Wednesday 9 October 2013

Rites of passage: Self Initiation

I wrote the following text over a month ago, before my trip to Bulgaria but didn't publish it back then. I wanted to see how things play out. And now it's good to reflect back on the things I wrote...

This is my birthday text. I am turning 25. It means that I have now been breathing the air of this planet for 24 years. It is a completion of a cycle. The cyclical nature of reality is quite interesting when you think about it. There are 24 hours in one day, 12 months in a year, 12 years in the Chinese astronomical cycle etc. I was born on the year of the Dragon, and as the year of the Dragon is every 12 years, also my 24th year was the year of the Dragon. As one cycle closes, a new one begins. The wheel of time keeps turning.



My life has been changing in many ways quite recently, and this time seems like a certain kind of culmination point in my life. Leaving behind old patterns of behavior and creating new ones. At the moment I am in my hometown Tornio, Finland. Just returned from a hiking trip to Lapland, and leaving for Bulgaria next week to do a bit of voluntary work. I was not planning on this but it just happened to come my way and so I decided to go. There are moments when you know you are in the right place in the right time, it's like putting pieces of a puzzle together and realizing how they all fit together. It happens all the time in everyday life when people think about certain things or other people and suddenly these things are right in front of them or their phone rings or a certain song starts playing on the radio... Then they say: "The strangest thing happened today..." or they might joke about telepathy or magic and superstition etc.

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe this phenomenon and did a great deal of scientific research on the topic. I have read  a bit of his work just to check if it confirms my own experiences. This is because I have had some very profound events that made me wonder what was going on. It was like a wake up call, an awakening to a new type of reality that I had no idea about before. It was a breakthrough that made me reconsider my whole attitude towards life. At first it was quite bizarre because like I already said before, I was not sure what was going on. But I am sure that many people could describe this type of experience as a some kind of divine guidance or destiny that could easily explain why some people suddenly are converting to some religion or have "found Jesus". But a bit of research helped me to stay grounded.

Synchronicity is a nice and convenient term but to describe such a curious thing for someone who has not experienced it is very hard. Therefore approaching it from a "scientific" angle may not lead to a result where someone could find this type of consciousness. It is hard to share. I would also attribute synchronicity to what early Christians called Gnosis. It is knowing. And when you know it, you know you know it. There is no guessing. It's like having an orgasm, if you start thinking if you had it or not, then you obviously didn't.

So, a revelation like this was a wonderful experience. It was an initiation, a glimpse of the future. It showed that there is more than the mundane. Break on through to the other side.



After a while I got used to thinking a bit differently. A random incidence was not random anymore, I found my life more meaningful. And naturally I began to follow these "leads". Meeting a new person exactly at the right time was very uplifting. Perhaps some of them felt the same way but that didn't really matter. It was about walking the path. I see the same roots where Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or pretty much any major religion or smaller "cult" stem from. There is no need for a mediator between yourself and what some may call God. It means taking back the power that dogmatic institutions have taken from us.

What am I talking about here? Nature. The interconnectedness of everything. God. It is the God of everyone and no one. We all possess it but no one can claim to own it. It is not their God, and it certainly is not my God. It just is. For some reason we have this crazy idea of ownership and separation. We argue about who is "right", is it the Christians or Muslims or Jews... We wonder who are God's chosen people.We all are. We just need to become the hero of our own story.

One thing that I pay even more attention than before is my intention. Not only thoughts and words but especially when I write something, make music or anything artistic. In some ways it is about relieving the feelings I have inside. Right now when I write these words, I am not really thinking that much but trying to allow things to flow out of me as naturally as I can. I have always done that but now I can do it more consciously. It is interesting to look back at things I did a few years ago when I did my best to embed my emotions into music. It is not only therapeutic but also a way to build yourself a roadmap into the future. This means transformation, metamorphosis. We can become something better, day by day, step by step. We can strip our addictions and turn them into virtues when we have some sort of a destination in sight. Buddha mind, Christ consciousness, enlightenment, nirvana, samadhi... those are ultimate goals but a human being is like an onion. We must peel off one layer at a time to get to the core. The path is to become ourselves, the highest mind that we all possess.


There are sacraments to this process. Ways to reach further. It has become apparent to me that there are very good reasons why religions have so many teachings revolving around food. Certain things people shouldn't eat, the forbidden fruit, the Holy Communion, holy water and so on. But we need to go much deeper than what the Church teaches because they only hand out placebos. But once you understand where these religions come from, everything becomes clear. We must go way back to the Native people. All around the world there can be found shamanic traditions who have a real communion, that connection to the source. It is so sad how their traditions have been systematically persecuted and almost destroyed. In Finland, for example, we have lost this connection completely. Sacred groves were burned and drums were torn. Now it's a legend, something to sell to the tourists. But the same has happened everywhere. Temples and pyramids are places of trade. There is one mention in the Bible when Jesus loses his temper. It is because of money changers who had taken over his "Father's house". Of course we can see this story as a metaphor to the body temple as well. The true beauty in many sacred texts is that they have many levels to them.



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