshold of a deeply  significant transition or a personally meaningful adventure invokes Threshold Guardians!  Only if you can pass by these daunting agencies or meet challenges designed to strengthen your weaknesses will you in fact step across that Threshold better equipped to meet your challenges successfully and realize your dreams.

Threshold Guardians are common archetypal character forms found in many a mythic tale.  The Never-Ending Story represents them as monolithic, winged Gargoyle figures guarding the entryway to  Bastian‘s destination. He must pass their enigmatic questioning in order to rescue his Princess and prevent the Nothing from spreading to annihilate all of his mythical world.  Scylla and Charybdis are rocky shoals that block Odysseus’s path to complete his Quest and return to home to Ithaka in Homer’s Ulysses. Dorothy faces winged monkeys sent by the Wicked Witch to deter her progress.  So then, what are some of your own Threshold Guardians and how have they served you or how can they aid you in completing your own mythic Quest?

Boundary Gremlins

In Your Life Path (see sidebar), I will share a story about a significant dream from a few years ago in which I visited a ‘high altitude’  region inhabited by beautiful winged horses which I felt served God-realized Masters in the far reaches of the Heavens. As I approached the boundary of their realm, excited to witness this, suddenly Gremlins appeared! Honestly I had never even known what gremlins might look like until after I woke from this dream, but there they were: little, broad faced imps with huge ears. They popped up along the boundary to prevent me from stepping into this rarifed realm of the Horses of Heaven.

Recognizing that these Gremlins were doing their own valuable work in this realm I had stumbled upon in my dreaming, I stepped back and knelt down at a respectful distance from the boundary. I felt grateful to have witnessed this realm at all and content to just be there for a moment. The Gremlins were not apparent then but I knew they would pop up again if I were to try to advance.

images are from pixabay.com

Behind me in this heightened inner realm, two winged Pegasus horses arrived, returning from their heavenly missives. One, white-pink-bluish, knelt gracefully onto her front legs beside me. I knew this was her invitation, and so I climbed up onto her bare back and held lightly onto a shock of her white mane as she stepped across the Threshold of the boundary into her domain.

I woke immediately, humbled and deeply impressed by this encounter with the Horses of Heaven! I realized the Gremlins were Threshold Guardians.  I needed great purity of heart, deep humility in order to venture into this sacred realm.

What or Who Are Your Threshold Guardians?

Your Threshold Guardians will be appropriate to the Quest and to the Threshold you aim to cross so you can achieve your own heroic purpose. I invite you to share YOUR story of Threshold Guardians. What qualities do they help you better master in order to advance to realize your Purpose?

Better Beginnings

I have written much for this blog about ‘better endings.’ Yet what about better BEGINNINGS? As you set out to realize your goals or to Live Your Dream, how shall you properly prepare to Answer the Call to new adventure?

Last week when I asked students in an anthropology class to write about a favorite Hero Cycle tale, six of 33 of them independently selected Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.  This fantasy trilogy has a very strong opening in Fellowship of the Ring, which follows after the prequel story of The Hobbit has set the stage.

Frodo, at home in his 2^nd uncle-once-removed Bilbo’s earthlodge within the Shire, receives a mysterious visitor, the Wizard Gandalf the Grey. Gandalf bestows upon Bilbo’s heir a magical object, the One Ring, which comes with a sacred responsibility and a definite Call to Adventure.

Frodo is to be the Bearer of the Ring, to convey it far away through dangerous territory to the cave of Mordor so to destroy it, once and for all!  For a young hobbit who has never ventured outside the Shire, this is an astounding Call. Hobbits, after all, are not known to be adventurous with the singular exception of Bilbo himself, who had never yet returned from his own last departure.

Gandalf entrusts Frodo with the Ring even more than himself. Frodo is an Innocent, untainted by greed, unaffected by war, at the beginning. Yet already as Frodo reads Bilbo’s unfinished diary and contemplates his own Call, Dark Forces approach the Shire, aiming to take the Ring for the evil Sauron.

Invisibility is a great device for one who must Depart in order to fulfill a mission so deep and so foreboding that it requires the Removal of the hero in order to draw out the hidden qualities of his/her own spiritual nature. Thus Bilbo disappeared for his final adventure after having briefly returned to the Shire; and thus Frodo must vanish from his home community (ultimately with three compatriot Allies).

Frodo must depart to discover his true qualities of Soul, to fulfill the Quest that only he is innately worthy to accomplish.

Darkness arrives. Frodo, followed and then joined by his Allies, Departs to fulfill their Quest.

         

images are from pixabay.com

Now what of you? What Adventure are you being called to?  How best can you prepare to embark?

Gandalf, Dumbledore, your Inner Teacher, and You!

