Dec 11: It’s been a good chunk of time now since I felt the draw to write another post. I’ve got an idea I would like to explore here that came up during my morning meditation, but first I’ll scribble out a quick sketch as to what the life flow has entailed the last while. The tone of feeling in the previous message definitely increased, becoming more pronounced and intense in the inner experience of it. I was a hair width away from bringing my adventure through Costa Rica to an end. To simplify that story, the pressures involved in this trip, ie the language barrier, the stress of getting around and the chronic feelings of loneliness, continued to compound, pushing me to my emotional limits. I managed to work it out through an immensely helpful conversation with my mom, and ultimately opted to continue on. Despite how strongly one part of me wanted to leave, another part recognized there was still things of potential value that remained to uncover and experience here.
I set myself up with another Airbnb further south in a smaller and more chill city, and I’ve been undeniably doing better. But there’s still a constant undercurrent of challenge. More than anything, this trip is really revealing to me the internal areas that are unhealed or underdeveloped or simply just dysfunctional in certain ways. It’s so easy to ignore or even straight up mask these weak spots in the personal system during normal living, through the accumulation of and reliance on various addictive sources and the illusion of comfortable control established through regular, steady routine. Travelling rips all of that away, and the results can be fairly intensive without copious external stimulation.
Like I had mentioned, I’m orienting very introverted this trip, which is likely being further enhanced through the current way that the retrograde mercury and mars are affecting the energetic flow, so the inner gravity is stronger than any external interest. I’ve come to accept that this is the primary purpose of this trip, to bring my awareness directly towards these weak points and understand the dissonance with a greater precision. How else can one truly restore and retune these parts unless awareness (and more importantly, love) is brought into the full reaches of them?
The primary theme of the central issue at play is essentially a fracture between my inner experience and the external world, a split between heaven and earth, mind and body, yin and yang. It would appear very clearly to me that this is not only a personal fracture but rather a collective one currently playing out with rather intense reverberations, seen through dynamics such as the divide between men and women, left and right politics, civilization and nature, or technological dependency and biological impulses. For me, I lean towards a mind rather than matter orientation, more comfortable and adept with inner intellectual processes than material, sensual connection. I used to swing more readily between the two, but I’ve learned (or perhaps been conditioned through experience) to trust and rely upon the one side far more than the other.
The thing is, polarizing myself in that way maintains the inner fracture, which perpetuates neurotic thinking and therefore compromises the clarity of my observations and interpretations. I want to be clear. I want to orient myself correctly. I believe achieving that requires genuine cohesion between all of my aspects; all the instruments involved in the creation of my personal music must be in tune and harmonious with one another. My increasing preference towards inner experience and the resulting resistance towards the outer renders a discordant conflict in the coherence of my music. Even here in Costa Rica that resistance to outer connection has continued to persist, despite the abundance of beauty pulling at the attention, and I don’t just mean the crazy quantity of gorgeous women or the warm affect of the people in general, but also the environment and the intangible energies. Venus has an especial affect on me personally here, so beauty’s quality is seriously amplified. And yet I still resist…
Having such a strong polarized pull acting upon and within me in regards to external connection really magnifies where and how my system pushes back against it, creating a charged up energetic tension at my core. It’s honestly quite exhausting, causing me to feel almost continuously tired. But like I said, it’s affording me the opportunity to really zero in on the source of that resistance, and that was what came up during my morning meditation. I figured there are three primary gates blocking off an easy flow of energy and attention between my inner realm and outer influence.
(Editor Aodhan here: Rereading what I wrote explaining those three influences struck me as a little too personal to be sharing publicly as this time. These posts are already leaning pretty far into my current emotional struggles and vulnerabilities, and I’m not looking to bog this blog down too much with that sort of thing. Perhaps I’ll return to those ideas in the future if it seems right. For now let’s just say they involve karmic accumulation, genetic and environmental inheritance, and experiential observation of the world augmented by esoteric study. Ultimately, it can all be simplified into a single discordant polarity which I will begin the next paragraph with.)
