Neither Here, Neither There
November 27th – December 3rd, 2005
This week is about learning to get off the spiritual fence.
There is a famous story about the biblical character Rebecca during her pregnancy. My telling a story about a biblical figure might sound religious, but what I am really revealing is the message hidden within the story. The Zohar explains that the characters of the Bible are actually aspects of our soul today.
So, the story goes that during her pregnancy, every time Rebecca passed a positive place, such as a school of spiritual study, she felt a kick in her tummy, as if the baby was trying to get out. And every time she passed a place of negativity, for example, a brothel, she felt a similar jolt. Rebecca thought to herself, “If I am pregnant with twins, no problem. But my greatest fear is that I am pregnant with one child who cannot decide between Light and dark.”
The message here is that this needs to be our greatest fear – a person that is all positive or all negative has a chance, but a person who is not that bad and not that great is in a serious state of spiritual danger. Unfortunately, most of us get stuck somewhere in the middle.
You see, when we realize that our desire to receive for the self alone is detrimental to our true fulfillment, we can awaken to change. And only a person who realizes the tremendous Light within them can truly recognize how much he or she can accomplish in this world.
For those of us on a spiritual journey, we are constantly urged by our teachers to analyze our actions. Most of us look at our positive actions and conclude, “I am good, but I’ll never be as righteous as the people I hear about in the stories.” And when we look at our negative actions we say, “I’m not as bad as others.” The result is we lock into this phase of mediocrity — Almost good, almost bad, but in truth, we’re neither.
When you think about it on a superficial level, this sounds like a good place to be. However, the point is, if we would only realize our true greatness, we’d understand how much more we are capable of achieving. And if we understood how thoroughly steeped in the desire to receive for the self alone we are, we’d want to stop and change.
Ordinarily, in a tune-up for a week that has a new moon (Sagittarius begins Friday), I would talk about what gifts the new month brings us, but this week I urge you to hold onto the last days of Scorpio because it contains the antidote for this condition of sitting on the spiritual fence.
How so? For Scorpios, everything is either black or white. They’re either your friend or your enemy; they either love you or hate you. We can use this extreme focus to look at ourselves and say, “I have such a dark side, and I really have so much more to transform, ” as well as “I have such tremendous potential, and I have so much more to accomplish.”
And when you do look at your garbage, don’t go crawling under a rock. The point is not to beat your self up but rather to awaken the desire to change because there is so much more to be achieved in the way of the Light.
All the Best,
Yehuda