Post by Sowelu on Jul 9, 2011 13:00:57 GMT -5
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Human attention is charged with the ability to create. When human attention is focused on negative emotions, those negative emotions take on a quasi-life of their own. Consequently, there are whole families of ill spirits: spirits of greed, spirits of resentment, spirits of shame, spirits of blame, hate, fear, anger and so forth. We call them by a score of names, but they are all hapless creatures of human ignorance. They are born through the misuse of human creativity. They have no life apart from the life that unconscious human beings foolishly channel into them. Our collective subconscious is teeming with such ill spirits. Like dark gray clouds, they drift through the lower part of the firmament. They have an elementary form of self-awareness. On the surface they crave the energy they receive when human beings identify with them and express them; but that is only what they think they want. What they really want, what they long for, is to be free. Their only exit point is through the conscious minds of human beings. Bringing them into full consciousness is the first step toward their dissolution.
The times when we are feeling emotional turbulence are our most profound opportunities to cast out ill spirits. These times are not pleasant, but they are essential. If we do all that we can to avoid ever feeling emotional discomfort, we refuse to participate in healing these ill spirits. And as long as they remain within us, subliminally influencing our awareness, we never awaken. We do not need to seek out emotional encounters, but when they come our way in the natural ebb and flow of life, we should appreciate the fact that these times have every bit as much value as our more enjoyable "peak experiences."
Whenever I feel the presence of an ill spirit, I know I have a tremendous opportunity, an opportunity to offer a healing deep into the collectivity of my race. As I feel the ill spirit creeping up on me, I take a moment or two to bring it into full consciousness. I find it helpful to be right out front and to say to myself, "OK, what exactly am I afraid of!" It is important not to be fooled by the clever disguises that fear can take. "I'm not afraid, I'm angry," the mind will often try to argue.
Y e s , but an honest examination will invariably show that the anger is rooted in some sort of fear. So, of course, is resentment and shame and greed.
Sometimes the connection with fear takes detective work to uncover, but the principle holds true: every ill spirit is rooted in fear. Its antidote is love. Jesus taught that we should love our enemies. Who are our real enemies? Enemies of happiness? Enemies of creativity? Enemies of joy and peace?
SPIRITS SUCH AS ANGER, RESENTMENT, GUILT AND ANXIETY ARE OUR REAL ENEMIES. THEY ARE PARASITES THAT FEED UPON HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
In their primitive level of self-awareness, ill spirits are far from happy. They long to be freed. No one, on any occasion, has ever loved them. They do not know what love is; yet they instinctively grope for it. They crave the love that alone can free them. They are usually either expressed or repressed.
Both approaches give them huge injections of human energy. Both expression and repression drain the individual psychologically and emotionally, and both leave the ill spirit recharged, looking for another opportunity to be acknowledged and fed.
Here is the approach of the healer. It is quite different from the first two. We do not repress the ill feeling, pretend it is not there, or gloss over it with feigned spirituality.
But neither do we identify with the reactive emotion and claim it as our own. We do not get all worked up and tell so-and-so exactly how we feel or go looking for someone to hear our complaints.
We may be trembling from head to toe, but we hold steady. We acknowledge the presence of the alien. We let ourselves experience it fully. We take a couple of deep breaths and let it flood our being. We meet it consciously with the spirit of welcome. We invite it up out of the subconscious realm into the conscious realm that it has instinctively longed for since it was first created. As we continue breathing deeply, we feel it permeate our entire body; as it seems to flood our circuitry, we bring it all the way up into our full conscious attention, and we let our love radiate. We remember our Creator. We experience the love that is the birthright of all conscious beings. The ill spirit dissolves. Its energy is released. It is evaporated in heaven. Ill spirits are nothing anyway, bubbles of nothing in an ocean of consciousness.
Only the surface energy which they trap has any reality. Inside they are empty.
In one form or another they embody the absence of love. As we allow the spirit of love to be expressed through us, love fills every void we encounter. We dissipate the ghosts of past human ignorance. We heal the only enemy.
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