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Blog 533 – 02.02.2017

A Friend That Sticks Closer Than A Brother, Closer Even Than A Lover

I recently watched on DVD a movie called “The Houseman” starring Hillary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones. It is a very sad, in so many ways, story of the harsh life on the Great Plains of Nebraska in 1854. We tend to romanticize stories of the expansion of settlers across these United States of America. This is not one of those stories. It is a story about three women, wives of “sodbusters” who saw their children taken by diphtheria and their cattle die and such harsh circumstances that they lost their sanity. It is also the story of a brave, strong, intelligent woman who is running a successful farm on her own, who volunteers to take those three insane women east to a sanitarium in Iowa when their husbands and the men of the community refuse the task. She frees a man alone on a horse underneath a tree with a noose around his neck after forcing from him a promise to help her deliver her cargo. Tommy Lee Jones plays the man saved from hanging and he is no prize but keeps his promise. It is a long trip that takes months and just days before reaching their goal Hillary Swank’s character hangs herself much as she had found Tommy Lee only she had kicked her horse to make it run. The ordeal and the belief that she just could not go on without a man, a friend, a lover to help her caused her to lose hope that life was worth living.

It is a great sadness this feeling of aloneness. But you are not alone, my friend, for there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother, closer even than a lover. I have a somewhat different take on this issue than I did as a practising religious person. I believe schizophrenia is a problem for all of us and that to differing degrees we all suffer from a split personality. Our higher self is God, the Divine, all seeing, all knowing, powerful, complete. Our lower self is earthbound, near sighted, unknowing, weak, and incomplete. We are fractured personalities. This incredible “urge to merge” that we call sex is a physical expression of a far greater spiritual or psychological desire to get together. Even the best relationship with another person is somehow unfullfilling, incomplete, missing something because what we are seeking to find in someone else is that missing connection to ourself, our true self.

I believe that is what these adventures in time and space that we call lives are all about. Heaven is not so much a place as it is a state of being. The true meaning of holiness is wholeness. Jesus came, all the prophets came, all the great teachers have been trying to tell us this all along. The great lesson is not about law, about justice, about sacrifice but about discovering Who and Whose we really are. This heart breaking illusion of loneliness that would drive one to despair is a misunderstanding of our true identity. Look into the mirror, look deep into those eyes and realize the one your heart yearns for is looking back at you. Your higher self is always calling, “Awake, oh sleeper.” And the message to the awakened is always the same, “When you are conscious, when you have awakened, strengthen others, your brothers.

Religions probably all of them started out to be a door but became just another box. Your higher self cannot live in a box and you cannot live without that connection to your real and true self. You will either go crazy or kill yourself like the four ladies mentioned in the movie above. Be encouraged, if it takes ten thousand lives we will get it right. Until we wake, sweet dreams, dear hearts.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White