Disappointment & Numbness

The feeling that I'll never get back there.
The feeling that I shouldn't be looking back at all.
The feeling that my feelings are dull.
The feeling of being only loosely connected to other people.
The feeling that we are lost in a world of make-believe.

Where are you?
You're not in there, and I'm not here anymore.

I'm ashamed of what we do to children;
They are not us, nor do they even belong to us

A Lost Vessel

A young man despaired at his inability to know what to do with his life, and where to go after numerous apparently failed expeditions in his soul journey. He had experienced this several times, but each form was different depending on his current convictions, and on any dogmas he had at least outwardly embraced in the process of seeking for the ultimate truth.

In his soul, he felt the despair of knowing he was on the wrong path, yet again, and he asked his mentor, "I know I have messed up royally, again. What do I do know?"

"Do not act as if you are without knowledge. There is that which you know is the way for you to act, and this you know in your soul, without any reliance on a third party. Do this."

The young man knew he had frequently been "hung up" on side shows, on thinking that his discovery of what was true in some philosophy or recognized "faith", was evidence that all their beliefs and dogmas must also be accepted.

"Accept nothing that you are not convinced of. Anything you do in the spirit of merely following a creed which you do not have conviction is devoid of spiritual value, indeed, is hypocrisy and has negative value to your soul. Besides, you have often swung to the depths getting hung up on these trivialities, then proceeding to throw out your convictions with these useless artifacts, because you hold them as a unit together, as if they cannot be separated. Do not forget that you are to wield the truth as a sword, that it will separate the wheat from the chaff, that which is useful from that which is empty."

But the young man knew he had also ignored his convictions, and that he was fully responsible for the effects of these decisions; he felt the damage done as a result of this, and he remembered with heaviness the stern admonition of his mentor in a dream, that this kind of egregious error was fatal. But even in dying, while one is alive, there is hope; it cannot be otherwise because each breath in life is a gift.

Have I found you?

Oh, how I have forgotten that it was not so in the beginning! This heavy cloak I drag around, that indeed I have even sought to decorate with various trinkets, has been a terrible diversion borne of compromise and impatience and lack of discipline in listening to my soul!

My soul! How it cries for communion, and how it delights in the hope of a kindred other soul. This, in the beginning, has been the real motivation, which drew me to others, but I forgot quickly and got lost in the deceptions, in the false phantoms of myself and others, when we feel the real connections but then get lost in the Forms, as if these Forms were the End! They are not the End, but they are only symbols... symbols and pictures of the pure desires for communion that we forget only at our peril, because in worshiping a Form we worship Something Less Than God and we fail to ascend further UP, because to bow DOWN to a Form is to acknowledge it falsely as being the HIGHEST ideal. It is not, and I understand my sadness, even the sadness which I forgot I have because I have numbness, and have become hard of hearing through my choices to worship the Forms.

I remember again:

"Why don't you sleep up here with me?"

Yes! Is it me you want? I see much in you, let us share!

Then comes a vulture, a bird of prey, that has fed on the souls of many, to corrupt this innocence, and to offer the temptation of an immediate substitute. But we are not the victims, but willing participants in this compromise, because we lack faith in the Perfect Laws in Creation, and one small bite at a time, we gave away our purity..... and the next time we used this sacred call for another, we used it in deception, not seeking true communion, but blinded by our baser lusts, we spoke lies....

....but redemption is here, and with real volition from our inner man, from the core of our spirit, we can seek to untangle ourselves from the strangling works of our own hands, through the uplifting power of LOVE, which God in his grace continues to grant us in opportunities in every moment when we seek for what is higher even with the faith as small as the grain of a mustard seed. The opportunities are there, and when we listen and act in a pure way to LOVE someone else, we make one small motion to disentangle ourselves from the cords that drag us down and we open up a channel to hear again that voice we heard before, from our soul, that yearning that we heard in the beginning.