12/10/2024
As a psychic, one question I get asked a lot is:
“Why would God bring this man (or woman) into my life, only to sn**ch him away again? He must have a sick sense of humour!”
There is certainly a very strange experience out there to be had in the world, common amongst my clients, both male and female, gay and straight. I would estimate that one in every five of my psychic readings addresses a scenario not far away from the following:
My client is busy getting on with life, asking for nothing, troubling no one. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, someone drops into her lap. This mysterious person stirs an ancient memory in her, reminds her of something she had long forgotten. And now she realises that this is what she had been searching for her entire life. Everything now makes sense; all the pain and anguish and loneliness of the past are healed in an instant. A connection of indescribable depth and resonance now unfolds with the promise of a deeply committed relationship. She has finally completed the long and winding road home; she has reached the promised land. Hallelujah! God is good after all. Thank you, God!
And then, within a year or two, sometimes even less, the mysterious person is gone again, without so much as a bye-your-leave. And my client, who was perfectly fine before all this happened, is now left feeling that she cannot go on, and that life has lost all meaning for her. One long-term client of mine described her experience as like “being eaten alive from the inside, without being able to do anything about it”.
So, does God have a sick sense of humour? Does he enjoy seeing us writhe around in unbearable suffering? Surely, he must be, at the very least, as pitilessly indifferent to our plight as nature itself? A scientist would explain that physical attraction is a biological function essential for the perpetuation of the human race, and in accordance with nature’s template, it arises, persists for a while and then dies away. There is no God, and no mystery either. There is only the destruction, decay and death that is essential to creation’s flourishing on both a micro and macro scale.
Charles Darwin, once a devout Christian, eventually lost his faith in God by studying the macabre habits of the wasp:
“I cannot persuade myself”, he wrote, “That a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars”.
According to Richard Dawkins in “River out of Eden”, it was the digger wasps that really put the spiritual lid on it for Darwin. He read that a female digger wasp not only lays her eggs in a caterpillar so that her larva can feed on it, she also paralyses the caterpillar with her sting without killing it, in order to keep the meat fresh.
The caterpillar must therefore aware of being eaten alive from the inside but unable to do anything about it.
This really needn’t have been the end of the road for Darwin though. In “Dialogue on Awakening” by Tom Carpenter (a record of a conversation between the author and Jesus, the Awakened Christ), Tom explains how Jesus had confronted the same paradox with a very different result.
“Always curious as to how Jesus’ awakening had unfolded here on earth, I asked how this had occurred. The answer was very interesting.”
Jesus, it seems, was baffled by a single question: If God created the world, which was the accepted belief, and if He was all loving, why could he find no evidence of that in the world? And so, he began to meditate, at his favourite place “beside a small stream in the nearby hills”.
In Tom’s words:
“It was as he focused on these issues which his perception could not fathom that he first broke through the boundary of that perception and became aware of a Presence within his mind; a source of knowing unrelated to anything he had experienced before. He “heard” an inner Voice say to him that his perception of a loving God was correct, but he was looking for Him in the wrong places”.
So, this is how Jesus learned how to become a Christ. Through the practice of meditation. He learned to become so silent, that the whole turmoil of his mind disappeared, and he tuned into the still, small voice of God within him. Jesus learned to be a listener, a receiver, to allow his own thinking mind to disappear so completely that something totally different could arise. The Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount were not thought up by Jesus, they were received by him in the stillness of his own silence. He was merely the vehicle. This is what the spiritual path is all about. Learning to identify the voice in your head as ego, and learning to still that voice, and enter silence, so that another voice will arise.
My years of study on non-dualistic thought systems such as A Course in Miracles, Sufism and Buddhism have taught me that the natural world, where all things die, is not governed by the laws of God. God did not create a world where creatures are aware of being eaten alive from the inside and unable to do anything about it. This natural world arises from an erroneous belief in separation from a loving God.
“You do not realise the magnitude of that one error. It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total unreality had to emerge. What else could come of it? Its fragmented aspects are fearful enough, as you begin to look at them. But nothing you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to make further substitutions”
(A Course in Miracles, T-18.I.5)
This sounds very wordy and complicated, but all it is really saying is that once, before we got here, we had a belief that we had separated from God. The course calls it the “tiny mad idea”. And from that one idea came the entire belief in the cruel and indifferent natural world of death, destruction and decay, of being eaten alive from the inside. God is neither cruel or indifferent, He wants us to come home, to wake up from this illusion, to end our suffering and to choose life. This is what Jesus achieved at his favourite place, “beside a small stream in the nearby hills” and what Charles Darwin missed, as he was too engrossed in his study of the Ichneumonidae to suspect the bigger picture.