On the one hand (likely the left) I don’t feel worthy of the word’s affection and care, and on the other (probably the right) I see it as not worthy of mine. That would appear to be the core fracture in my being; the neurotic thinking that compromises my interpretation and experience. At this point I’m not sure what exactly to do to resolve that split, but as the saying goes, knowing is half the battle. I must hold to the faith that through the desire to mend that inner rend, I will be guided to where I need to go to do so.
There is one significant thing that spiritual study has added to my inner equation, and that is the strong sense that despite how screwed up humankind and the world appears to be, there remains the need to engage with it. To enact, as best as we can through our individual imperfections, the efforts of healing and awakening that are required for the restoration of this realm; giving of our light and love to this life. This is an orientation symbolized (and possibly embodied) by figures like the Christ.
As a final thought to tie into all of this, I find there to be a correspondent resonance between everything I just laid out here and the Gnostic interpretation of god and creation. In their view, the version of god found in the old testament, and therefore the direct creator of the material plane, is not in fact the true divine source but something more akin to a powerful expression of spiritually ignorant egoic impulse. A kind of lesser, and effectively tyrannical, deity referred to as the Demiurge.
When you start bringing the esoteric pieces together it becomes clear that there is a link between (using this particular symbolic language) Yahweh and Satan; that they are in fact two sides of the same coin, the link being their association with Saturn. Saturn has a strong connection to black cube imagery, revealed by the hexagon on its pole (a hexagon being a 2D representation of a 3D cube), which then manifests within Abrahamic religions through things like the cube on the tefillin or the Black Stone of Mecca. Satan’s saturnian connection is revealed through the goat symbolism of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, and Capricorn’s rulership of the devil card in the tarot as well as the tendency towards materialist and hedonistic indulgence that takes place during Capricorn season, exemplified through ceremonies like Saturnalia, which is the foundation of our Christmas. (Actually, I have a lot of thoughts about this particular time of the year, especially regarding the role the Christ essence plays in it now, something that actually ties into what I’m talking about here, but that’ll be for another post).
Those are just a few of the many examples of these links. I bring all of this up because the split in our own natures, such as the one I’m uncovering within myself, may well be rooted in this demiurgic/saturnian influence; that fundamental egoic fracture between the self-righteous authority of Yahweh condemning his own hedonistic impulse to indulge in his own creation. Following along with this Gnostic/esoteric interpretation, the Christ is the emanation of the divine essence breaking through the Demiurge’s narcissistic barriers and bringing love and forgiveness to this material plane, in order to restore wholeness to existence itself.
Whether these stories are true in a literal sense can certainly be debated, but as symbolic allegories, they seem to provide a map of sorts that can be followed to achieve greater awareness and cohesion. As a conceptual lens, it’s effectively saying that ultimately the means of resolution is found through rising above the unhealthy ego’s tendency towards either vain, self-righteous judgement and condemnation of material imperfection (that right hand proclaiming the world unworthy), or the infinite hunger to indulge in sense gratification as a way to avoid greater existential reality (which leads to the feelings of shame and worthlessness of the left hand), and instead emphasizing love and forgiveness towards ourselves and the world and all the faults found within as the means to heal. That by restoring the union of inner “authority/god” and inner “devil/hedonist” the disorienting extremities of both are balanced out by the other. I would like to believe that. And the more I am able to inform the operations of my mind and emotions with that belief, the clearer, cleaner and more cohesive I feel.
All right, I think that’s enough for now. I definitely allowed myself to indulge in my own mental ramblings here. But once again, I have to remind myself that this is the purpose of this blog in the first place. If you managed to read out the whole thing, I thank you for it. Hopefully you were able to find something of value in it. Lots of love to everyone!
(Editor Aodhan here: I know I harped on Saturn here, but I want to make it clear that I don’t see that symbolic image as innately bad or evil. It’s effect and influence is necessary for what we are, and I intend to explore that in my next post.)
ACMindworks 
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