Pre-destination — Journey of the Soul
It’s all written. Raise your hand, it’s already done
It is curious how many of us worry about reneging on our responsibilities to others but so readily neglect original agreements with our own soul.
Over a long life, the challenges of the outer world — career, children, housing — slowly do a volte face and each of us is confronted with the deeper reasons we came to Earth.
The old idea was a daimon, genius or angel accompanied us on our journey into physical form and kept us on track for its deeper purpose.
Another analogy, elucidated in James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, is the idea of seed or acorn that holds in microcosm all that we are and need to unfold.
Yet another is the Atman or soul which may appear as a small, flickering light in one’s awareness hinting at greater illuminations ahead.
Because the first period of our lives is so focused on ego building, physical foundations and setting out our stall in career or business, this light remains in pilot form, ever on the backburner and largely ignored.
Your daimon has other plans, however, and may hit you hard with sudden and painful initiations for which you are entirely unprepared: divorce, illness, accidents and so on.
As Carl Jung famously said: ‘The disasters of life are the genius of the unconscious.’ Ego, without an eye for initiation, doesn’t see it that way of course.
But it’s why, as Kipling said in If, both failure and success are impostors, the implication that we must transcend both. In fact, I would argue that failure is far more significant and often the precursor to the descent stage of the hero’s journey.
When life flows all its treats towards us, it may be the result of good karma or even grace assisting our outer journey, but rarely assists in the production of soul growth.
Mystic philosopher Peter Kingsley in his book Reality, turns the universe on its head and states unequivocally that it is not Love, or Aphrodite, that brings us home, rather Strife.
‘The situation is starkly simple. If we let it have its way without cooperating, then Strife will manifest as violence and destruction all around us. But if we are willing to cooperate, we can consciously channel its energy instead into destroying ourselves — our beliefs and illusions, our attachments, our clinging to the way things are.’
All our accomplishments and accretions, concepts and ideas about how to do life will have to be given up so we can learn to die before we die.
For in this world of illusion, where everything is already written and pre-destined, choice really is an illusion. We are caught in a grand game masquerading as reality and the appearance of choice is part of the necessity that makes us so willing to roll the dice.
We keep playing until we begin to see that we are in fact in a matrix we might call the god-game and all our delusions of grandeur and importance are risible.
As the great sage Ramana Maharshi exhorted everybody, roll all your problems to the feet of the Lord — it’s already covered. We only imagine we are the doers, but truly we are the witness only and can afford to stop taking life so seriously.
Stephen Wolinsky, author and devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj, clams German scientists discovered the way the nervous system is set up means a delay between body and brain proves all actions have already happened before registering in the mind.
Kingsley writes: ‘Everything is decided for us, even whether to go on reading this book or not, whether to move our arms (Wolinsky’s example), object or agree, get up or stay sitting, think about next week.’
But although life is a game already won (ask any Christian), we must play our part in the grand drama — hero or villain, all fall under the claim of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity in the Greek pantheon.
Although the behaviour of our ancestors may not be our fault, in the game of life which is ruled by absolute laws, we have no choice but to shoulder their burden and do our best to evolve the family line.
Within the dream of life, soul work is important, outer tasks giving way to inner. Because we are unable to remember our past lives or our heavenly home, we blindly thrash around and wonder what it’s all about.
Strife and friction start our awakening, awareness completes it, which is pre-destined by our own inner nature. Then we are free to simply be ourselves without worrying about what to do next.
It’s why Ramana Maharshi declared the lazy man as king, silence and stillness hallmarks of the enlightened one.
There are then many layers to the human experience, which are really divine. As a boy sent to a pen friend outside Le Mans while my mother tried to repair her second marriage nearly destroyed by an affair, having already lost my father, I wept so badly and for so long, my hosts called the doctor.
Many years later, while training with the late Dr Roger Woolger in his practice, Deep Memory Process, a form of past life regression, I was working with a partner but not getting very far.
I had sensed something important arising but couldn’t contact it when suddenly I felt an enormous slap around my face (my eyes were closed) which jolted me on to the Somme, which urgently came to life — feelings, rotting smells, carnage and so on.
It was perhaps the most real encounter of my life thanks to Roger’s courageous and outrageous slap. As I looked around at the devastation, all my friends were dead and, once again, I collapsed into uncontrolled sobbing.
This was the missing piece from the traumatic event in my childhood — one of many — putting the entire incident in its proper context. Until that moment, I had not understood the deeper roots of my terror or my collapse.
But there it was and whatever anyone might say, I knew it was real, as much as anything is real in this world of total illusion. Thinking about it now, I conceive our lives as a series of concentric rings or bands.
Was I on another band, or bandwidth, when I later found myself as a monk in medieval England falling in love with the local squire’s daughter and dying of hypothermia in a tower?
Or when three separate individuals told me I had been a 12-year-old student of the Buddha in his lifetime?
We are all on a long journey of becoming until we finally rest in being and move from there to non-being and eventually beyond.
Glories and eternal peace truly do await us but first we must pass the tests and trials of life, moving beyond both mind and senses, letting go of all we held on to, all that is most precious — or appears to be.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
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