Oftentimes, my client will tell me with the upmost certainty that that her now-departed lover is her twin-flame. Sometimes this is a neurotic, fear-based attachment, but just as often I sense the wisps of memory of an ancient melody behind her words. Twin-flames are not a modern concept; the idea of one soul occupying two bodies was written about extensively by ancient Greek philosophers and the concept is frequently referred to in the Gnostic Gospels, such as those of Thomas and Mary Magdalene.
Yet, because we humans haven’t yet mastered the simple art of stilling the inner-voice, we make an idol of the twin-flame phenomenon and ignore the radiant truth that shines behind this idol. We try to slice and dice and merchandise a mystery that cannot be pinned down, and therefore cut ourselves off from the true immensity that a twin-flame connection signifies in our spiritual lives. We worship the finger that points to the moon.
As a result, a multi-million-pound industry has exploded. Twin-flame master-teachers are emerging from all corners of the internet, and people gather around them to exude hosannas and deploy palm fronds. Concepts like vibrational alignment and heart activation are being discussed on dedicated Facebook groups. You can purchase services such as energy cleansing and Akashic Record clearing for several hundred dollars, and for several thousand you can enrol in a twin-flame college where you can graduate to “ascension”.
There doesn’t seem to be complete agreement between twin-flame master-teachers as to what ascension is, but it certainly has something to do with self-realisation or awakening to the truth of who you are. But the road to this ascension seems to be scattered with food for the ego to chew on. Thirty- or sixty-day programmes, and courses in ten or thirteen or a hundred modules, covering diverse topics in and around the subject of awakening. “Ten signs that reunion is about to happen”, “The meaning of 11:11”, and then, almost as an afterthought, “Letting go of your attachment to your twin-flame”. Warning the self against the ego, we can hope to be of some effect, warning the ego against itself, we are surely addressing the wrong object. Stilling the mind and letting go of everything you think you are is surely the only way forward. The lighter you travel, the easier the journey. Remember poor Darwin.
Furthermore, this ascension business seems to be considered as a means for reuniting with a lost lover, rather than an end in itself; the ultimate end of returning home to God. From a unified perspective, this is rather topsy-turvy, upside-down thinking. When you do realise your own true nature, as love itself, you have no needs that a lover would fulfil. These twin-flame institutions need demystifying, as the worst of them seem to be no more than places where narcissists and co-dependents can seek each other out. Last week on YouTube I caught sight of a feet washing ceremony take place; of a garlanded and enthroned twin-flame couple, in reunion and therefore, presumably, ascendancy. I am reminded of a story a Buddhist teacher once told me:
Maya the evil one was walking along the road with his attendant when ahead of them appeared a man whose eyes were transfixed to a spot on the ground. His face was lit up with a radiant light.
“What is he looking at?” the attendant asked Maya.
“Only a piece of truth”, Maya replied.
“Aren’t you worried?” the attendant asked
“No”, replied Maya, “If it gets serious, I’ll organise it”.
So, if the purpose of twin-flame union isn’t the uninterrupted joy of the union for its own sake, then what is its purpose? I believe our twin-flame is our divine helper, our mighty companion on the winding road to the real world. Like an Abraxas rooster before the dawn, he chants out the clarion call to remind us of our connection to the Light. It is only by his running away from us in the world that he is drawing close to us in spirit, helping us develop, like Jesus, a faculty of interior hearing. This faculty is developed by turning the soul from outer things, whether material or psychological, and turning inward to the centre where lies the divine spark, the Spirit, the Self.
Herein lies the key to freedom from twin-flame misery. Be willing, if only for a moment, to recognise in this connection something so much more immense than the possibility of being together in this crazy world where all things die. Be willing, again if only for a moment, to see the utter cosmic irrelevance of this much idolised concept of “reunion”. Instead, develop a daily practice of following your twin-flame into that intermediate space between the natural world and the spirit world; to the imaginal world, where he is beckoning you. Here is the space where Mary Magdalene met Jesus after his resurrection and came to understand the nature of his love for her. Here is the space from where she wrote her Gospel.
“Lord, I see you now in this vision”
And the Lord answered:
“You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you”
(Mary 10:12-15)
Gradually you will come to see how much more real the imaginal realm is than the natural world, just as Mary came to understand how much richer her meetings were with Jesus here than in Jerusalem or at the shore of Galilee or by the well. You will come to understand how much more you are learning about yourself here than in the world of bodies, form, fear and attachment. And believe me, only then will you be able to let go of your attachment to reunion. A twin-flame connection is so strong, it is quite impossible to let go of without realising this. I have never seen it done by willpower alone, and I doubt I ever will.
Then, and only then, will your twin-flame runner come back into your earthly life. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Miracles have a way of being simple whilst keeping faith with the complexity of life experience. The process is utterly extraordinary, but it is also reliable. Not everyone I know who does this has reunited with their twin-flame already, but they have all, without exception had weird stuff happening almost immediately. Stuff that they couldn’t make up if they tried.
Human beings are on a windy road, and love is only found by walking it.
