“Forgiveness doesn’t make one person better, or the other guy smaller. Forgiving is just letting go. It’s turning back toward being what we really are.” – From “The Gardens of Ailana” handbook for healers & mystics
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Tag Archives: personal development
Book reading for mystics
http://www.citylightsnc.com/event/edward-fahey-returns-new-novel
Edward Fahey Returns with a New Novel
Sapphire author, Edward Fahey will present his third novel on Friday, May 22nd at 6:30 p.m. The Gardens of Ailana explores the metaphysical, the idea that there are places on this planet not confined to the logic of men or limitations of science. In this modern-day fictional tale, four people with very different backgrounds, each scarred by a horrific childhood, meet at a place of healing where one’s most crippling darkness must be faced down. In the rubble of their lives and broken spirits they learn that in their weaknesses lie their most profound strengths. In their festering wounds they find hope. In The Gardens of Ailana we see through the souls of mystics, experience laying-on-of-hands from the healer’s point of view. Feel at home among wonders and magic. Fahey says of The Gardens of Ailana, “This is the book others have been laying the groundwork for and building towards.” Novelist and teacher, Fahey spent his life hunting magic, seeking out the other sides of reality. His previous novels are Mourning After and Entertaining Naked People. To reserve any of his books please call City Lights Bookstore at 828-586-9499.
Event date:
Friday, May 22, 2015 – 6:30pm
Event address:
3 E Jackson St.
Sylva, NC 28779
author appearance
grownups
Teachers point back at you.
Quoting HPB or anyone else when exploring matters of spirit, we might not want to take them as ultimate authority. To almost reverence her for connections to great masters of the wisdom who themselves didn’t want to be reverenced. Our most usable insights come from within. At the end of any answer from a great teacher we should hear a little “hook,” as though s/he is asking us, “What insights does that set off in you?”
Great masters point and guide. They know your answers can and should be accessed through your own soul and experiences. If you are simply researching and quoting texts for answers, then your are still knocking on doors.
Step inside
Forgiving ourselves
“The Gardens of Ailana”
A pilgrimage toward redemption, and forgiveness.
You can recover your innocence.
Excerpts:
“Guess we all have our moments when we don’t look at reality quite head on. See things through our ‘I’m no good and I can’t do this’ state of mind. We might read it as ‘She hates me,’ or ‘This’ll never work,’ but what we’re really doin’ is givin’ up on ourselves.” …
… “So you’re sayin’ we just make peace with everyone who’s ever screwed us.”
Paulette reached into her own past to tell her, “We make peace with ourselves. They just come along for the ride.”
Sharing the Light with others, I feel truly Blessed.
I am absolutely amazed at the wisdom, deep truth, and heavy duty teachings in “The Gardens of Ailana”! I find insights I have never seen any philosopher or great spiritual teacher even hint at before! (And I hate using exclamation points) Every day it all just pours through – a thousand words or more in a couple of hours – and I am learning so much from each scene and passage. I feel like I am READING each chapter, not writing it.
I am so very, very grateful for these teachings
Will be doing a reading from “The Mourning After” (and perhaps from my new book, “The Gardens of Ailana”) at the Quest Bookshop in New York City on Sunday, May 11th.
In “The Gardens of Ailana”.
“What do you think we should call you?” little Sylva asked.
“Do I have to have a name?”
“Most people seem to think so. I think they’d get lost if they didn’t have their names. People don’t usually know who they really are, but they do like to pretend.”
“People think they need a lot of things they’d be better off without.”
“That’s what my mom says, but I’m still figuring on that one.”
“Want a little help?”
“No, I think I’ll just let my brain have it for a while; I’ve got other things to do.”
Some very brief bit, only one or two short, very mildy distracting lines goes here.
“What do you like to eat?” Sylva, lost in her pondering, was all seriousness now.
“I like strawberries.”
“No, that’d be a dumb name.”
“How about calling me Cuthbert?”
“Now you are just being silly. Pay attention. This is important business. People don’t come here and leave here the same, so they should get a new name while they’re here.”
“Okay, I can see that,” he said. “So what’s your brother’s new name? Or is Renn his new name?”
“Renn doesn’t need a new name; he was born here. Only the pretending people need real names when they stop pretending so much. But some people leave and they still don’t know who they are, so I don’t name them.”
“Aren’t you the girl people told me doesn’t talk very much? Guess they didn’t know you very well.”
“Good point,” she said. So then she went back to thinking again.
As they studied the land around them it seemed indecisive, uncertain. It hadn’t yet made up its mind. Was it spring now, or had winter merely blinked? Were some patches of ivy brown, brittle, dried out and returning to soil; or were they looking for a bit of their green again? Had they given up, or would they once again decide to live? Was that which had been there last year coming back, or had they seen the last of it?
