I have no blooming idea who I am.. artist, writer, magician, shaman, witch, Wiseman, trickster, director, producer..blah.. blah.. In the end.. I think I am Mani.. yay.. great conclusion to a long quest, right? Wrong! Even that is a name given to me by my parents (not even the first one.. they gave me another name..and changed their minds and few weeks later went and changed it on the certificate :-p ) So anyway as I often point out.. the magical / witch / shaman names we give ourselves in initiation rituals is a tad bit more of our own choosing than the name we’ve been stuck / blessed with since our birth. (hint: They call it `given name’ .. perhaps all forms we fill should henceforth have ..along with `give name, family name, married name’ another box too.. called `chosen name’ ?!)
But anyway.. so the only way forward ..is to go backward and clean up all this transpersonal mess.
This is why in esoteric realms, we rant on about `Know Thy self’.. not easy as it sounds..or all these born-last-night-gurus make it out to be. `Know thy Self’ is a quest that can first strip you bare to the bone.. and then some more.. It’s more than just `breakdown to breakthrough’.. !
I remember an episode in the old Babylon-5, when Captain Sheridan goes to the Shadow world ..and dies..as forecasted. (`If you go to Zahadum, you will die’) . Then a whole episode came up where he finds himself in a dark cave.. ( how symbolic and womb-like) and with an ancient wise-alien (Lorien the First One).. and the one question Lorien kept asking.. `Who are you?’. Sheridan has to figure this out before he is somehow brought back to life in `our world’.. (self realisation gives birth to identity?!) with some sort of borrowed time.. (spoiler alert – decades later, he goes into space and just sort of fades/ bursts into light).
This has stayed with me for so long.. and I marvel at the deeper transpersonal symbology behind it all.. Going into our own shadows and clearing it means we experience a death…because the old self full of shadows changes…(death and rebirth).. The question `who are you’ is the most powerful one of all that kills everything we think and feel we are… till we reach a single simple deeper truth (can’t tell you what that is ..it may be different for you and me).
And at our eventual physical death, all that energy locked up in our body is released. Okay when its’ cremation or decades of decay in a coffin below ground.. we don’t see this energy release…But if it were to happen in one moment..we’d see all of our `mass’ transform into energy (light).. After all. it was light (energy) that was transformed into mass in the first place…inside a star.. long before we even became born as humans. (every atom in out body came from something else around us.. food..air..water.. but it can all be traced back to the star where it was created out of energy…cos `we are star dust’).
So is that who you are…a thinking piece of Star Dust?
What about before?
wait a sec.. !!!
Am I going too far ..too wide..too deep and too long into the past? well.. did you travel with me down this Quantum rabbit hole? Great… ‘cos this was step one of the `Know thy self’!
Now go beyond!!!
-Mani Navasothy
QuantumPhoenix 