“Unplugged.” That’s the word that’s reverberating among the people on the trip on the last day.
I used to hate it, feeling abandoned by God as I adjusted to the old, slower internal car/computer/internet connection. In something I wrote years ago I said that we leave the trip to return to our own private hells. I hated being confined to my personal karma again. Now I enjoy it. My personality is like a pet that I regard with a kind of fondness. I’ve learned to be far enough above it that it no longer feels threatening or limiting. It’s a house cat instead of a lion, cute rather than constraining.
I talk to one of the other assistants about how on the trip we had seemingly unlimited energy to do what to anyone inexperienced in spiritual stuff would think is impossible. Then suddenly the canopy is lifted up, or the curtain goes down on the play (up or down become irrelevant in this kind of spiritual energy, like street signs in a ghost town) and we’re all limp, deflated balloons.
I experience it physically as a pleasantly sleepy, tired, floating feeling. The pleasantness comes from not having to hold so much voltage in the physical body, which would get burned out if we did it constantly. It’s not like a tension, where there’s the push-pull of Spirit telling you to do something and then you have the choice of rebellion or obedience. When your finger is in the 220-volt light socket you don’t have a choice, you just do what that electricity makes you do. The choice was made when you signed up for the trip.
At lunch we do our good-bye’s and thank-you’s and John declares the end of the trip (energetically it reminds me of closing a seminar/communion/workshop, etc.) and those of us who’ve been “assisting” (which is kind of like a crucifixion, but without the pain or inconvenience) get to experience a relieving unplugging, similar to what “death” must be like after a long illness.
Speaking of death and crucifixion, this morning was the time for walking through the narrow, strange-smell-stained, stone-lined, shop-infested streets of old Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, featuring the stations of the cross where Jesus walked, stopped, fell, got up, and walked again just before his unplugging and replugging into a higher voltage.
It’s interesting to encounter the inexhaustible array of human reactions to that unknowable thing called “death” and that often unknown thing called resurrection (unknown only because we don’t recognize it, because it’s so common and ordinary). Some people build huge churches (like the “Church of the Holy Sepulchre” that we visit, a gaudy multi-roomed, multi-storied vampire-movie maze of human guessings about and disfigurements of God); or they make little gardens where the crowds of pilgrims and tourists can rest; or they make money in shops selling olive wood relics, Jesus refrigerator magnets and crucifixion t-shirts. If Jesus really did what they say he did, is there any reason to create all these homages to death, pain, or even memory?
We start out above the old city just outside the walls of Jerusalem, near a stone graveyard (no lawns) where people pay big bucks to be buried, because, according to a scripture, their location near Jerusalem insures that they will be first in line to be re-plugged in, recharged and resurrected when the Messiah returns. Then we hike to the Temple Mount, with the famous golden Dome of the Rock, that we unsuccessfully attempted to enter a couple of days ago, daunted by the huge crowds and one of those noisy religious/political collective epileptic seizures, called holidays or riots or wars, that people in this part of the world like to indulge in.
We end up at Christian-run Notre Dame for lunch—hamburgers with some kind of weird middle eastern spices, and some good homemade cheese pizza (finally, milk and meat remarried after our stays in Jewish-run places). Next time I want to stay in one of these Christian places where I can get a rare steak, and cheesecake at both breakfast and dinner.
I can’t believe I’m already thinking about next time. Does Jesus think about future crucifixions in different galaxies or higher levels of universal consciousness? Is the plugging-and-unplugging eternal and inevitable? Do these endings and beginnings ever stop screwing loudly, like a horny couple in an adjacent motel room, keeping us from getting some much-needed rest? I recall that J-R was fond of saying, “There’s no rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need it.”
I remember someone telling me about asking J-R how they could hold into the spiritual energy on these trips in order to be of service, and he said something like, “just stay in your loving and have a good time.” Then the energy does you and there’s no reason to know what’s going on, and you can dance or convulse (depending on your level of resistance) in the higher energy. Who knows what we really did here on other levels? It’s veiled, at least to me. And there’s no real reason to know.
This has been such an easy, loving, mature, cooperative, un-neurotic, fun group. I think that the theme of one accord has done us, and done its work, and if not there’s always a next time.
As far as next time, some of us are going on to MSIA/PTS/Traveler events in Bulgaria, Madrid, Strasbourg, London. I’m going home slowly, through Italy and Switzerland, ending up in Strasbourg for the John Morton events, and then flying home. I don’t know if I’ll take photos at the events or just enjoy the energy without having to hold it in the body. Do I have a choice?
Yup, that’s what I am called and answer to….that name this lifetime