“Y’know, people really should listen to children,” she told him.
“I’m beginning to find that out.”
“But not when we’re just being children.”
“Okay, now that’s something I’ll have to think about.”
“It’s good to give each other stuff to think.
“But you don’t wanna make a whole lotta noise when you’re doing it.”
“You mean like talking?” he asked.
“And other stuff. Like eating corn chips.”
He started to write on one of his special lumpy papers. She saw him holding a pencil he hadn’t had before, but hadn’t seen how he’d opened his box. She decided she would just have to start observing harder.
She thought she’d give him something to write.
“You know you can’t pet a stumblebee on the back while he’s flying because that’s where his flying parts are, and that’s why they stumble.”
“Ah, yes. That would be so,” he replied.
“You don’t really scare them when you try to, but they would ‘Really rather you would stop doing that!’ ”
And then she was quiet again. That had been a lot of talking for her. She didn’t usually pay any attention to grownups because most grownups didn’t know very much.
This one was different.
Besides, he was fun to watch because his light went out farther when he thought about people.
It didn’t shrink in and get all hard like that crippled lady’s used to. You could hardly call hers light at all.
“I think I’ll name you Mica,” she told him, “Because you’re all shiny.”
“Mica. I like that. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Mica it is. I am now Mica.”
“You are Mica, the Shiny One.”
At end of day, Paulette sat with Ailana on the porch, unwinding from her day of exploration. She’d been thinking about how much she had learned back at the healing and meditation retreat without even knowing it.
She tried to remind Ailana now of one particularly lasting and memorable lesson. “When you told us to listen to the forest, feel that deep Peace, and take it inside us … Well that just changed me somehow.”
“Except I never said that.”
“It … but … You didn’t?”
“Why would I tell you to take peace inside you? It’s already there. All you needed was to find it. I told you to feel it inside you, not take it there.”
– From my new novel-in-progress, “The Gardens of Ailana”.
We are what we believe. We rarely see how things truly are.
Digging through lies you created to hide your True Self,
you may find God.
Or something much better.
Chapter Eight
An instant spray of sparkle spat outward across the pond.
Gentle footprints of ripple wavered, dissolved, fading away to rich green stillness. All the world was ripening, finding its form, as the scent of new birth hid in breezes.
Paulette poked through the rubble left by long years of misconceptions she had once built her life on. By water’s edge she kicked through the jetsam of defensiveness she no longer need. Budding here and there throughout the wreckage she found the delicate florets of long-hidden kindnesses, just now peeking out through deep shadows.
Harve felt caught up in a web of lies the world really wanted, even needed to believe. They told him to his face, announced in banner headlines, that their world needed heroes. So in some muddled and disheartened way, he kept climbing into the costume they held out before him.
He couldn’t abandon them now.
Confession would get him nowhere; it would hurt a lot of people.
He was trapped.
And yet here was a woman to whom he had just bared his soul throughout a long night of impassioned weakness, and she seemed to understand. She stood beside him still.
In fact they seem to have connected even more deeply than if he had just stayed Mr. Mystery, or played the hero card.
Throughout this morning they’d been wandering. Heading off originally, each had followed his or her own directions, seemingly at random. Bit by bit their paths had drawn nearer to each other. Now the two new and tentative companions walked together, though not directly side-by-side, and barely talking.
Walking, pausing, reflecting; staring at trees right in front of them, or rocks at their feet, but not truly seeing them. They felt stunned, unnerved; bemused as things seen and unseen fell into new places. Like leaves after a great troubling wind. They felt both drained and refilled; alive with new mysteries and possibilities.
Like newborns, everything was new, bright, wondrous, but confusing. Nothing made sense, and yet they had to learn to trust, their hearts surging everywhere at once. This was a brand new world they knew nothing about.
After long silence between them, Paulette spoke.
“It’s so hard to find out all in one night you’ve built your life on beliefs that were just never true.”
“Tell me about it.”
– From my novel, “The Gardens of Ailana”.
Being yourself IS spiritual.
I don’t need to follow some ethereal checklist, take on some pre-designated persona in order to attract the attention of the masters, maybe even hope they might accept me into their service. M wasn’t KH; there is no standard persona. Why would I want to be muddling up their energy fields before I’m ready anyway? And why would they want anyone pretending to be what he isn’t?
Be who you are honestly and fully. But keep in mind the classic motivations for everything you do; like service to humanity, defending the weak, standing up against the abusive, and being the best you can be (whatever that is). If you screw up or fall short, face it honestly and make amends.
Be you.
But be it fully, and for the right reasons.
Ailana’s Gardens.
