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”
