Cycles
Do you ever despair that it all seems hopeless, that you will never do it, that it's all just too much? Have you Worked for years and suddenly see how you have been in bondage all this time to some ideal or other? And think then that nothing has been accomplished? Does The Dark Night of the Soul seem eternal?
Dear friend, take heart.
It is a misconception to think that I will do one piece of Work -- just the right piece of Work -- and then I will be instantly transformed. Our life here is a continuing process. We must stop thinking of it as a straight line from hell to heaven. The process occurs on an ascending spiral, with the same markers along the way in roughly the same places.
Despondency is a natural (if unproductive) niche on the road. Use it! You know you have been there before, you recognize it; you may be there now, you may be there again. It is just a marker on the spiral path that lets us know we have covered certain terrain once again.
Perhaps one not Working treads the same spiral path, but it descends without the Initiative. She is sliding down the mountain in a circular fashion, and sometimes recognizing the same road marks (she always ends up in the same awful relationships, for instance) can awaken her.
With Initiative (a New Purpose) the ascent begins, and it is around the mountain and upward.
When you see that same pit in the road, and you stumble in, know that with forward motion, which will occur in its time, this too shall pass. Stop that linear thinking that says I am here and "it" is far out there. Bliss is just around the bend. And know that you are on the next level up. Have faith in your New Purpose, have faith.
From FTE, Vol. I, No. 7
