The Parameters of Paradox | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, August 18, 2022

(Golden Age of Gaia)

August 17, 2022

I am the mother of sorrows,
I am the ender of grief;
I am the bud and the blossom,
I am the late-falling leaf.
…Down to the grave will I take thee,
Out from the noise of the strife;
Then shalt thou see me and know me—
Death, then, no longer, but life.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Paradox



I’m finding it awfully confusing to be someone attempting spiritual awareness while still living a practical life.

The paradoxes and difficulties are not new. Nor have I ever had much patience with balancing awareness and enhancement of Self as a spiritual being with slogging through everyday life as a human trapped on this planet.

Instead of becoming more tolerant of the paradoxes, and “letting go“ of perceived difficulties, however, I sometimes feel more impatient and cranky than ever.

Hellloooo! Is anybody listening? Haven’t I been fervent enough with manifesting attempts? Am I not clear that I want a pain-free, vibrant life filled with joy, abundance, and well-being? For myself as well as for all.

Perhaps the thing that pokes me into crankiness more than anything else is the monotonous reassurance from various sources that whatever I’m feeling is perfect and fine. Basically, don’t worry about it if you’re having a bad day. All is exactly as it’s supposed to be. You’re just processing and releasing those things that require processing and releasing.

I get that, I do. But I’m doing the equivalent of a whole-body eye-roll at the exorbitant amount of time that I’m spending, processing and releasing all this stuff.

*****



I’m coming to realize that I don’t really believe I agreed to come here and lose the memory of Who I Am. We’re told that that’s the way it has to be. The All That Is wanted to experience different aspects of itself so it split off into these fragments, and I’m one of those fragments, destined through repeat incarnations to help Source (“me” as well) experience the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And whatever “lessons“ I’m supposed to learn this time around—well, they wouldn’t occur if I remembered everything that I knew from previous lives.

The reasoning seems to be, memory has to be wiped; otherwise, why would we agree to the revolving door of reincarnation, often experiencing horrific lifetime after horrific lifetime, if we knew what was going to occur? If we remembered who and what we really are, Soul having a human experience?

What if, when we reached the age of being able to think / reason, we said: Oh, wait a minute, what am I doing here again? Pretty sure I mastered all these lessons already…Would we be denying Source (or our Highest Self / Soul) its chosen experiencing? Even if that experiencing has already occurred more times than there are stars in the sky?

*****



I’m persistently nagged by the notion that what I’ve learned about how spiritual life is supposed to work, especially with respect to reincarnation and karma, is a distorted, or perhaps fabricated, version of the truth.

If discarnate life, other-dimensional life, is so completely different from what we experience in our physical lives, how can we truly comprehend it as physical human beings? How can we describe the indescribable?

As for spiritual writings, both ancient and contemporary—the indisputable fact that they were written by incarnate human beings surely means that the “whole truth“ of whatever the texts are attempting to describe is not available.

I’m not sure where to go with this confusion and these thoughts. So, I am going to embrace the ever-reliable Twelve-Step aphorism: take what you like and leave the rest.

At the moment, I’m mostly leaving the rest. I have to cobble together my own belief system, one that doesn’t insist that everything is “fine” when my third-dimensional self observes that it simply isn’t so. But also one that allows moments of resting peacefully within the absolute knowing that everything is, after all, fine. No matter how things look.

I start and end with paradoxes. Perhaps the only trick I need to master at the moment is to feel as comfortable as I can, living as I must within the parameters of paradox.