The Mystical Frontier of Inner Being
There is a road, always open. It belongs to you, and you belong to it.
Mysticism is something we associate with a vague and undefined, and therefore unreachable religious or spiritual notion of union with the divine, and that whatever is being reached for and encountered, is something outside of us.
Being or feeling lost involves always a combination (or lack) of three things: Knowing where we are, knowing where we wish to be, and orienting ourselves to the world. The idea of being lost is almost always metaphorical, and it does not always come with the sense of panic or urgency and alarm that we experience if we ever encounter being lost as a child. It is more like when we are trying to arrive at a destination and realise we don’t know which way to go, or even how to find our way back from here. It robs of us the comfort of knowing where we are and where we are going, something we realise was an illusion as soon as we discover we are lost, and arrives as a troubling sense of uneasiness that dogs our every step in a very real way.
The other related condition is stuckness. This is where we imagine we understand what it is we want to achieve and how we might get there, only for life to sap our optimism and motivation by the way it lovingly divests us of our ignorance and fantasy. Our sense of being lost is what happens when we do not trust the stuckness, imagining instead that Life is a cunning puzzle, the answer to which is doggedness and determination. In this way, we hold on to our fixed ideas of what a journey should look like and how long it should take.
Determination is a word that carries two related yet contradicting meanings. In one sense it is how resolved we are to keep trying, even when the way seems blocked. In many ways, this is noble and appropriate. In another sense, determination is the word we use to describe things like ‘outcome’, in which sense it can be very limiting if we are driven by ambitions that we define for ourselves before we know anything about the journey of our lives and who we will become. Under the rubric of a firmly fixed determination and ambition, we can cauterise the possibility that our vision and wisdom will invariably grow along the way. In our tenacity we can be like Sisyphus, so certain that we will eventually roll the boulder up the impossible slope, only to be drawn into the endless cycle of repetition.
In the ancient Greek myths, there was a mortal king who tricked the gods, twice no less, to escape death. He was trying to achieve immortality and for his hubris, he was set the challenge to push a boulder up an impossible slope. The conditions were that if he ever managed, he would be granted immortality, but every day when he failed and was crushed by the large stone, he was respawned the next day at the bottom of the slope to repeat the attempt yet again. Everyone thinks this is a cautionary tale about hubris and defying the gods. The truth is, it is a cautionary tale about the myth of ceaseless determination—Sisyphus actually achieved immortality after a fashion, being that he was born again each day and faced with the same recurring and unsolvable challenge.
When sharing this idea with people, I always like to recount the scene of a fly trying to leave a house through a closed window, and thereby de-canonise the virtue of never giving up. Windowsills are the eternal shrines to the small gods of trying, where one may always find more dead flies.
Life kindly says ‘no’ to us a thousand times, before we stop listening for a ‘yes’ outside the wrong door.
We like to imagine the solution will be tenacity and optimism, instead of opening up to the possibility that life is instead happening for us, and some part of ourselves that can see far further, presides over our days and ensures that we do not follow the path our smaller unknowing self is so certain must be the way.
Stuckness, invariably, is the circumstance of a wiser, better version of you refusing to release any more vitality, creativity or sense of flow until you make the effort to prioritise alignment, congruence and the deepest form of rest and self-care, which by definition has to include the care and investment in the relationships that enable and support you. It is as if our soul, via our nervous system, says “This is not how I want to belong in this world, and this is not how I want to move forward.”
It is saying “This is a fork in the road, a sliding door moment and the way you are going is not congruent with the deepest truest part of me. Something needs to change.”
Usually, we are holding the conversation of life in the wrong stance, in a framing that is ultimately too small for the future version of ourselves that is unfolding through precisely the trials and challenges we are so sure are in the way. It is a conversation we are holding in altogether the wrong language, which is actually limiting, closing doors and leaving no room for the greater, liberated and more expansive version of ourselves to arrive.
Stuckness is never a punishment, it is the universe’s way of inviting us to a deeper form of self-care, which so often requires a deeper form of presence than we are used to practising.
We make the mistake of thinking that stuckness heralds some sort of terrible problem, where in fact it means that something is instead terribly right and that we are being guided, from both wisdom and love, towards a more expansive version of ourselves and a more aligned way of being in the world.
When our outer road seems blocked, we are invited to come again, to the inner road.
