Beyond the Cliffs

“Daring to live means daring to die at any moment but also means daring to be born, crossing great stages in life in which the person we have been dies, and is replaced by another with a renewed vision of the world, and at the same time realizing that there will be many obstacles to overcome before we reach the final stage of Enlightenment.” – Arnaud Desjardins

A few posts ago I wrote about the painting “Choosing to Trust.” Here is an excerpt from that:

Recently, I found myself in a situation where I was blessed with the opportunity to choose to trust. Doing so meant I would have to step beyond years and years of painful heartache and self-doubt. And in that moment when I chose to trust, I felt myself setting fire to all of intellects careful research and documentation it has been collecting for ages. And as intellect’s screams of doom chased me down I joyously leapt from the treacherous precipice of fear, and smiled as I finally saw the view beyond those cliffs (but that is another painting). In Choosing to Trust, I chose to be free.

I spoke about the view from beyond the cliffs. It is in fact a spectacular view. You can finally see beyond all the negative emotional chains that normally bind us and keep us from truly loving, from truly being free.

When I jumped, I flew. And I flew for awhile. I tasted the sweet, intoxicating nectar of being one with my Divine Nature.

This painting came from the joyous space of finally being free from it all for the first time.

In fact while this painting was coming through, each time I closed my eyes I could see nothing else but this view. It was screaming to be born from within.

Since then, however, I have come to see something more in this painting.

Someone close to me shared that they experienced a sense of hell in this painting. At first I set that image aside, knowing that it wasn’t hell to me, because I was flying above it all and looking down, but as I thought about it, and what I have experienced since that leap, I can see it clearly.

For when I jumped off the cliff and let go, I left fear, guilt, shame, self-doubt, mistrust, jealousy, and pain behind. All of those things did not disappear; they are still down there below me. So in fact if you think about it, those emotions are a personal self-made hell.

However, like Icarus, I became exhilarated by the thrill of flying and began to get careless. I flew too close to those fires of my hell, and my wings could no longer hold me. I fell. Perhaps I couldn’t really let go of those things that weigh us down.

Why are we so attached to our baggage? It seems that as soon as we finally free ourselves from it, when we finally set it down because it has become too heavy and is weighing us down, we rush back to check on it. It is as though we need to make sure it is still there. We are almost protective of it. We feel naked without it and we are fearful of our nakedness.

We are so used to seeing a muddy reflection of ourselves that when we finally have the courage to clean off the mirror we don’t recognize ourselves. Our raw and freshly exposed skin tingles from a sense of heightened and electric awareness. Not unlike a reptile sloughing off a skin that has become too tight to grow further; its new skin is sensitive to everything in its environment.

Instead of just delighting in the experience of fully feeling for the first time, we rush to retrieve our masks that we packed away in that luggage back there. We pick up that stifling mask of fear or blinding mask of self-doubt and re-cover our brilliant Souls with them, blocking out the Light. We climb back into that incredibly heavy armor of ego and we can no longer fly from the sheer crippling weight of it.

But unlike Icarus, we have the opportunity to leap from the cliff again and again to test our trust in our inherent ability of flight. It is the mistrust of the birthright of flight that causes us to keep crashing headlong into our personally created hells. But if we have the courage to climb the jagged rocks of attachment, we can choose to jump from the precipice once again, re-birthed in the Heavenly Skies, killing off a part of our false identities.

So let’s be like children and take a running leap, hand in hand, off the edge.

Ready? On the count of three. One, two, three….