Trailing Clouds of Glory

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Excerpt from "Intimations of Immortality"

by William Wordsworth

I believe that, like Wordsworth so beautifully describes, babies are the most in touch with the spirituality which is, for each of us, our human inheritance. The "prison-house" he speaks of gradually descends around our consciousness until, by the time we are adults, we have the freedom to completely deny the truth of who we are.

As Joseph Chilton Pearce describes, how we are able to come to express our self in the world, even at a cellular level, depends to a very great degree on the models we have as children. Our primary models show us what it means to live in the world and they mirror back to us our identity. We see ourselves as those closest to us have seen us over time. It is a rare and wonderful thing when a child can grow up with models who perceive the "clouds of glory" and help her keep in contact with her own essential self.

When this can happen, the developing person's spiritual identity is very closely aligned with his/her human identity. Such a person is much more likely to have thoughts and make decisions out of his/her highest nature.

For the vast majority of us, however, we have to deal with the apparent fact that there are significant gaps between the ideal and the reality. Gaps between the radiance of us before we were born and the smaller self which is created as a denizen of planet earth. We have to revisit the places in our biography where the "prison-house" came down with particular force, and jolted us out of seeing ourselves as reflection of the divine.

The posts I have made so far describe aspects of the "shades of the prison-house" that formed around me and shaped my lower identity. I've talked about both the shocks of sexual abuse and of my dad leaving. I've spoken of the bipolar atmosphere which was my basic mental environment as a child and young adult. These influences are powerful forces in my life today. I need to understand them in greater detail than I do now so that they are not running my life. For they have the power to ruin my life. But I won't let them.

One aspect of the prison-house I am acutely aware of right now relates to my identity as a professional wage-earner.

My parents both had career challenges in their forties. I am in my forties and am having career challenges. It seems like a certain kind of echo, a trace of the experience of my parents which I seem to be caught in. The model I received from them contained something about hitting serious career bumps at about the age I find myself now. It seems we humans may have a tendency to "do it the way our parents did it" unless we can actively cognize what's going on and find a different way.

It's kind of like being in whirlpool, very slowly being drawn into the same field that I watched them be drawn into. Writing about this helps me to wake up to the experience in order to keep the affects of it from hitting me like it did them.

When he was my age, it is likely that my dad experienced something similar to what I feel now. When my dad was a kid, his dad became ill at about age forty and died before the age of fifty. My dad may have reflected his own father's experience in suffering from severe alcoholism by the time he was in his forties and taking his own life before he reached fifty. My dad may have fallen into the whirlpool created by the trauma of his father withering away and dying from a degenerative disease before his eight, nine and ten-year-old eyes. His model of what it meant to be a man was his dad.

As far as I can tell, neither of my parents were able to be particularly honest about their situation. They were both very smart but were unwilling to look at their own thoughts and behaviors particularly well. My dad, having been a Marine, was likely extremely adverse to admitting weakness. My mom has had bipolar as an obstacle to clear thinking her whole life. And she has a mental habit of blaming other people for her troubles. I believe that honesty about where I am will help me to navigate this place and come through the other side.

Because I see myself as essentially a spiritual being, I am more willing to be brutally honest about my earthly expression without becoming overly depressed about what I see. I do not fundamentally identify my essence with my personality. This gives me a little wiggle room to analyze my situation and see what I need to work on. I find it to be very helpful.

When my dad came up against addiction I think it meant he was out of touch with what was essential in him. The layers of worldly burden piled up on him and he lost sight of his true nature as a reflection of the divine. In addiction he was trying to fill the empty space inside. He had been trained to ignore his beautiful self and so was not aware of the glorious reflection of God that is, for each of us, our basic inheritance as humans.

Addiction is a sign that our true self was not encouraged to develop and so the mundane, or lower part of us took a larger and larger role. Experiencing significant separation from our higher self can be cause for despair. No matter how low we get we are still "trailing clouds of glory" because the truth of our spiritual nature is no different than it was when we were born. Even at the moment my dad pulled the trigger he was as innocent and holy as he was as a newborn baby. The problem was he didn't have the consciousness to perceive the truth of that statement. He was awash in booze and his own pain and couldn't see a path out of it.

The only difference between a man pulling the trigger of the gun to his head and a man who is actively seeking his recovery is perception. Perception is very powerful at the level of our experience.

One of the great aspects of AA and related programs is that they give us permission to see ourselves as having an identity beyond our mundane one. Beyond the shame and pain and suffering and crushing burdens we can experience in life, we can see that there an essence of us, an archetype, which we can begin to focus on and acknowledge.

It can seem like a very, very small light in the darkness, but it is a light we can follow into healing ourselves. The light will steadily grow in our awareness as we allow it to. Spirit is always present to us to the degree we can make ourselves open to it.

I believe that the process of forgetting our glorious archetype is, to some degree, lawful. We are called to actively remember it to whatever degree we are able. We are called to dig into the pain and suffering of the world and seek for the the little flame that reminds of our true inheritance. And we must cultivate that flame.

My dad had a beautiful spark of the divine that I deeply connected with and loved as a child. But he doused his own connection with it by pickling his consciousness in booze. He could have entered recovery and changed his life. AA was available at that time. But he didn't. I am very, very sad about that. It makes me wonder if he loved me.

I think we all choose to forget who we are (by being born) so we can learn lessons and grow. The thing is, the modeling our caregivers show us, and how they treat us make a huge difference in the depth of our forgetfulness. If my dad had been able to get into recovery and reclaim his life from addiction, he would have shown a powerful example to me. His example could have been like a beacon to me and been tremendous comfort at times when I felt sadness and despair.

But he, my primary model of what it means to be a man, chose suicide. It makes my road a lot harder. I have no doubt that I will steadily transform my pain in the years to come. I am tuned into the spark which points to my archetype and have no incentive to let go of it.

I just wish he had made a different choice.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben