Posted by GEM on 9/1/2007, 3:30 pm, in reply to "Re: Seeking like minded friends."
67.95.93.154

Hi Dave, I am a fellow seeker that has been on the path for a number of years. I have been following my heart for a very long time and I intimately know the lonliness of which you speak. Understand my friend that it is necessary. It is this lonliness and the longing for Truth that carries us home. We must learn to depend on nothing but Spirit. I have studied many paths and have recently received some very profound integrations in my understanding that has been over twenty years in the making. I'll share a little with you. I now experientially know that I live in a relative world of opposites: hot and cold, long and short, and most importantly: good and evil. Evil is real and has real consequences at the "human" level, but not at the level of Ultimate Reality. Nevertheless, in this earth life I must deal with the relative reality of evil within myself and my world because as a human being I myself am not yet completely real, nor will I be until I am completely actualized or individualized. The late protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the existential psychologist Rollo May have both pointed out that the human condition is a mixture of being and nonbeing. After many years I now understand how the psychology of Carl Jung fits in to the whole picture of what is actually going on. Jung's entire system is dealing with the "human" level, the level of terrestrial existence in this world that has only a relative reality. The shadow is nothing more than the evidence of evil within me, where evil is nothing more than the necessary opposite of good in this existence. It must be consciously dealt with by the ego before it be transcended by the God within. This involves exercising the courage to separate and withstand the tension of the inner opposites. The act of transcendence itself is a paradoxical union of one's inner opposites into the complementary balanced whole that we already are in essence. This is accomplished by what Jung called the transcendent function of the totality of what we each are known as the Self. This is essentially what the 12 Steps are also about. First the conscious self must become aware of its failure to be perfect and its need for help out of the bondage that it has created for itself (Steps 1 thru 6). Then the God Within miraculously performs the integration of and transcendence of the black/white opposition between the opposites within the personality. So, we increasingly move beyond good and evil to the Good, which we truly are. The problem that I have always had was understanding how spiritual teachings such as A Course in Miracles, Science of Mind (Church of Religious Science), etc. that teach that there is no sin or that nobody can hurt you, could possibly fit with the reality of sin and evil in this world. I now see the solution in that I live in a relative world of relative opposites, but that I am asked to have a spiritual vision of the Ultimate Reality that each of us is God and God alone (See only the Good), that the evil in each of us is only relatively real, (however it is real in this world and must be dealt with acccordingly). Holding this spiritual vision on a daily basis then is an additional life practice that pulls me further and further into the actualization of my inherent divinity. Anyway, nice to meet you, write me and tell me what you are into. I have studied alot of spiritual material and have practiced spiritual therapy on myself for years now. I have worked with my dreams, chakras, kundalini, third eye..... I have long wanted to start a spiritual group in the Houston area where I live. Chow.