Monday, April 1, 2019

APRIL AND EASTER - 2019



SOUL CRAFT AT EASTER – BLOG 2019









April is Easter time. Most if not all people of the Christian faith believe that at this time Jesus Christ resurrected after being crucified on Golgotha. Yet, in ancient times it was the Spring celebration (in the northern hemisphere) that dates back some thousands of years. All tribal societies celebrated the ‘resurrection’ of the Earth. Nature became alive again when the sun warmed the fields and melted the snow. Flower and animals are born at this time and we still consider spring as the resurrection of life. Here are some early spring celebrations as examples:

Ēostre or Ostara, the goddess of spring – Germanic tribes.

In Roman mythology, Flora was a Sabine-derived goddess of flower and of the season of spring.

Jarylo (Cyrillic: Ярило or Ярила) Slavic god of vegetation, fertility and springtime.

The ancient Greek goddess Persephone is associated with spring, among other things.

Thallo (Thalatte), a hora of spring, classic ancient Greece, corresponds to Flora.

the great Spring God (春大神), of Ba Jia Jiang (The Eight Generals), Chinese folk beliefs and myths.

SYMBOLISM:

Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover by much of its symbolism, as well as by its position in the calendar. In most European languages the feast called Easter in English is termed by the words for passover in those languages and in the older English versions of the Bible the term Easter was the term used to translate passover. Easter customs vary across the Christian world, and include sunrise services, exclaiming the Paschal greeting, clipping the church, and decorating Easter eggs (symbols of the empty tomb). The Easter lily, a symbol of the resurrection, traditionally decorates the chancel area of churches on this day and for the rest of Eastertide. Additional customs that have become associated with Easter and are observed by both Christians and some non-Christians include egg hunting, the Easter Bunny, and Easter parades.

However, SOUL CRAFT is more than just celebrating spring. It is a celebration of the SOUL. Soul and Spirit are one aspect of Nature. Soul is our inner Spirit. Osho, a great Indian guru (teacher) spent most of his life teaching about Life and how we need to live with “soul awareness” and not forgetting our daily task of ensuring that Life be meaningful, that our soul is open to Love and thus grow in joy. 

Here is a quote from Osho:

“Life is an opportunity. Whatever moments we have lost, there is simply no way of getting them back. The opportunity life brings can be used in many ways. Whatever we do with it changes our life accordingly. Some people use it to earn wealth. For their whole life, they use all the opportunities of life, put all their energy, into earning wealth. But when they come face-to-face with death, all their wealth becomes useless. Some people toil their whole life to use this opportunity to attain fame and prestige just so their ego is fulfilled. But when death comes, all their ego, fame, and prestige become futile. So, what is the criterion that your life has not been in vain? The only criterion is that when death confronts you, all that you have earned in life should not be worthless. When you face death, however you have used the opportunity of life – whatever you have staked your whole life on – its meaningfulness should remain intact.

 Only that which is meaningful in the face of death is worthwhile.

Just go from the thinking that tomorrow morning you won’t be able to get up – what should you do? Depart from here with this thought: tomorrow morning you won’t be there, then what should you do? Someday a morning will surely come when you won’t be there. At least this much is certain; there is no reason to doubt it, there is no need to explain it either. There will certainly come a day when the sun will rise, but you won’t be there. Many people have been on this earth, but now they are not here anymore. Today you are here, and someday you won’t be here. In life, nothing is more certain than death, but we hardly ever think about it. Everything else is uncertain, everything else is doubtful. It is possible that God may or may not exist; it is possible that the soul may or may not exist. It is also possible that the world we see around us may or may not be there; it may be just a dream. Yet, there is one thing that is certain, one thing that is inevitable and there is not the least doubt about it: someone who is here now will not be here forever. Death will certainly come; there is no greater truth than death”.
Osho. The Independent Mind: Learning to Live a Life of Freedom . . Kindle Edition.







