till now. Hence we need to reinvent ourselves beyond circumstance and culture,
and figure out ways of cultivating change. But before we do that we need to taste
the limbos more deeply, to keep doing what we are doing until we hit saturation
point. To go directly into the Spiritual Catatonia instead of trying to run away
from it.
“And, rather than trying to manipulate your way into increased passion, put some
energy into directly facing the very deadness, stuckness, or pain that your desire for
more passion is an escape from. Instead of trying to generate passion, make room
for it to emerge. If you want to invite even more passion, get more vulnerable, more
transparent, more open to all that constitutes you.” Robert Augustus Masters.
To get out of the intermediate state of purgatory—the strange limbos “between”
heaven and hell—we essentially have to move beyond the life of the mind and
body, while putting them to even greater and deeper use. To transcend spiritual
catatonia we must learn to create a life of the soul, and for this we need to use the
“Imagination.” In Facing the World With Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life,
Robert Sardello talks of the making of the world by bringing attention to it and
insists on consistently exercising the activity of imagination. With imagination we
can avoid being locked into our view of ourselves and society to live out a life of
the soul: turned on, enthusiastic, curious and intentionally interested.
The Sacred Marriage is not “transcendent” of emotion it IS the full exploration
and illumination of emotion. Anhedonia is the opposite of this—when the inner
kinesthetic, felt-sense is anaesthetized, resulting in a loss of meaning-association,
personal-affect, and loss of purposeful relationship with oneself and others. The
extreme amplification of the emotional biochemistry during the peak of an
awakening often or invariably leads to a down cycle of the loss of feeling, emotion
and sensation. If we are not aware that this is an inevitable swing of chemistry,
we will lump secondary depression through distress over our condition onto the
already deflated chemistry. Those that didn’t have fluid emotional wiring through
a healthy bond with a happy emotionally fluent mother in childhood, are likely to
have a harder time dealing both with the emotional inflation of the peak, and the
emotional deflation of the valley. Even the anhedonia (loss of pleasure) associated
with the numbness of endorphins is a stage, through which emerges even greater
riches, transcendental vision and insights. The thing is to recognize, accept and
explore whatever state or condition we find ourselves in and this helps us move
onto the next thing. (See Dealing With Torpor in the Skills section.)
loss oF creatiVe liBiDo
“I’ve learned that real intuition requires skills and attitudes that are more demanding
than those of the mind; it demands some concrete object, image or ritual procedure,
and it doesn’t act in a vacuum. It presents no sure knowledge, but rather offers
information that is poetic in nature, and often ambiguous, ambivalent, paradoxical
and elusive. Its answers to our problems are neither immediate nor fully conclusive,
but rather take time to unfold and may never stand fully revealed.” Thomas Moore