CLOSE YOUR EYES Close your eyes and be guided home. Call a dear friend to read this aloud for you or find my voice, and I will gladly say it again. Close your eyes, forget the road you were trying to follow. Put down the urgent demands. Set aside the ceaseless drama of finding your way forward from the here that isn’t real. Will they not be waiting for you same as they ever were? Close your eyes. Let them rest now. Wait a moment and become deaf to the world also. Be led along the path of your breath by the quavering touch of its secret fire. Be pulled in to the dream at the centre among the roots of the world where you began, where the soft animal in you makes its burrow, and where it goes to be timid and afraid. Let yourself sink, like water seeps into soil, like fallen leaves fold into loam, forgetting forever the cold silver sky and bright sun, and see: Here in the warm night, there is something being spoken, a chant or a secret. Both seductive and familiar like a fluttering of wings of moths around an unseen lamp, of birds changing perch in the dark. Feel the twisting limbless vine, a coiled thing of ancient sinew that moves in you like a current. Here is the womb. Here is, the belly of the world from where the earth gets its fire. Here you are never alone. Here, you are never hungry for a morsel of direction or hope. There is only the navel of awareness, and the way in which that holds you in the vast and undulating stillness and how it makes everything yours and creates a universe around you. Let the cell walls of time dissolve. Dissolve. Let what is clenched unclench. Let everything that was, alone. Let your heart keep time. Dream the chrysalis dream, that the ancient child in you may awaken. What it sees is Promise. What it speaks is Truth, its native language, Vulnerability. What it hears is Calling. How it feels is Real. What it wants is Love. What it dreams is Wonder. What it is, is the soul of Life, unbound by time, —beauty, pure and simple, undiminished by words. And on its lips the question, welling out into our waking life as tears, and tiredness, and longing, carried in our prayers for meaning asking and answering: How am I a gift to the world, and how is the world a gift to me? Rocco Jarman
The closer you lean into the truth of who and what you are, the more you are prepared and ready to let go of the way you are attempting to hold the conversation, the more ready you are to wait and allow everything to be as per its own season.
We need to accept that people and our gifts and our purpose, arrive together only when we can open ourselves to the Invitation, and allow ourselves to be guided through an initiation into the unfolding seasonality of how those three things meet and can only meet at this moment, accepting fully that it will change and keep changing.
The invitation is a progressive unfolding. So are we, so are our gifts, so are other people, and places and therefore, so is Truth. Our calling is always about our sacred gifts to the world, which it turns out can only be revealed through the necessary threshing of our struggles and adversities. We are nagged by deep callings and perfectly thwarted by the circumstances of our life, our bodies, the time and place and the family we are born into, and born through. The worst thing we can do, is act like there has been some mistake, that our path is too narrow, our calling too bold and presumptuous. When we do that, we become deaf to our own truth and sense of purpose. To find a sense of fulfilment in our lives we commit ourselves instead to the well-mapped, well-travelled, wide forgiving path and the kind of ambitions for which the world has developed ready formulae. The wide path is wide and well-worn precisely because the many have gone that way.
To know thyself, was the goal according to so much ancient wisdom. To truly know oneself is to admit the truths your soul whispers quietly, and would sing louder if it wasn’t shushed and shamed by a persona of modesty and propriety, the old borrowed shoes we already outgrew some time ago.
You get to go in earnest search of Meaning again and you get to remember that you had a purpose, a sacred charge between you and Life, that your troubles caused you to abandon and label as silly. You get to say “Fuck that Noise!” and devote your whole self to your Self.
Acknowledgements
There are two parts of the poem CLOSE YOUR EYES that are mindfully and deliberately borrowed:
The first, the notion of ‘the soft animal’ of the body, is from Mary Oliver by way of her wonderful poem Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. —excerpt from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
The other is from Michael Meade, the twin questions he frames so stirringly in his book Fate & Destiny, the Two Agreements of the Soul which describes the nature of every child coming into the world, including ourselves, carrying the same question, asking how we will be gifts to the world, and how the world will be a gift to us. The point not to be missed is that even though the question is a shared truth for each of us, the gift of each of us is utterly and invariably unique. That is what makes our gifts so precious, and our calling so sacred.
These questions are questions of Calling and Purpose. —Something we can get closer to only by finding the courage to abandon the small ambitions we set for ourselves, the small questions imprinted on us during childhood and the forgetfulness of our modern world.
For anyone who arrives in this moment confused about what Fate and Destiny mean, consider the line and allow its profound implications to clarify and undistort your understanding: “The Fate of the caterpillar is disappearance, its Destiny is transcendence.”
There is a road always open. It belongs to you, and you belong to it. We join this path not through outer practices —none of its access or passage is ‘determined’ from outside ourselves. It is determined through the curious intersection of our Fate and our Destiny. We come to it, we find and follow our way along it through Mythos, through the way we allow the language of Archetypes to speak to us, to illuminate the inner map, and its divine symmetry with the outer world and with the Cosmos.
I leave you with this:
There is no fire outside.
It is ‘your’ spirit of defiance, not ‘the’ spirit of defiance, or ‘a’ spirit of defiance, it only burns in me. It only burns in you. It only burns in us, when we are kindled and fed to warmth, stoked to fury, fanned to the blacksmith forge of courage and leadership by the bellows of true vulnerability. It only burns enclosed within.
There is no fire outside. It is your insistence on meaning as a standard of living deeply, a mind to leave, and the heart to leave a legacy. —There is no fire outside.
We are the lamb through which Life smuggles the secret fire of creation in the heart of man, rippling towards its own infinity. There is no fire outside. You are the flame. We are the kindling and the torch sparked by emotion, kindled by Mythos, and carried forward by Reason and the eternal lure of Eternity. And tamed by self-restraint, the weight of stewardship, and a sense of True Belonging—ultimately in fulfilment of your truth mutually with mine, which is itself the truth of Life in me and you
—the spark, within the fire, within.
It is the nature of fire to chase the light of glory of its own illuminating future.
There is no fire outside. There is just the light.
Nice read, instead of my usual doom scrolling, most of the concepts go beyond my intellectual understanding. You live and learn.
Thank you Rocco