I Am a Battleground

©Isabel Castaño. www.isabelcastano.com

As the layers of the onion are peeled away, I see more clearly how the battle lies within me. I am a battleground. The battle is in me. I see how I have fought, but did not know or understand my enemy. I see how I have fought, but I did not understand my allies. And, thinking I was alone in the battle, not trusting anyone or anything, I see how I fell prisoner. How I have lived in the stockade, the gulag, fighting just to survive. Knowing, yet lacking even the rudiments of faith, I have been the bewildered one.

Huge swaths of me have been laid waste. There are war-torn lands whose skies roil with the lightning and thunder of gods and angels. I see the smoking, shadowed places whose bleak and hollow landscapes are filled with restless, irritable and discontented demons.  I hear the rise of many voices, the cries of my own humanity and the whispers of the angels and demons.

If I kill off all my demons, will my gods and angels die too?

Revelatory Power of the Soul

What if the problem with my anger is that it is simply a manifestation of the finite, a psychological defect that is a manifestation of the lie that I am finite? When I am in my anger, it is like my soul is in chains. It is bound in the finite. It cannot be what it truly is because the “I” that is living in the hell of my future as I stare back at the reflection of my past cannot see beyond the reflection of my three dimensional world. So I think this is it.

Only when I am rocketed into the 4th dimension through difficult spiritual work and the alchemy of the dreams, can I even know my own ignorance. My soul lives on the other side of a mirror. It is like a two way mirror, she sees me and yet I do not see her as I am trapped in the deception and illusion that the “I” is real and that she is not.

And yet, I feel her there. There is a way that I know her. I feel the truth of her existence in the attraction that she exerts upon me. Her power is revelatory. She manifests in me as desire.

I believe that there is an attraction that we all feel. We often don’t recognize it as attraction because it manifests as the pain of our separation, which is often projected out into the material world and so we think the longing we feel is about something else outside of ourselves.

It takes a warrior heart to activate the desire sufficiently to allow her to engage us. In the dreamwork, the dreams provide an opening into the 4th dimension where she lives.

As I continue to follow this path, I realize that what she gives to me are revelations, revelations about who she is not and revelations about the possibility of what she is. If I am willing, I am shown what has happened to me, how I became lost, what chains hold me hostage, what feelings I can allow which can lead to the alchemy of true change in the spiritual sense, what is being born in me, what I might become.

The cumulative acceptance of these revelations creates in me a sufficient opening for her to work with the Divine in bringing into being herself.

Thinking vs Feeling - The Serpent

Encapsulated more and more in my dreamwork homework, is the forethinking vs pleasure that Carl talks about in The Red Book. My cut continues to be to notice when I am in the spin of story or thinking I know something and to bring in the feeling part of my homework. This week it is to bring the pain of my wound to the Anima as we tumble and tumble in each others arms in the waves of the ocean, or to bring it to the place of spinning round and round with the 13 year old girl. Both these places carry feelings, such as sensuality, joy, and desire but they also move me into disorientation, which cuts through my mind's powerful re-orienting abilities.

Two Coils, Lorena B. Moore’s Ironwing Tarot

This cut is actually the movement from thinking back to feeling. I have written before about Carl’s serpent, the serpent that moves from black to white and back again.

Noticing when I go to thinking I know something or spinning out a story in my head about something is like trying to live in the blind spot since it seems I am doing this all the time. Someone could walk in the room and I have a whole story about them within moments!