Returning and Its Lessons

Returning and Its Lessons

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all exploration Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot Cited in Mystical Hours

Wayne Teasdale adds these descriptive remarks:

“The English-American poet, in one of his more mythical utterances, speaks of all of our explorations of experience– be it of the inner life, nature, the cosmos, relationships, creativity, knowledge, poetry, music or art.

In all, we are searching for Ultimate reality, the Divine Ground from which all of our lives derive. Eliot refers to both the perennial quest and the return to the Godhead from where we are born and to which we will return at the end of our lives.

Returning to the Divine Ground after having been awakened by experience, we understand it for the first time with much greater clarity, depth, and joy.

To return from where we began… Just the thought of it can make some of us wince and shutter, while others would be filled with warm caring memories… But what is being referred to here by Eliot appears to be the eternal quest; What Mircea Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return.”

Recently, I have found myself in that introspective process of contemplating the places and the inner or more soulful experiences of my life. Where I was; where I have gone; where I have returned; and where I might remain! Where I have gone in my searching for self-defining answers, and paying particular attention to where in my journey I have repeatedly come back to have needed to revisit and where I fully expect that will return for solace or further instruction.

I have endeavored to do this from the place of awareness where I might remain, or cycle through and return to where my unanswered questions and dilemmas, my quandaries and emptiness have now placed me.

It is not just the more intentional process of writing a book that has stirred up these reflective and introspective questions, although the sheltering time of COVID-19, with its restrictions did give me additional incentives to begin to put it down on paper…

Writing gave me a grounding; It is also assisted me in realizing that my lifetime of searching, pursuing, studying, and most importantly experiencing the multi-layered variety of inspirational messages I have received, and then learning to how best to respect and honor that these energies and experiences. Now these experiences are seeking a ripening and a greater sense of completion. I have begun to create a more definitive homecoming process within me…

When we return to a place or a consciousness that we have known… and maybe that we thought we had outgrown… There is both a humility and a grateful comprehension that arrives, and while it is certainly imbued with familiar feelings. I can acknowledge and greet those familiar feelings and experiences with a new awareness that can more effectively diffuse any attachments or negative connections I had rehearsed.

With the perspectives of age, wisdom, and yes, and the reconciliation of some deep disillusionment, I am able to redeem or benefit from my past with a knowledge that only wisdom born of suffering that releases me from memories; and with the grateful addition of new perspectives, I can claim a more soulful understanding of life cycles and enduring lessons.