On a “spiritual path” we are not supposed to speak of this. We are supposed to cultivate compassion, and wisdom and grace; humility, kindness, self abnegation and service.
But as I grow I realize I need to know and befriend the part of me that sometimes wants to stick a knife in someone’s throat. We all have it. Let me repeat: we all have it.
So often growth is conceived as a falling away of undesired traits. You lose anger, and you lose greed, and you lose self absorption. This is a simple idea, one which does not require conquering the fear of what lies within us, our primal demons, our ancient decay, the atavistic desire for rapine we share with animals.
In recent days I have been meeting these parts. They are terrifying. Anyone who really knows, who really sees, who really contacts on an emotional level what they are actually capable of, must feel shock, and other emotions I don’t quite have words for. I do not want to shoehorn them into inadequate words. Terror and horror, though, certainly belong in this mix.
Ponder the quasi-death cult which is the obsession with relics, with the bones of supposed holy men.
Ponder Saint Simeon the Elder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites
There are several interesting points here. One, that he chose to leave the world, where he lived in the constant presence, according the iconography, of temptation, which he resisted through what would amount to physical torture if it were inflicted on someone unwilling.
What is this temptation? His own anger and violence, which he merely avoided and did not process through his asceticism. Sex–primal, animal passion–is merely a gateway drug to everything else. A good solution allows one to live happily in the company of others, in peace, in communion and community, as we were meant to do.
Second, the fight over his “relics”, which are the pieces of his skeleton. The Christians, certainly, but I believe also some Buddhists and some Muslims of some sects, revered a thumb of a saint, or a knuckle; a knee, or perhaps even a skull. God lived in these. God blessed the believers through these bones, or so it was believed.
We all know death waits for us. It cannot be avoided, even if its fact can be pressed out of polite conversation, its existence made something which happens somewhere else until you reach an age where everyone you know is dying. In our world, that is 60 years or more of avoiding most death. Pestilence and war are strangers to most of us.
But I think acceptance of death is tied to the acceptance of our own culpability in the violence of every era. When I say culpability I do not think most of us are directly, physically guilty. What I mean is that some part of us relates to the desires enacted by some for death, torture, and glorifying both. None of us are innocent. And none of us are truly absolved by the “blood of the lamb”, or by submission to the Koran or Torah. Or by sacrifice, of animals, people, or our own comfort.
Walking through the valley of death is a necessary rite of passage for us all. We need fear our evil, our own capacity for destruction, but only until we know them, and walk with them too, until they make themselves known and accessible.
I am getting to these places in recent days, and it is freeing me from bonds I did not know tied me down, prisons whose walls I could not see.
We all see the sky as the limit, but in truth we live in an infinite universe. We need the sky as a limit, and use it as such.
Who would you be, if you were a ball of light, without arms, without legs, without an up and down?