There is a curious dynamic once you shift into the perspective of the body as cosmic, usually in Refined Unity. The cosmic is beyond the fields of karma and stress. There is nothing there to purify. When you experience your body as cosmic, it is seen as pristine and full of light.
And yet all bodies in our universe are part of the cosmic. It includes all forms in all of time and space. Those bodies are expressed into denser layers and carry unresolved experiences, nodes of resistance, and other kinds of crud.
And thus, when we live as the cosmic, we still experience purification and healing. Only now, we’re taking a hand at healing all of it and not just apparently personal stuff. (As we resonate with the kinds of things we’ve healed, we tend to process new flavours of the same.)
We also come to recognize that what we’re healing doesn’t actually exist. All the suffering of the world results from shadow. Shadow is simply lack of light. Lacking the light of awareness, we resist pain and grasp at pleasure, rejecting the world the way it is. We see things in shadow rather than light.
In a sense, we’re now dissolving illusions of stress rather than anything real. Like bringing light to a shadow, the darkness vanishes.
Another perspective is that all of nature (prakriti) is the flow of attention. As awareness is self-referral, it flows forward while also curving back on itself. The result is spiraling flows. Where there are constraints, the spiral tightens, then falls into a point. It ceases to flow. Without liveliness, it falls dark. Shadow arises.
I wrote about this a year and a half ago, framed a bit differently. And I talked a little about the experience of this here.
Davidya
Washing machine: I am not in refined unity or any other advanced stage (as far as I know :-)). However, I think I am being what Rick Archer calls a washing machine. I am suffering for things and events which did not happen to me (i.e. I read that someone else had negative things happen to them and I suffer). Or I suffer thinking of someone else’s actions to another person. I have enough of my own and so don’t need to borrow other people’s “sins or sorrows” so to speak. However, I think I am suffering for myself and also experiencing other people’s negative emotions and actions more recently. Cruelty, especially emotional cruelty in other people’s relationships,really makes me suffer. I resonate more to suffering there. I think there is truth to Rick’s metaphor of a washing machine. However, how one goes about proving or disproving whether I am suffering for others or just have poor psychological boundaries or have other psychological issues, I don’t know. Thanks
Hi K
Actually, this is a bit different than the “washing machine.” The “washing” is the experience of cleaning the environment rather than of just our “personal” crud. This isn’t possible if we’re identifying with the contents. If we do that, they stay.
Taking on others stuff and suffering is quite different. This isn’t “washing”, it’s more like putting on others dirty clothes. Becoming more sensitive can bring this on. Or becoming more conscious of dynamics that were already in play but become more prominent with awareness.
Empaths can have this sort of experience and it often can be suppressed to try an keep it unconscious. But then spiritual progress makes it conscious. Then, it’s about getting skills to not take others crap on. This doesn’t help you or them as nothing is being resolved.
Or it can simply be mind identifying with everything that arises. Only now we’re becoming more conscious of what has been going on. In that case, part of the equation is asking what is inviting this stuff? What benefit do we get from this suffering? There can be stories about deserving or being the martyr or other kinds of things that encourage suffering.
We don’t suffer for others. Thats old Christian BS. Suffering comes from identifying with experiences we don’t want or grasping at what we want. We can still have experiences without suffering.
But this also isn’t something to pathologize, nor something to prove. Thats just ego and it’s stories. More what you want to do is observe the dynamics of it and how you’re getting entangled. Then take measures to shift the behaviour.
The action depends on what is driving it – empath reads, greater sensitivity, and so forth. You may need healers skills to help see the dynamic.
I really liked this It’s really clear.
I am after many years more able to face things directly.I can’t imagine what it’s like to so stable as the self to not have any resistance and be completely open.Sounds wonderful
Hi Robert
Well – I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone completely open and without resistance. Even after becoming well-established, there is often deeply buried nuts that gradually come to the surface. Not to mention, the gradual shift from personal to cosmic, clearing for the whole.
But there are certainly people with massively reduced resistance and it does quite change how we are within and in the world. It quite revises our experience of life and the ways life is able to support us and we can support it.