Spiritual Prompt for the Week of March 20th through March 26th
Let’s take a look at the purpose of lifecycles aided by a quote from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
Introduction
I took my first intentional steps along the yellow brick road toward spiritual awakening in the summer of 2012 when I chose to go to rehab to address my issues with alcohol and drugs. I had ventured into the rooms of AA before and always ran into a roadblock around “the God thing” (see my 12 Step Programs’ God Problem)(I now unshakably believe in God as I understand God, as opposed to what many religions preach).
For many years, I had bounced around between agnosticism and the belief that God was akin to the Force from Star Wars — the psychic energy emitted by all living things — and I believed that some people had the ability to tap into this energy, e.g., psychics, and to a lesser extent, me and others who experience phenomenon such as de ja vu. At rehab, the spiritual staff consisted of a few priests and ministers — and Meredith. Meredith gave a lecture that discussed the Mayan calendar, crystals, etc., etc. I dubbed her Mystical Meredith. As I knew that getting past my God roadblock would make recovery easier, I had arrived at rehab hoping to find an understanding of God that meshed with my conception. After hearing Mystical Meredith’s lecture, I scheduled a counseling session with her.
I told Meredith that I believed in the existence of souls because I had spoken to the souls of dearly departed through a psychic (see short-form story), and I asked her how God fits into this — asking her if there was a hierarchy of souls with God at the top?
Before answering me, Meredith asked me why I thought I used substances abusively. I answered that I thought there was an irreconcilable conflict between my conscious and subconscious minds over things I had done, or not done, over the past few years, and I drank and drugged to run away from rather than resolve this conflict.
Meredith explained that the conflict was not between my conscious and subconscious, but between my mind and my soul. Meredith’s conception of God, or the Great All, and how we and our souls fit in, is that when our souls leave the Great All to take human form we contract with the universe to experience certain painful things on Earth that are not spiritual so we can learn what is spiritual (love, kindness, compassion, charity, etc.).
While reading Hesse’s Steppenwolf a year later, these words struck me and brought me back to what Meredith had said:
The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, … ever deeper into human life. … Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are to ever find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
I thought of this quote again in January 2021 when I read these words of Ravyne’s:
Wowsers! So we are born Buddhas, already fully enlightened and all-knowing. Somewhere between birth and spiritual awakening, we’ve forgotten who we are. And so we spend a lifetime perhaps, seeking enlightenment
and then together she and I crafted this story under her byline as the first third-party submission to my publication ChannSpirations and Coincidences
The Prompt
React to any or all that you have read above with a poem, essay, fiction, or creative non-fiction. If you write a poem, I suggest including an essay portion in your piece that explains your thoughts behind the poem.
You can use this prompt here on PW or anywhere else on Medium. Regardless of where you publish, please tag me, and Ravyne Hawke and use “promptly written” as one of your reader interest tags, and include a link to this prompt. Also, if you use the prompt in another publication, please come back here and drop a link to your story in the comments as the tag notification system is notoriously unreliable.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
