Beginning (again)
THE BIG IDEA
This week’s spiritual energy rewards us with a chance to consciously begin again.
The creation story of the world has three ways of being told - inviting you to allow a wide range of what might feel like contradictory thoughts but is actually the maturing ability to hold the paradox of existence.
Take time to go back to the beginning. Note how after a year of war, and the first 21 day cycle of soul renewal after last year’s massacre, your perspective on the creation story and the origins of the entire world may have shifted.
Do your best to accept the consequence of knowing good and evil — and to acknowledge your personal desire to know.
Over the holiday I was lamenting the various predictions made by the prophets describing the fiery skies and wars and destruction that will precede the era of Growth Through Joy (the messianic arrival). A dear friend lovingly laughed at me, “ because you thought the redemption of the world would come without birth pains?” And in that, I understood the punishment of wanting to know…. Of eating from the tree of knowing good and evil… having to see evil (as we all have been forced to do) and bare the horror of its existence as we consciously choose to see and believe in an ultimately Good God.
The punishment of knowing is the pain that will be felt by women birthing life into this world. And more specifically, the pain of the feminine level of the divine dwelling in this world (shechina) will experience bringing the messianic consciousness of growth through joy (etz ha’chaim/the tree of life) into this world.
A consequence we must live with, like bringing food from the earth through hard work and toil.
So this year I invite us all to take God’s advice to Cain seriously. To know that when when your thoughts drop and your positive faith filled perspective fails you, sin waits at your door, urging you to “lose it,” and specifically in those moments it is essential to remember you have the power to be the master over dark thoughts, inclinations, and the inclination to enter lower states of consciousness - and choose you ability to see Good through it all, even when we don’t understand.