Persephone Arbour

I received the writings below from an old, dear friend recently. All his life he has had long dark periods of depression. However, the strength of his determination to ‘find answers’, to paint, to write and live his life as fully as possible has supported him throughout. So far on this site I have not included anything overtly spiritual. Given his age (78) combined with his sincerity I was moved to publish, hoping that for some of you a chord will be struck.    Persephone

“Now I start a new story. I write about a dozen lines and my mind dries up. Maybe it’s the wrong day, I think, I’ll give it a rest. The next day is even worse. Four lines come to me. The following day I cannot even think of a theme. My mind is a beautiful blank. Beautiful, yes, peaceful,serene, but what about my story? The frustration of not being able to do what I had planned and what I wanted.

Maybe the solution is to surrender to this nothingness, this blank. Where will it take me? Will it take me, or will I be left with nothing? Is nothing so terrible? I sit in an almost blissful state. Occasionally thoughts come in, they hover and I let them go. A whole new world is opening. I can feel its magnificence, its vastness. It is freedom. 

This is bliss, but how does it fit into the real world? I should say the illusory world. 

Two days after writing about this experience, I read the following passage from Vitvan, an amazing teacher. It fits in exactly with what I am experiencing.

“Everything we say about the Power which motivates and about that which is being motivated is relative to our own private worlds, a mental construct that exists only on the mental level. If we could transfer our awareness from the mental level to the actual function there would be nothing to say. We would fall into utter silence in order to know. As long as we think and talk about it, we are not still enough to know it. That may seem a contradiction, especially coming from a “teacher of the Wisdom.” But the fact is we are not still enough yet to know it.As we approach the widening sphere in which we are conscious, we become more and more silent. We have less and less to talk about. Eventually the times will come when we only want to seek out the quiet spots in the hills and mountains, the stillness on the woods.”                        Vitvan

So where do I go from here? . . .  It feels as though the body is declining – not surprising I guess at my age of 78. One world that I live in is at times blissful, the other is at times hellish. I’m grateful that I am granted the former – without it I would be desperate. My journey now, is to fully experience these two worlds and somehow reconcile them. Or to change the hell into heaven if that is possible. Old age can be a sad process, to which many have to surrender. I wonder if it is this way to force us to go beyond, to force us to discover who we truly are. If it was easy, would we bother?”