Changing Lead to Gold
Posted by admin on 23 Jan 2009 at 11:41 am | Tagged as: Spiritual Alchemy
Alchemy is a process. It is not an easy process. It is a practice of commitment to the highest good. It is the highest responsibility. You commit to accepting that your energy is your energy and you are responsible for how it is expressed.
There are various densities to lead. Hatred and bitterness are a kind of lead that you have allowed to grow heavier and heavier until they, in a literal sense, become immoveable. These immoveable objects often begin as less dense leaden aspects such as irritation and anger.
Alchemy is the process of learning to change these leaden aspects of emotional experience into more positive aspects before they become calcified and harder to move or less flexible. This process begins with awareness. It is to become aware of how one feels. Allied to this are the thoughts that one allows to surface in the mind. It is your mind. You are the guardian of your mind. At the gates of your mind, metaphorically speaking, you create with practice threshold guardians.
This storyteller works with anger. It takes a lot to make him angry (or at least he thinks it does) but when this energy is evoked by outside circumstances all hell can be unleashed and, metaphorically speaking, divine purpose goes out the window of awareness.
In such an experience one loses one’s centre. The mind goes racing. The intention is to remain centred but the intensity of the experienced hurt or injustice is highly emotionally charged. One literally is on a raft going down a white water experience. I am being carried down the rapids and all I can do is watch.
This is why you do a spiritual practice. It is not in order to chase experiences of bliss like going to a spiritual supermarket to shop for self-aggrandisement. Such states are graces and are not available for your personal use. You can and will enjoy (and I mean in-joy) these experiences but their real intent is to serve the highest good for all.
The measure of your spiritual maturity is not how long you can sit in meditation but how long you can work with energy that seeks to destroy or hurt or inflict pain -whether this is physical, emotional, or spiritual pain. This is shambala, the experience of becoming a spiritual warrior.
In the ranks of the spiritual army I would consider myself a rank amateur. This is not to denigrate the effort. To quote an Irish mythological metaphor, riastradh (combination holy anger and battle rage) arises yet it often appears that nothing much has changed. The reactive self is still reactive. What is important, however, is the intention. Keep intending that you will work with the process and honour it.
Honouring it does not mean getting rid of it. Neither does it mean indulging it, which tends to weaken the power of the threshold guardians you, as a spiritual warrior are intent on developing. What you do is it to witness the experience and its power. This is essentially why all spiritual traditions have practices of meditation. It allows you space to witness intense emotional states as they arise and change them within that space as they arise.
You, as a spiritual warrior, turn that power against the forces that have invoked this experience. This means that you do what you need to do without recourse to injury or harm while all the time being aware that you are experiencing anything from mild irritation to boiling rage.
Then there is the hardest part. What if you do all that and the forces that have invoked your experience win? What if nothing changes and you’re left feeling that it is all a lost cause?
It is here that spiritual practice and spiritual experience come into their own. One of the most powerful practices of all spiritual traditions is the practice of detachment. This does not mean absence of feelings. It means the witnessing of emotional states. This allows for the creation of the guardian at the mind’s gate. Then the guardians are really in charge.
Winning and losing are also a concept in time. Winning and losing are also an ego experience. Winning and losing is a concept of separateness. They are an experience of duality. The one is always becoming the other. The elation of the win is the seed for the birth of loss. The sense of death at a loss is the seed for the birth of the new. This is samsara. This is suffering.
It happens to us all. It happens to this storyteller, this rank private first class in the realms of spiritual warriorhood. This is no reason to despair. What are important are the intention, the witnessing, and the practice of the will to Love. You are going to come out battered and bruised but you will have moved on one way that is central to the process. You will have moved to the centre ground. You will have created a clearer boundary and you have moved nearer the circle of Love than the circle of time. Your reward will be in Heaven. This is not some other place or time but within the dimensions of the timeless. The forces of Love know what you are doing and they are there and are always there beyond this time, space form continuum. They are more real because they are forever. You are learning to know how to become the guardian of your own birthright, which paradoxically is your birthless/deathless nature.
So remember that alchemy is not easy but the reward is to know the beauty of who you are beyond this time-bound form called ‘little me.’ You don’t get it as a reward. You get it because you reveal it to your Self from your Self. Let this Irish storyteller assure you, this is more reward than enough.