Two fictional examples of the Teacher archetype aiding an ensemble cast of protagonists to alter their dreamlike lives so they might achieve better endings are Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings saga and Dumbledore from the fantasy mythic adventures of Harry Potter and his friends. Gandalf and Dumbledore have always seemed to me to be the same kind of mythic personage, though Gandalf is cast more for the young adult and Dumbledore more for a child’s conception of the Teacher or Mage  (per Jung or Campbell) energy.

Myths are projections of archetypal personae and challenges that we all face in our everyday lives as everyman and everywoman heroes; so Gandalf or Dumbledore are—as we project onto them as readers or as moviegoers—our own intrinsic Teacher-selves made manifest. These mystical Teachers allow their charges to accomplish what they otherwise might believe to be unllikely, yet they are the hero’s own Higher Energy propelling her or him forward toward the realization of their “impossible dream.”  Saving the entire wizarding and muggle worlds from a force too dangerous even to Name; returning Middle Earth to a state of balance and harmony instead of chaos: these are the tasks of an orphaned boy and of a tiny hobbit; or, you and me. But the magical Wizard Teacher is a protean shape-shifter, a transformer of pure energy into otherwise unimaginable new Forms.  All is possible if we set our hearts to following the directives of this all-knowing, all-powerful Higher Self Ally of the Teacher.

Have you noticed how Wizard Teachers like Gandalf and Dumbledore conduct their novice apprentices to the attainment of their most worthy desires?  Like Glinda for Dorothy, Gandalf and Dumbledore seem always to know exactly when their presence is of utmost value; they appear only when they are needed, otherwise they remain in the background, invisibly watching.

Now then, this week as I have been contemplating how the Teacher appears in my own heroic journey of Soul, I find that my Inner Teacher(s)—whom I recognize to be “as close as my heartbeat”—are always present yet they appear exactly when and how I require their precious aid. I will share a true example of a life and death situation in which I was quite literally saved by my own Inner Master (an ECK Master associated with the spiritual path of ECKANKAR, which is the belief system and practice to which I adhere). Your own Inner Teacher or Guide may take the form of Christ or Buddha or of Socrates, Rumi, Glinda or whatever archetypal—yet very real—personae you recognize, so long as you believe in and deeply value their protection and guidance.

I was living in a duplex apartment in Tempe, Arizona with a housemate who worked a four to midnight shift. One early morning while sleeping in the living room, I had heard voices outside so looked out the front window and witnessed a drug transaction involving the scurrilous group of tenants living on the other side of the duplex living room wall. They saw me witness the transaction and started terrorizing me for the next several months, making overt threats in loud voices from the other side of the thin wall separating our lives. One April or May afternoon, I was sitting in a living room chair after a hard morning at graduate school. Suddenly, as clearly as I could hear a person standing in the room right beside me speaking into my right ear, I heard a male voice that I immediately recognized as my spiritual Teacher. He stated very calmly but firmly, “Linda, lock the door.”

I stepped over to the door, which was slightly ajar, and as I was placing my right hand on the doorknob to close and lock the door, the ringleader of the neighbor gang was reaching to grab the doorknob from the other side, to come in! I just barely closed the door and turned the lock before he could enter. Then I looked out the picture window to my left—the same window through which I had witnessed the drug deal transpire. Huddled down just beneath the window frame was the bodyguard of the drug gang, waiting to abscond me if I were to have run out of the house to escape. I kid you not; this was one of the most dramatic events of this lifetime and I am absolutely certain that had my Teacher not intervened (I know him as Harji, the Inner form of the still current Living ECK Master, Sri Harold Klemp), I would not be on this earthly plane today to share this story. Oddly though, I was not afraid at all after this happened; a calm set over me like a cloak instead. And even more oddly when I look back to it now, I didn’t even call the police. I called a friend, asked her to come pick me up at the house, and I never slept another night in that duplex apartment. I slept for weeks in a sleeping bag on the floor of my Ph.D. advisor’s office until I could locate a new roommate and move into a safer space.

I ask you to be thinking about how the helpful presence or guidance of your own spiritual or inner archetype Teacher has appeared in your own life experience. I would love for you to share your own memories or stories about how your Teacher or Guide has been leading you to fulfill your own meaningful life lessons or Quest.

Finally, it makes sense why the Teacher appears most clearly in our lives only when most needed. It is because it is not ABOUT the Teacher or Master himself or herself; we are not here to simply follow someone who has already attained to all that which we seek. We are apprentices, aspirants or Learners who are striving to become Masters of spiritual essence and formations of life for ourselves; we may then become or appear as the Teacher for others as we gradually come to master our own lessons and unfold in our own awareness.

I invite and would love to share YOUR insights and stories about your own Inner Teacher or guidance. Tomorrow I am going to see the new Hobbit movie; maybe we might meet somewhere in the Middle Earth of our dreams!