A State Of Grace

Finding Your Inner Voice and Authentic Path:
The Process of Creating a Vision

Grace was in all her steps,
Heaven in her eyes.
In every gesture,
Dignity and love.

Milton

I found this quote in a Calgary, Alberta curio shop I was exploring with my partner/husband, Jhon, in early 2008. He was in the midst of "a dark night of the soul" that lasted more than a year and saw us horribly fractured (but never totally broken).

The Milton quote touched something deep inside me and I borrowed a pen from the shop owner to write it on the inside flap of a cigarette pack (which I still have, after much traipsing around the country). I think I was trying to be Jhon's "saving grace", and you know how that goes -- one can only change oneself and should not even pretend to know what is right and good for someone else, even when your motive is love.



FINDING GRACE

I have always believed that a Higher Power exists, guiding our way, if we choose to pay heed to the signs along our path. And those signs come in many guises, many forms; nudges and hints that shine the “Light”-- passages in books, people who have a life experience to share, a song, a dream, an animal, a landscape, or an inspiring night-sky. The Higher Power (or the Universal Energy, or Allah, or Yahweh, or the Absolute, or God) wants us to discover the truth, to see this “Light”. Some call it “enlightenment”.

One of my “signs” came to me in the early ‘90’s. I was reading a book called The Celestine Prophecies (Redfield, 1993) which is a story about recognizing “the signs”. The story speaks of people appearing in your life with messages. I had not yet finished reading the whole tale, when one day as I was standing in line at my neighborhood corner store, a total stranger standing beside me looked me directly in the eyes, and holding my gaze said, “Some people look, other people see.”

Kind of freaky, and to say it unnerved me somewhat, would be an understatement, but, after a further seventeen years of struggling to find my way, I now begin to understand what this “Guide” (or “Teacher” or “Helper”) might have meant.

Some time ago I was travelling down Route 19A, the Old Island Highway on Vancouver Island. I was on my way to the ferry docks in Nanaimo. I stopped in a little coastal hamlet called Bowser, at a convenience store, for some coffee and snacks. I saw a free publication so I snagged that too -- the May 2010 issue of The Beacon (Vol. 6 Issue 12) -- as ferry fodder for the mind. So curious that, the name of it, since my journey lately seems to be a search for the “Light”. But anyway, I digress………..

In the column, The Art of Conscious Living, in her article Who Shall We listen To?, Joanne Sales writes about “being inundated by our own opinions” and that “we’re stuck inside our own minds”. With refreshing humor she points out that “we don’t have to adopt the opinion of the first loudmouth that grabs the microphone of our minds”. Furthermore, Sales advises us “to just listen and observe…to listen to the silence…to open the door to the ‘other half’…the right brain, intuition, the sub-conscious…or whatever you call it’. She suggests that, “…if we can get quiet enough to hear it, our ‘best’ opinions may come from the same intelligence that keeps our hearts beating and the sun shining”.

During that same trip, after I had shared the Sales' article with my Mom in Vancouver, she suddenly remembered that she had “found” some books she thought I might find useful. Among them was Living In the Light (1986) by Shakti Gawain with Laurel King. Gawain discovered for herself the same concept W.W. Atkinson wrote about in Thought Vibration or the Law of Thought Attraction in the Thought World (1902). Gawain tells us that the events, happenings, incidents, etc, in our existence have been attracted into our lives to show us something relevant to our reality (p. 27).If we are experiencing problems, it is the Universal Consciousness pointing out, “Hey, there’s something you need to be aware of, something that needs to be changed here” (p. 27).

Gawain tells us that we all possess a natural outflow of the Universal Consciousness: our intuition or gut-feelings. We all possess this inner-knowledge but in order to tap into it you must reach inside, for it dwells within you. Jesus too, taught this spiritual truth – the Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20).

Recording artist, Sade, sings of this intuition in Long Hard Road (Soldier of Love CD, 2010, Sony Music):

There’s a long, hard road ahead
But a voice inside me said
You know,
there’s something wrong
That you need to know
But it’s gonna be alright

Over her twenty-five year song-writing career Sade has been lauded for her ability to comfort fans with her “mixture of mourning and consolation in her songs”. She herself says, “If it’s like a lighthouse to guide them past the rocks, that’s a great thing.” (http://www.sade.com/).

When my last term at North Island College ended this past April, I was moved to create a video montage of beach sunsets for my English instructor (Unwritten – For Judy Johnson, on YouTube.com), to thank her for her most enlightened instruction. We had discussed, several times, the solace to be found on a solitary beach stroll. The narration I wrote for the video:

When your thoughts are scattered
Still them,
So the seeds
Of
pure thought
Can be planted.

          Your Teachers
          Wait only for your acceptance
          Of their gifts:
          Knowledge, available to all.
          One has only to reach out
          For what is so freely and equally
          Offered to those who seek

          Listen
          In the stillness
          Of your thoughts
          As the night replaces the day

          Know
          That answers
          Aren’t always words
        
          Sometimes they come
          In the beauty of
          God’s colors.