Aside
New opening lines for the book?: “I hurt so badly to connect with something.” She didn’t know how many times she’d awakened with those words in her head; that ache in her heart. She wasn’t completely sure what they meant, or what she could do to change anything. She only knew that feeling rode her somehow. Like a horse wearing blinders, she always felt something unseen, controlling each step, yanking at her reins, pulling her up short when she wanted to run free across vast fields she probably only imagined. Or maybe in some strange way remembered.
Dedication: This book is for those who hurt for something more in their everyday lives. Who desperately need to feel connected to something. Something Higher, richer, more meaningful. No matter how much they give to others, no matter how productive, over-stuffed, and generous their lives, they always feel they’re pulling up short.
It’s for those who need to feel what it’s like to heal, and be healed.
For those who need to FEEL again.
To feel something far beyond life’s daily drudgeries.
Falling through the bottom.
If my life shows anything, it’s that no matter how lost you may feel in your deepest pits of depression, you can always be led to something Higher. In fact sometimes it seems you may have to fall through the bottom before you can rise to your true heights. Sometimes you have to be consumed by your own darkness before you can find that tiny light to lead you out. Or maybe I should say before it can find you; before you are ready to let it in. You can be guided out of any mess into something clearer.
I’m not of course recommending any of this as a path to enlightenment, but it doesn’t cut you off from it either. You don’t have to be a vegan yogi living in isolation on barren steppes somewhere hidden from the world, and from life. You can get drunk, have sex, get angry, hate God and His world, and still find Him.
God, or whatever you choose to call Him, Her, It, That, Them.
Or nothing. Maybe it isn’t God you are finding, but your deepest, highest, vastest, truest self. Which may be the same thing as God.
Don’t just parrot the philosophers
Aside
Ancient philosophers were explorers and wanted us to be. They wanted to understand this physical world, but not get stuck there. They didn’t share their insights so we would over-analyze and repeat them in endless loops through forever ad nauseum. Their goals never included being quoted and re-translated until they lost all meaning. They sought to be jumping off points, not stalling out points. They wanted to be doorways, not doorstops.
Friends want to drag you into their darkness
Aside
The universe is based on contrasts: yin & yang / for every action there is a reaction. The world of spirit is no exception. For each teacher trying to lead us toward light there will be another slinging darkness. When we find ourselves dancing in joy we will find friends crowding nearer who want to drag us into their fears, angers, and disillusionment. When we lose ourselves in beauty, others will remind us of ugliness. As our lives fill with magic and wonder, there will always be those trying to beat these away from us with factoids and rumors, with scientific counter-references and left brain limitations.
I picture a dog in a storm outside a large comfortable mansion. He is standing at the door, barking and howling as the masters snuggle inside by the fireplace, dry and warm and feeling wonderful.
They go to the door to let the pooch in, but he won’t budge. He hasn’t been barking for them to let him in; he’s been trying to get them to come outside and share his misery, to join him in this horrible deluge.
So they walk back in to sit again by the fire, to snuggle up in the golden warmth, as he goes back to yapping in the darkness.
Questioning.
Aside
The very best questions don’t lead to answers. They lead to deeper questions.
Wallowing
Aside
If you absolutely must wallow, then wallow in joy.
We can never rise unless we fall
Aside
Doubt and denial seem to be an important part of spiritual development. Tales are told in most if not all religious traditions about those who deny, and who, other than Judas, lived to recant. Look also at stories of Christian and other martyrs, of Sai Baba, HPB, et al. Where there is a Light Bearer there must be those trying to drag us back into the darkness where they are more comfortable. Where there is purity, folks will sling mud. It seems to be one of the basic and undeniable, unavoidable rules of the universe. Like Yin & Yang, like there can be no up without a down to compare it to. Where there are those trying, we will find those falling short. “Seek & you will find”? Sure. But only if you are willing to get lost so many times that you have felt like giving up. “Knock & it shall be opened”? Maybe. But sometimes it will be the wrong door.
But the light is in there; and someday, you will get all the way home, only to realize that even when failing, even in your very darkness moments, you actually had been there all the time.
Does God know and control everything?
Aside
I don’t think I believe that there is no such thing as coincidence; that God plans every detail, and all that. But I do know absolutely that beyond a certain stage in one’s development, once he is unshakably aware, interacting with that glorious vast whatever day and night, from then on every one of his moments will be woven out of deeply meaningful synchronicities.
Others around him may shake their heads, call it miraculous, say, “Whoa! That was strange!” but he keeps on keeping on, fully open to the next moment, and the purposefulness of every little bit of his life.
Of course this brings up the whole thing about no sparrow falling without God knowing it and all that.But then this all hangs on what exactly the speaker is referring to as “God”. It may very well be that nothing happens without something else knowing. It is certainly true that every little something else is then a part of a larger something else until it all weaves together into that Vast Something Else. – If we then call that Vast, Glorious, but ultimately unknowable Something Else “God”, then okay. In that case I can agree that “God” knows about everything.
