Soul & Spirit — Hades then Heaven
WHAT GOES UP MUST FIRST COME DOWN. ISN’T THAT A LAW?
‘Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.’ Michael Meade
Sometimes, the floor keeps opening and we just keep on falling through it to yet another rock bottom. Along the way, we pass through those feelings we spent a lifetime or more avoiding, until we reach the core of the conditioned mind — worthlessness and self-hatred — only to finally discover that within us lies an invincible summer.
Courage is required not to circumvent this process, and faith. If you just want ‘love and light’ in your life don’t even begin, keep holding on to what makes the ego feel safe. But it seems to me, that for all of us, there comes a point when the only thing we can do is to let go and live our own peculiar passage through time until we land in eternity.
I wrote those words a long time ago. Looking at them now, I see they touch on three vital positions: the descent stage of the hero’s journey, the possibility of refusing the call to new life, and the vast meadow of possibilities that waits hiding beneath our pain.
Each of us must cross a series of thresholds, starting with birth, if we are to become both everything and nothing, clean up our mess and move beyond purely personal concerns.
In other words, we must live through the pain of the hero’s descent, plunging into hell, if we are ever to reach the promised land.
Life’s journey can be confusing, and at times, we may feel spun round and utterly lost, not knowing which way to turn.
Often, in such circumstances, life itself will intervene and provide us with painful initiatory experiences we would not have chosen, simply to take us deeper into ourselves.
Many people refuse the call of the soul to adventure and become increasingly stuck, rigid and despairing. Then they start to atrophy.
Instead, they cling to security and what family and friends say is the smart move no matter how bored and dulled they feel at the prospect of this particular job or career, or that relationship they should have terminated long ago.
Perhaps ultimate health is to follow the hint in the heart and become a child of the moment responding to the divine whisper we both align to and heed. How few of us know such faith, or trust anything but our own ego and its plans to keep us safe even when it is slowly killing us.
The soul on the other hand seeks freedom and authenticity, the healing of both personal and familial wounds and will pour through any cracks in our armature to get us to the goal. Relinquishing my job as one of Britain’s youngest newspaper editors with all its alleged promise took me over a threshold I had to cross if my life was to have real meaning.
But how did I know? Because the prospect of a career in newspapers left me feeling like I was dying. The consciousness of an entire industry was simply too out of synch with my own.
Yet none of the people who purported to care about me would support what to them was a rash and reckless move, triggering their own fears and insecurities.
I had to do it nonetheless if I was to remain in any integrity with my deeper self. Like Macbeth, I had to ‘screw my courage to the sticking place’.
As Carl Jung says, ‘The disasters of life are the genius of the unconscious.’
Because I went on such a long and deep journey of soulful descent which included transformative shadow work, ritual, grief ceremonies and mythological men’s work, my recent writings have focused on the spiritual ascent.
The soul is deeply allied with nature and earth, seasons and archetypes and the world of the feminine. This is the realm of ‘the gods’ and to pass through this territory is essential.
That was my own emphasis for years until it finally changed and I began — through meditation and inner work — to glimpse that golden meadow of fulfilment and the end of longing.
For years I wondered if it would ever be possible to come home and experience real peace and freedom from desire.
It is. But first it seems we must be brave and descend; we must face the unknown, the dragons of the unconscious.
We are shards of the divine here for personal experience and a journey which is sui generis. My journey is not yours and utterly unique.
Yet eventually, we reach a turning point, another threshold, experienced through repentance or what the Sufis call tauba.
Now, I start to turn back towards higher matters that are not physical in origin. I have started to remember and recognize home, realizing it is not and never has been here.
Many, many people look back on their lives with regret because they refused the threshold of descent, to visit Hades and return home with its sometimes, dubious gifts.
We can refuse the call to new life and further adventure, play it safe and circle our own longing like a vulture eyeing a corpse.
In a sense, we are already dead when we give no room for soul and spirit rather existing entirely in the ego, or day, world. There, we try and continue to squeeze meaning from what no longer holds any juice.
Yet in lieu of knowing where to go and what to do, we just keep on circling our own corpse as it continues to decay and stink up the house.
We become increasingly dead inside but still refuse the call. I know several people right there at this moment with a big decision to make.
Those with too many fixed signs in astrology are particularly stubborn and intransigent. Why?
Because when trauma appears to tear up natural roots into the unconscious, which we need to feel whole, instead of earthy and nourishing soil, it feels like a hell realm we must do anything to avoid.
We forget that life needs loam, and that we ourselves were born from the dark. Instead of an ally, root and ground of our very being, we have made an enemy of our very selves and refuse to visit.
We want ‘love and light’, as mentioned at the outset, but don’t realize we must have the courage to plunge and plummet before we can breach what feels golden.
Sometimes, it is so long since our last visit, a crust has grown to cover the mystery we fear; and seemingly nothing can break it.
We may experience numbness, depression, despair and a void where memory should be.
The task then is to begin to break up the hard ground. That may involve artwork, psychotherapy, hypnosis, journaling, shadow work, ancestral work or any number of permutations until we find what works for us.
Sometimes, we intuit the origin of our stuckness did not rise in this life but another, which may involve an even deeper dive into something like Roger Woolger’s Deep Memory Process.
Archetypal past life events can be better understood through disciplines like Evolutionary Astrology, for example.
But whatever we do, we must act; or we should expect life to act for us. The first way is to do our best to walk upright towards the stairwell.
The second is the equivalent of being dragged through a hedge backwards.
Either way, we can only avoid what is necessary for so long.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
