Despair becomes a dis-ease of psycho-spiritual imbalance and thus serves only to ‘freeze' you up. Which is the opposite of free-dom
A.
| Sa-Ra 2: On Despair and
Hopelessness By through Shellee-Kim May 8, 2013 - 10:53:47 PM |
7 May 2013
Shellee, you and I have discussed numerous things already. And something that you are familiar with - although more from your distant past - are those feelings of despair within. A feeling of never being able to pull yourself up and out of this most dense emotional state. Along with it, in most instances, comes a sense of hopelessness. For this is, in fact, what it is.
But how is it that ones arrive at this state in the first place? What are the tell-tale signs we can become aware of BEFORE we begin the sinking into this unhealthy and unhelpful state within?
Despair is a state where we feel we have lost, within ourselves, some type of battle. We believe we are no longer connected to the hopeful feelings of our lives and that which once brought us feelings of upliftment therein. Being in despair feeds on its own self-destructive tendency. And so we end up in a spiral of this self-destruction, feeling as if we will never recover from whatever ails us.Of course, this is all the more intense if we choose to stay there. And without applying the light of our understanding to ourselves.
We first arrived into a state of hopelessness and despair by allowing a situation or person to strip us of our personal power; by relinquishing an aspect of our own essence. Despair and hopelessness might have arrived via an early childhood experience or it could have been as a result of an ongoing pattern experienced over many years as an adult. Even if those feelings lie buried and dormant for years, perhaps later into the life it is externally triggered by a person or life situation.
As an example, let's say the current source of your issues (or so you believe) is a difficulty getting along with a work colleague. One with whom you've had bad relations. In this, no matter what ‘surface' treatment you applied to the situation or how you tried to ‘plaster' it up for functionality in the work place, the energy between the two of you was still at work in the unconscious and on the ethers. Meaning, a battle for power is being fought.
As this continued, you found yourself subject to other situations happening around you or perhaps in your home life. Similarly disempowering situations in whichever forms they took. And you may well have NOT connected the dots. When, in fact, there was a single source at the root of all this seemingly-disconnected emotional turbulence.
Most people would only be able to access the end feelings, as it were -these eventual feelings of despair. The feelings that were set in motion by fighting something or someone outside of yourself and the inability/unwillingness to accept your own power; your own truth.
Yet, the dysfunctional work relationship above and its start only came into being as a result of an agreement between you two (at the Higher Self level). In which the situation brought forth an opportunity to find out where within you felt disempowered and how. And thus your seemingly greatest enemies are most often, in fact, your grandest teachers. If you will fully allow and accept them in being so, embracing the lessons they bring forth.
As you sit now in this current unpleasant scenario of feeling despair and not really knowing why, try to mentally trace through your memories of where and when the very first feelings of despair began for you. And what/who the people, situations and circumstances were which existed at the time.
You may ask for help with your memories from us and your own guardians of Light; we are but a call away to assist any and all wishing to heal and grow themselves.
Once you've clearly understood despair was merely the symptom of other, deeper feelings of non-acceptance you have about yourself, there will be some relief. For you will now have greater accuracy in arriving at the core of the problem. Rather than continuing to expend energy in trying to control these feelings of despair with your ego will alone. For controlling something is certainly not bringing understanding to it or allowing it to heal.
Despair becomes a dis-ease of psycho-spiritual imbalance and thus serves only to ‘freeze' you up. Which is the opposite of free-dom. And it easily gives rise to feelings of depression (which your world has labeled a mental disorder, using as an excuse to get you addicted to all manner of chemical drugs), it shrinks your world/your interaction with it, can make you feel antisocial, and at worst, leads to feelings of wanting to commit suicide.
Once you know what it is that caused all the trouble in the first place, you are halfway to the healing and subsequent re-introduction of greater balance within.
Most people engage in their internal battles by applying the will of the (lower, ego)mind. Which grows ever weaker, less reliant and more confused as the energies hitting earth and everything on her accelerate with greater intensity.
And, it is our observation that many people are hanging on to their functionality in the world by a thin thread connected to this will. As this is the negative ego's understanding of survival.
But issues like these cannot be completely and authentically resolved anymore by anything other than the God/higher mind being utilized in the problem-solving. And this is what those who are dedicated to growing in consciousness require for their progress.
Despair is but one of many ‘symptoms' brought to your attention by your mind. Along with the world, that brings to you, at every turn, an exact reflection of what is occurring within and where/what you should be looking to to heal.
I address despair today as this can be and does have a paralyzing effect on the human psyche. Where all other inner movement is potentially shut down. And it is most necessary to keep those doors to yourselves open, beloveds. For otherwise you are no better or worse than ‘zombies'. And living in this mode would be no life at all.
Despair is the opposite of hope. It is the state of having given up on yourself. And I AM here today to show there is a way out of the maze you may feel you are in, internally. Which can return you to yourself, given your dedication and sincerity to the task at hand and your desire to apply your higher mind to the problem.
And we are here to help you return you to yourself, if you so wish.
On this sombre, but most important note...
I AM Sa-Ra, loving you all for everything you are, go through and achieve.
It is with delight and joy that I AM here to serve.
I take my leave now and wish you Adieu.
B.
Eckhart Tolle : The Dark Night of the Soul
Q: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period. Can you address this subject?
A: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.
You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.
A: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.
You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.
