Watch history repeat itself?
Watch your own inner looping. Patterns continuing to play out?
Watch how unoriginal your habitual mind is.
Jesus said, “‘Follow me.’ But the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God’”
Luke 9:59-60
Let the dead bury the dead. So full of meaning.
I have had this scripture speaking to me "out of the blue" for the past few weeks off and on and in engaging with it, the depth of meaning keeps inspiring me to ever expand in life. I will write a bit now of the digested pieces, always hoping this is as inspiring to others as it is to me.
Dead, first referring to the dead in body. Second dead, referring to the dead in spirit.
How many of us have death following us and maybe don't even realize it? What could this death be referring to and how many of us deny death calling it life?
I cannot help but imagine a tomb underground. For me it also has been Pandora’s Box. A locked closet. The underworld. All of which point to something “dark and buried”, hidden from ourselves.
But is it?
I think this is the invitation to explore.
How many of us carry around a history of past once forgotten, buried in the recesses of our mind. Hoping that we will not be seen in this shame or guilt. Actions we created that generated an event we would rather not remember. Aspects of ourselves we were conditioned to believe were not loveable or acceptable by another so we store them too.
This tomb we deny exists (in the recesses of unexamined mind).
Maybe we are deathly afraid of the death we are carrying, unable to look into the box of horrific mystery that may consume us. And the fear is, that it will.
And we have plenty of reason to believe that it will. Look at how another’s Pandora box has generated pain and suffering for us. Why would we not consider that if we release the Kraken, it will obliterate everything and everyone. Better to keep it sealed, bottled and isolated for ours and everyone else’s protection. And we keep others from really getting to know us because there are facets of ourselves that we don’t know and we are afraid of, too.
So it’s not really about others, its about our fear of ourselves. If we didn’t have something to protect that we give value to, why protect it? And yet its this very thing we hide that would bring our salvation. And yet we fight wars protecting this separation within.
We deny the existence of this tomb, yet we continue to carry it around with us praying that it will never see the light of day, and that we can live our lives peacefully without remembering it. We keep it sealed. Yet we keep stuffing it will similar experiences that confirm our pain, guilt, shame, needs/wants and our need to escape from ourselves and this now moment. Patterns of avoidance, denial, bypassing, fantasy.
If we pretend it’s not there, it’s not. And we would fight anyone who wanted to show us our denial and right to stay in it.
Yet we also want to escape that loop. And we don’t understand why we are in pain, why we suffer and why we feel so far from ourselves. Why we feel so isolated and lacking in warmth or deep humanity.
In our own prison of perpetuated isolation from the “not okayness” we carry, we draw people closer, but just enough that we think that sharing our lives. We are, yet always controlled so as we show only “this” but not “that”. We believe intimacy has the right to secrets and forgetting that a clear consciousness free from guilt or shame has no need for secrets. And the fear of the desire to be close yet the fear of being close and being loved can feel excruciating to the one who has lots of death inside.
It would take real courage to confront patterns that contradict what one has believed as true for many foundations of how we believe ourselves to be are created from often false beliefs. If we were to change one of those foundational beliefs, we fear we might not exist. And that’s true, the previous version does not. And then we are asked to have faith for our whole world will change. And it will, you don’t perceive as the same past version of yourself anymore which means new ways of relating with yourself and the world around you. Yet physical death will not occur.
The psychological rebirth is necessary to restoration of wholeness.
For holding the idea of separateness believing it to be whole is an illusion that one must wake up to and see the personal impact of hiding from reality giving relatability to those who still hide, for all the reasons that make sense to their need to stay buried and projecting an attractive image, yet hollow in intimacy with vital life force.
Imagine generations of condemnation passed down, forcing our wholeness into separation by believing the authority was correct in their perception of reality while they are living in separation from reality. And because we fed and continue to feed this distortional perception of reality calling it reality, this collective belief has altered the whole.
The dance of unearthing and integrating our ancestral patterns is profound, important, and not to be underestimated. The forgetting of ourselves has cost us our vital life force. And the hauling around our earthly psychological inheritance is our death.
We must exhume the tomb and resurrect life.
Bring our guilt and shame to the surface and to the light of our love. Stop hiding from the light of our own purification. For this is love loving and aligning us whole.
And it is death that would say it’s life, baiting you to consider that holding onto its fearful grip of separation from love would be of benefit to you and to others. Yet it is the light of love that would say “come, all of you, as you are”.
Our resurrection must happen for life to restore the kingdom within, and we are all called to let the purifying light of love into the shadow of our deathly tombs for it is here that death is truly overcome.
When we have no fear of our own shadows, when we have seen ourselves as the creator, destroyer and the preserver of life we understand more of a larger pattern we have inherited, a more inclusive life that fears no one for no one is home, All are here present.
Life everlasting is without need. This means no need to hold death as separate from self.
Cycles of nature are just that, an arising and falling. Same with our human form, same with thoughts, same with time.
Yet the perpetuation of time in our system creates gravity and our form identity caught in time stops flow creating a baron tree that must be cut down for it only sucks life but does not generate it. Our reconciliation with what we have inherited takes true courage as it is an act of pure faith to investigate death. And the riches of integration are life itself.
Let the dead carry the dead. Die before you die.
Let others who desire to live with their tombs, their closets, their closed aspects live in that way. When we grow in compassion for the meaning of the “why” in our own stories and start to see the intersection points between ours and another’s, there is no need to point out what is obvious.
And the dead often want to stay dead, stuck in right ideas, right ways, of doing, being and seeing. It is what keeps us safe. Patterns of comfort. It is also what can kill us. For taken to the extreme side of self-righteousness, our tombs become something we protect at all costs for someone to come close to seeing what we have buried, we would need to destroy them too.
In this way we think we alive yet live in the shadows of being discovered as false keeps us one foot in the grave. And we protect our image/identity at all costs. Often trying to destroy the image of another through slander, gossip and plain manipulative lies.
So we must understand then that the dead would attack the living to protect themselves. And if we were to attack back, we would not have seen that there is nothing to protect that is worth losing to someone who is dead to themselves, living out of integrity and alignment with life.
This would only add more pain and potential suffering to the one who continues to hide from themselves.
Our lives can be a unassumed teacher for all who would seek refuge from their own shadows. We all know the face of fear. We all know the impact of distorted and conditional love. Let us understand the impact of continuing under the spell of denial of death, calling that life. The impact of living fragmented and asking others to see us see us fragmented too. Then going to therapies to fix us from our inherited belief systems and structures that we ourselves agreed to believe without first examining why. Maybe to belong, to be part of the world, a human.
Maybe it’s time to belong to your Self?
This inner restoration requires reconciliation and forgiveness. Self and other become One. Yet these supreme gifts, when humbled by our need for them, will come to us.
We can continue to repeat the pattens of the past, repeating history or we can transcend them, being pioneers into a field of Now, a mystery of what arises, unconditioned by the past and free to be as it is without the personal self getting in the way.
Let the dead bury the dead…and follow Me.