In this particular narration I meant Judy when I wrote “Your Teachers”, but I can totally understand Gawain’s reference to “asking your inner-self to access the available universal guides and helpers to assist you” in your life’s journey. Gawain believes that we can request the assistance of our inner wisdom and when that request is directed inward (to our soul I suppose) then our inner wisdom taps into the Higher Consciousness and soon, the things we need, in order to move in the direction we want to go, will start crossing our path.

Looking at the series of events I have just recounted shows a definite correlation in, not only my train of thoughts over the many years, but also in the knowledge that is mystically presented to me so that I do indeed move forward in my intended direction. It is a mysterious and beautiful process and I have the utmost faith that it is truly so.

Gawain explains that Spirit is the essence of consciousness. The Energy of the Universe, or God, if you will, pulses forth a connector current of spirit into our earthly being. It is this piece of God that infuses our physical form, it is the body’s reason for being. Long after our body returns to the dust, our spirit, our soul, our piece of God, keeps its energetic impulse. Longfellow explains this poetically in A Psalm of Life:

          Life is real!
          Life is earnest!
         And the grave is not the goal;
         Dust thou art, to dust returneth
         Was not spoken of the soul.

I found this Longfellow poem in William J. Bennett’s, The Book of Virtues (1993). I was overjoyed to find it because another passage of the poem had been inscribed in my mother’s photo album by my father, in the 50’s, and I had always wondered from where he had gotten it:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Gawain tells us that metaphysics proves that all matter is, in actuality, energy – vibrating particles – and energy is also spirit. Our physical form incorporates many facets (p. 35):

our physical body
our mind
our personality
our ego/identity (the self-concept)

As such, our mind, body and personality must attend to the details of physical life and survival. Most times our inner growth takes a backseat to the survival issues and our inner growth (or soul growth, or spiritual evolution) is stunted. When this happens our inner wisdom is harder to perceive and we have difficulty distinguishing the myriad other voices we hear – that originate in our mind – from that of our higher consciousness. Joanne Sales calls this confusion, the “choice of voice” issue. We end up trying to satisfy our spirit’s natural inclination, to strive toward the Higher Consciousness, with external solutions, instead of turning within for the intended internal solution. In a spiritual disconnect, with a sort of current isolation, we tend to give our personal power away and we end up feeling “helpless, empty, victimized, angry, depressed…leading a life of quiet numbness and desperation” (p.69).

Basically, in a disconnected living mode, as I explained in my essay The New Age New Thought Movement (2009), you end up “just allowing life to happen, cowering against the ropes, anticipating the punch that takes you out, and allowing doubt and misery to drain you of life, of energy, of growth”. Gawain says that by following your intuition, or gut-feelings, you will find yourself with more “clarity, vision, wisdom, power and love (p. 38)… you will feel more alive and things will fall into place more easily for you (p. 27)”.

Concurrent to my studies, I am compiling power line information for my Jhonnie. He is a journeyman power linesman who needs to update his qualifications. While taking notes out of a technical publication for him, titled Distribution Transformer Handbook (3rd E., 2006), which covers transformer concepts, transformer connections and the installation of transformers, the booklet slid off a bigger pile of books and just happened to land, open-faced, on the last page (p.77). To my wide-eyed amazement I read this:

           THE MYSTERY OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Distribution transformers use magnetic force to convert electric power from one form into a new and more valuable form. But no one actually sees electricity or magnetism -- we are aware of them only through their effects. In our daily lives, we occassioanlly have experiences which prove transforming. We can't see the forces behind these wonderful events either, but we surely notice their effects. Whether transformations are electrical or spiritual, there is someting mysterious about them. While we don't fully understand how they function, we are delighted they do.

Did that give me a start? Yeah, you bet! Why would a technical handbook carry such a mystical message as an end-note? I’ll be sure to write an update about that later on, after I contact Richard Alexander of Alexander Publications. I am a believer, but always curious, so…………..

At any rate, Gawain suggests using visualization to assist the inner communication process. She says – name your inner voice, your wisdom; create a visual image in your mind for your inner voice, keeping in mind that your inner-landscape has dual facets. The Taoist tradition, calls this duality the Yin and the Yang, while Carl Jung termed it anima and animus -- the female and male aspects of both out physical and our spiritual being (p.45).

From a psychological viewpoint intuition is generally considered to originate from our inner female; her nature being wise, loving, and visionary. The nature of the inner male is to take risks, to serve the inner female (pp.46-48). However, that would be the balanced schema. In this life most of us are a far cry from either inner or outer balance.

In the interest of creating more balance within I have determined that the naming of my inner voice feels right to me. I know she’s in there because I feel her nudges from time to time (and I must admit the nudging has increased exponentially since I have given these thoughts more credence), and I do ask for her guidance. And yes, I do agree she originates from my inner female. So I name my inner voice, my intuition, my wisdom, my piece of God:

Grace

And my visualization of this inner Being, has all the attributes of Milton’s poetic ideal: she moves with graceful motion, Heaven’s illumination shines forth from her eyes, and in gestures, speech, thought and deed she is dignified and loving.