BODY MIND & SOUL

I teach in my workshops, that ‘Risking Being Alive” is a way of leading a meaningful life. We must be aware of our BODY MIND AND SOUL. The body is a fixed ‘machine’ of Nature dependant of resources that make it grow and thrive. The Mind can become independent and yet, it is dependent of the culture, traditions, education that I call all the INTROJECTS we swallow whole and believe they are ours. The mind is also a slave of words, scriptures, dogmas, stories from outside.

You may have many thoughts in your mind, so just watch them a little. If you watch, you will find that they have come from somewhere and have accumulated inside you. Just as the birds come and sit on the trees in the evening, similarly the thoughts have come and inhabited our minds. They are all others’ thoughts; they are aliens, borrowed. Only someone who can generate one or two thoughts of his own has the right to call himself free. Then the inside freedom begins.

The methods that began in ancient India are now adopted in the West called MINDFULNESS. This is one way to free the “mind slave” and once free, we reach our Soul.

SOUL- CRAFT

There is a great longing within each of us. We long to discover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world, to recover the never-before-seen treasure we were born to bring to our communities. To carry this treasure to others is half of our spiritual longing. The other half is to experience our oneness with the universe, with all of creation. While embracing and integrating both halves of the spiritual, Soulcraft focuses on the first: our yearning for individual personal meaning and a way to contribute to life, a yearning that pulls us toward the heart of the world — down, that is, into wild nature and into the dark earth of our deepest desires.

And so, we search. We go to psychotherapists to heal our emotional wounds. To physicians and other health care providers to heal our bodies. To clergy to heal our souls. All of them help — sometimes and somewhat. But the implicit and usually unconscious bargain we make with ourselves is that, yes, we want to be healed, we want to be made whole, we’re willing to go some distance, but we’re not willing to question the fundamental assumptions upon which our way of life has been built, both personally and societally. We ignore the still, small voice. We’re not willing to risk losing what we have.

The most effective paths to soul are nature-based. Nature — the outer nature we call “the wild” — has always been the essential element and the primary setting of the journey to soul. The soul, after all, is our inner wilderness, the intrapsychic terrain we know the least and that holds our individual mysteries. When we truly enter the outer wild — fully opened to its enigmatic and feral powers — the soul responds with its own cries and cravings. These passions might frighten us at first because they threaten to upset the carefully assembled applecart of our conventional lives. Therefore, many people regard their souls in much the same way they view deserts, jungles, oceans, wild mountains, and dark forests — as dangerous and forbidding places. Jung called it the Universal Unconscious.

Entry into the life of the soul — a life of passion, enchantment, and service — demands a steep price, a psychological form of dying. We do not easily give up our claim on the good life of extended adolescence, what Jungian analyst James Hollis refers to as our “first adulthood.” Nature-based societies, understanding this, provide their youth with extensive preparation for the encounter with soul followed by an arduous initiation rite. These rites, now beginning to reappear in our own society, facilitate the radical shift in consciousness required to turn our focus from familiar egocentric concerns to those of the soul, from our first adulthood to our second. In contemporary Western society, the underworld journey is neither understood nor encouraged by most parents, teachers, health professionals, or cultural leaders, to say nothing of mainstream business, science, or politics. Yet a genuine soulful adulthood is possible for everyone. We need to restore the ways of soul initiation.
Plotkin, Bill. Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (p. 19). New World Library. Kindle Edition.


FINAL WORDS

Michael Meade is my Mentor and his work is mainly teaching about SOULCRAFT. He and some very well-known community leaders in his men initiation groups like Malidoma Somé, Robert Bly and many others. His work as a mythologist is the best we know today, and he speaks of social change as primarily Soul initiation. Go to his web page: https://www.mosaicvoices.org/ He said:

“ Ritual has to do with change. In Western culture, everything is in constant alteration and change. But philosophically, Western culture still tends to deny change. People spend a lot of time trying to establish that they're the same person all the time. Tribal culture is always trying to throw up the fact that everything has changed. It changed because the cycle moved, or the wind blew, or someone's ancestor”

 Cultures that did initiation based it on change-the understanding of change and the capacity to move with change. The Chinese call this the Tao, which means the Way, but it also means the Wave. It means that things are in flux. Right now, we are in one of the biggest changes that anyone could be involved in. Soul craft is the WAY!









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