Being the Light.
Aside
Years ago my other-worldly connections shifted dramatically. I could sometimes feel myself traveling to a hospital or sickroom somewhere to assist in the healing, and would get unsolicited confirmation later that day. Or I might radiate general Light to all beings; I might feel myself a radiant sun on high, shining down onto all beings, onto and through the planet itself. Or I might for a while enjoy the Bliss of Humility, and just receive for a while. Then I went through a long period of time when I just felt part of the woods I live in, part of the world’s peace.
This troubled me when I read the masters’ letters and they spoke of being there for poor orphan humanity. A dear and knowing theosophist / psychologist friend, Dr. Barbara Hebert, told me I was a radiating center of peace and that this was a good thing, but I had trouble agreeing with her that this was enough.
It sure felt good, though. It felt natural, and healing, and right.
I had some cancer spots for years that bled and hurt all over my back and shoulders and Lynden suggested, “Well, you send all this healing all over the planet and beyond, why don’t you just redirect some through yourself?” – Well. I have to admit that had never occurred to me. So I sat and drew down the healing forces, pulling them through me. The cancer went away and I apparently set about getting ready for the next stage.
I headed off for England where I came into contact with lingering spirits in ancient monasteries and graveyards; stone circles and centers of magic; pieces of the true cross, bones of apostles, the robe of St. Francis …. And it was like my molecules were changing. I was losing my sense of physical presence. Lynden and I were sick for months and I stayed home. The winter broke records and I stayed inside. I got a devastating earache and deafness in Italy, and I could hardly have felt any more isolated.
As I healed from this, it was as though I was now in a very different body than the one I’d felt the pain through. In recent weeks I have been constantly buzzing in some other-worldly kinda way. I have never been good with numbers, but now I seem to have no connection at all. If I just make the slightest shift from paying attention to my surroundings, I feel the flow of healing pouring through for all; and I am a part of that flow. Shortly after that, for some reason, I desperately need a nap.
As Lyndie and I were coming home from Scotland yesterday, after visiting Roslyn Chapel again (I spent a lot of time in the crypt below it this time), I felt like I was just some non-specific force of Nature, just pouring some benign energy out into the hills.
I pondered over what that might mean. A tree in the forest is a center of peace, but doesn’t get all anxiety-ridden over where he should be sending that peace. He is just doing what he is. Winds are forces of Nature, but don’t question whom they should be seeking out to blow upon, and where they should be blowing him.
There is a picture on Lynden’s altar which we think was supposed to be KH, but I have never believed they looked like their pictures in real life. I can see why they would not correct this, because having too many normal people focusing on them could disrupt their work on other planes, so I just see these as pictures of generic mahatmas that I could make use of however I will. If I am in a place of gentle loving peace and wish to grow more so, I can see this drawing as KH. If I am kneeling there with Sword Ganesha in my hands, in a mood to bust through the blockages and the darkness, I can see this as M. I can use this to offer myself to guides and spiritual teachers generally and ask to be an extension of their work into the world I inhabit, without having any idea whom I am praying to. I may or may not be a student of some great teacher, but that question doesn’t bother me. I want to be there if needed, as needed, in every moment.
Period.
I no longer need feedback. I don’t need the ego trip of people re-assuring me that I had indeed helped them. Spreading peace and joy is a good thing, and if more is needed of me, doing that will keep those channels open.
If I hold too specific a picture when wishing to contact a particular master, I am limiting him, and my access to him, to what I have imagined him to be.
If he offers some teaching or challenge, I have already opened one particular doorway for that gift to come in through, and by golly it had danged well better fit through that tiny and very specific portal. Unseen teachers can only reveal whom they are to the extent that I can let go of whom I am expecting them to be.
And in the end, isn’t it really all about letting go?
Why should I feel bad for feeling this good; even if I don’t know how, or if, I might be helping others? Why not just trust? Let myself be that force of nature, even if it is a Force of a Higher Nature I can’t see or be thanked by?
It feels good. It feels powerful. It feels completely and totally right.
I guess I can be okay with that.
Check your ego. But step into your Power.
Aside
When we feel ourselves radiating as healers; as powerful Centers of Light; is there still a part of us that wants to hold back? Telling ourselves that Spiritual Brilliance is for other Beings, much Greater Beings; we don’t want to show off?
Sure, if you can find any whisper of pride in such feelings, then most likely you are not ready. But what if you are, but you’re blocking it? Could you be buckling under to old, outmoded paradigms insisting you are still that little kid, hanging onto the coattails of bigger, more significant folks?
If you hide inside limitations you are ready to break free of, you are hurting more than just yourself. There are people out there praying for help; don’t deny them what you are able to share.
Bob Edward Fahey 