Conversations with a Soul (7 page)

No one ever willingly sets foot on a path that promises an arrival at this place. Surely even the most melancholic amongst us, even the most miserable, whining, self-pitying, self-negating individuals don’t seek a tryst with despair. Despair yields no milk to nurture or nourish our self-hatreds but simply gnaws away at the guts with an insatiable hunger until everything is reduced to an overwhelming, all-encompassing sense of hopelessness.

Despair is a terrible thing.

At the same time the path is well trodden for it is a rare human being who has escaped the agony of despair. Sooner or later most of us have to confront the ogre.

Some ancient religions set in juxtaposition the words
despair
and
desire
, and teach that the only way to escape despair is to avoid desire. They hold that it is the annihilation of that which we most cherish that sires despair. Therefore if one can live a life free from the lure of desire, one is thereby insulated from despair.

Their logic is flawless and I respect their perspective but I fear that to carve from my life the magic and the wonder of love; the thrill and anticipation of encounter; the relationships that give meaning to each day; the enticement to build from the rubble of one dream a new reality; the optimism that leads to a crazy investment of my heart in the hungers of the world about me, is too terrible a price to pay in order to escape despair.

We instinctively avoid the word, but usually despair finds us.

Sometimes it sneaks up on us as we work away at some problem, one moment confident that we can find a solution to anything until we feel despair’s teeth sink into us and feel our self-confidence ebb from our bodies. Sometimes it leaps out at us from nowhere and with terrifying suddenness turns life inside out. Sometimes it lies hidden in the structures of our being, like some malignant disease just waiting its opportunity to lay waste, and sometimes despair can ride in and take us captive when a snippet of information is fed to our darkest fears and grows to powerful and grotesque dimensions.

When a man or a woman journeys to this part of the forest the gloom about them kindles a gloom within.

On occasion men and women find themselves here because they have come to gather strength to face the reality of death, their own or that a loved one. At such moments there is no comfort in theories or ideas, religious or otherwise. We need something far more powerful with which to deal with the awful loneliness and fear. We need to be enfolded in the arms of our mysterious Wisdomkeepers.

This deep in the forest is where men and women find themselves when circumstances have become so crushing that thoughts of suicide begin to seem plausible. It is also the place where we struggle with shame that has simply become overwhelming, and leads us to believe that we can never face life with confidence again.

This place is alive with demons.

There is probably no time in our lives where we reach out to our Wisdomkeepers with greater urgency, if indeed we have nurtured such a community. In this place of anguish, the resources we find will depend, in large measure, on the relationships we have cultivated all through a life time. Persons who have spent little or no energy in nurturing intimacy; who have devoted their lives to acquiring wealth at the expense of integrity; who have written off human hungers of the heart as an unnecessary drain on their time; who have come to think of themselves as living in a world populated by servants, will find that until such time as they rediscover what it means to be a fragile human being there is no way out of the forest of despair. For such people meeting with despair means learning to start over again, and, perhaps, learning to listen to their Souls for the first time. Frequently the first lesson that an encounter with despair has to teach us is that of learning to cope with loss in a healthy way.

Conversely, those who have taken the time to nurture deep friendships, who have practiced the very difficult task of being honest with a trusted handful of friends, and who have nurtured their own deep hungers,
will
find resources for this agonizing place.

The summoning of the sacred community of Wisdomkeepers takes many forms. Sometimes in the silence a familiar voice is heard and with the hearing there comes new vitality. Sometimes the touch of a loved one mediates hope and within the hope we see another path that leads home. Sometimes the gift of enlightenment that arrives unannounced and from some mysterious, secret place, deep in our being, brings the Wisdomkeepers alive and present and we know we are not alone. At other times it is simply the wondrous gift of memory, when in another place and at another time, someone tucked into our heart the gift of a few words which now shine with hope. There is no magic formula through which we might know the embrace of our Wisdomkeepers for it is the Soul alone who mediates their presence.

A journey to the place of anguish has frequently initiated a particularly fruitful dream world in which the Wisdomkeepers have come to speak. Sometimes deceased family members, or friends or colleagues have come to reassure the dreamer of adequate resources to face whatever drove them to this place. There are many channels, such as tradition, intuition, inspiration and mysticism that bring the community of Wisdomkeepers alive.

Such words sound almost antiquated in our technologically addictive vocabulary, yet we might remember that the existence of the Christian Church is predicated upon the belief that Jesus is present to his followers two thousand years after his death. While it is not very difficult to dismiss this conviction as a classic example of mass hysteria or even superstition, the issue becomes far more complex when we remember that in every age men and women have been willing to die for holding such a belief.

Sometimes the Wisdomkeepers come to us in a powerful memory, focused more upon the simple fact of their being rather than any particular advice. In our walk together, each of my Wisdomkeepers shared something that does not need much effort to be coaxed into awareness. One of my Wisdomkeepers had a heart attack on his way down the stairs on Christmas morning. When I received the news I
knew
he was bigger than death and that this event did not signal the end of our relationship. To this day I sometimes find myself grasped by something he said, and my heart fills with laughter or awe. Sometimes it is simply the stillness and the quiet that resulted from his deep inner strength which, today, feels like a gift.

Way beyond my understanding and in defiance of my scepticism, my Wisdomkeepers have sometimes acted as midwives in my pain filled struggles with despair and helped me to grasp that I am a creature in process and that pain could be simply the prelude to new birth!

Young people are by no means exempted from a journey to this place of anguish, but generally, the things that drive people here are related to the older years. In fact learning to cope with, survive, and learn from the place of anguish, is a task that awaits everyone in their later years. Most of us, sooner or later, come up against doors which once were open but now have closed leading us to the awareness of how swiftly and irrevocably time passes us by. If we can avoid bitterness, the place of despair can teach us to value and cherish the time that is left to us and see doors that invite new explorations and even adventures.

The place of despair can bring a greater clarity to our seeing and initiate some basic changes. Pointless employment, which demands so much and returns so little, can be reframed as a mere means to an end and not an end in itself; long walks with someone we love ceases to be thought of as a luxury and becomes a fundamental necessity; and the drive to summon all our creative energies is awakened so as to leave something of value for generations only now being born.

The discovery of just how fragile and fleeting is that gift we call, “life” is a priceless insight we sometimes take away from the place of despair for it awakens within us a hunger for intimacy, and often, a need to complete certain tasks or start a conversation that has been on hold for too long.

The recognition of just how wonderful and capable my children have become ignites a deep yearning to engage them at a level we’ve not yet explored. I want to know them, and more urgently, I want them to experience me, not merely as a parent or mentor, but as a person who works away at life in the same way they do.

Joseph Campbell’s vigorous warning against living a life designed and structured by someone else, applies equally to embracing someone else’s questions and even more, their answers. While a good deal of common human experience may be found at the place of anguish, the answers others have carved for themselves are rarely helpful. At this place advice, good bad or indifferent, breaks down for what we need is not more advice but a drawing up of wisdom from the deep wellsprings of our being as we dare to face our own questions.

As a lover of questions once wrote,

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
¹⁸

An encounter with despair is never comfortable, yet it holds the potential for growth. Learning to honour all our journeys, even those that fill us with anguish, becomes a door through which we might engage the Wisdomkeepers. Yet be aware that our Wisdomkeepers never force themselves upon us and never demand that we honour their presence. Our need is to so tune the inner ear and risk ourselves in hearing that we might better apprehend the mysterious Keepers of Wisdom.

This land of the inscape is a vast and mysterious place. To grasp some of the treasures and mysteries that can be found here we sometimes have to make a journey into the ultimately strange and unpredictable corners of the universe.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
¹⁹

Our final journey is one into the most mysterious of all, a journey into the strange diversity of our multiple worlds.

Writers of science fiction have long toyed with the idea of multiple universes existing side by side (or perhaps in some other spatial relationship). Passing from one universe into another, their fictional characters discovered each universe to be strangely different from the planet with which they were familiar, yet, at the same time, there was something vaguely common that allowed them to recognized basic principles that operated in each world.

In a very different context, puzzled by the anomalous behaviour of subatomic particles, several physicists have begun work on their own understanding of parallel universes. They point out that time honoured classical theories, which form the corner stone of our understanding of how things are, are simply inadequate to explain the bizarre findings of quantum physics and general relativity. One report suggests:

Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.
²⁰

Albert Einstein’s theoretical work on space-time introduced us to the concept of Holes, 'black holes in space,' yet as one scientist noted:

Einstein realized that the black hole had another surprise. The hole wasn’t a hole after all – it was a tube connecting into another possible universe. As Einstein and Rosen first stated it there was a ‘bridge’ through a black hole to anywhere and anytime.
²¹

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung would be quite at home amongst researchers who are not adverse to the idea of parallel universes. That is not to suggest that they proposed a multiplicity of universes exterior to ourselves, but rather to acknowledge that they drew attention to
the multiple worlds that live within each one of us!
As mysterious as any parallel universe and just as difficult to describe they were convinced of a sphere that existed just beyond the horizons of our conscious awareness. Sub-conscious or un-conscious that world might be, yet everyday it plays a powerful role in the way we think about ourselves, see others and make choices.

It is now time for us to puzzle over this mysterious, strange world of our personal parallel universe, our
Land of the Unconscious.