We want something to save us, save us from ourselves from each other, from the pain and unpredictability of life, from suffering, illness, aging, and death. From vulnerability and heartbreak, from failing being the fool, the outcast the idiot. Save us from our deepest wounds and greatest fears. From our boring mundane existences. From feeling worthless, meaningless, and purposeless. Save us from whatever it is, we dance so intently and avoidingly around. But at last, when nothing saves us, we have no choice but to surrender to the experience, to the light and dark of at all, to the inescapable fuckery and beauty of it all, to the light and dark we are. When it last, nothing saves us we begin to awaken, heal and live the soul.
Intro:
Thank you for tuning in to the falling into soul podcast. I'm McCall Erickson, your host, it's an honor to be in this space with you sharing my experience and context for the more nuanced and confusing parts of soul awakening. I'm glad you're here. I know my work is not for everyone, but it is for the people it is for. And for that I'm grateful. So feel free to take what works for you and leave the rest.
This is Episode 17. When Nothing Saves You
One of the things that has been pried from the grips of my poor ego through the processes of alchemy and spiritual maturing, is the idea that I could crack the code that I could somehow figure out how to save myself from the perils of life, that somehow my righteousness, my chosenness and my wisdom set me apart from the rest of humanity. And I wouldn't have to suffer in the ways other humans have to suffer.
The idea that being good, and doing the right things was somehow related to my level of suffering was deeply, deeply embedded in me. But honestly, was a fucked up idea.
I learned this first in religion. If you just believe, pray, worship in the way you're supposed to pay your tithing, do all the right things you will will be spared from the apocalyptic fire when Jesus comes again.
Spirituality also reinforced this ideology of doing the right and good thing to be saved. If I eat the holy diet, the vegan diet, the green juice diet, take the right magic supplements, avoid all toxins, vibe hugher, yoga myself silly, then I can be saved from cancer disease suffering.
"Your intuition won't lead you astray" ?
If I listened to my intuition, I can be spared from bad situations (which Yes, that can be true. I know.) I will be safe. "Your intuition won't lead you astray." Honestly, I cringe a little bit when I hear that because sometimes our intuition leads us exactly into the fall into the heartbreak into failing. That's what opens us to the soul.
So it should be more like, follow your intuition. It won't lead you anywhere. It doesn't lead you.
I mean, that sounds so silly. But it's so true. We want to ensure that somehow we can be kept safe from heartbreak and failure. But that is not how it works.
The list goes on. If we can just figure out how to do the right things. Eat the right things live in the right way, we can somehow be saved from the suffering that the lesser enlightened humans have to endure.
The Elixir of Immortality
Many alchemists throughout time have undertaken The Great Work to find the Elixir of Immortality, which is another name for the Philosopher's Stone. But every alchemists has had different ideas of what that means, what it could mean, what the Philosopher's Stone can be used for, or the elixir of immortality could be used for. Some wanted to use it to cure disease and believed it could cure all diseases, or achieve perfect optimal health, maintain eternal youth and even eternal life.
There's been a lot of metaphysical confusion around this topic, but one thing is consistent. We have to remember, in order to achieve the Philosopher's Stone, or the elixir of immortality, every Alchemist has to surrender every notion of what they think it might mean, to have the Philosopher's Stone, what it might be, what it might entail. We have to surrender everything. notion of it, every attachment to what we want to use it for what we want to achieve with it. In order to have it, we have to give it away.
This is the most important thing I've learned from alchemy is that our conscious intent and logical understanding can only take us so far, our logical understanding of healing, creating, manifesting, living, making the life we want, can only take us so far.
And if we're doing everything in our power to make something happen, and we find we cannot avoid or be saved, from something happening happening in a certain way, then we are meant to experience it.
If we cannot be saved from it, we are meant to live it.
This helped me shift from trying to save myself from life and all its beauty and perils to experiencing it more without answers, without a pretty package to tie it all up in. Just being in the experience, which we know is the first desire of the soul, to be in the experience.
Of course, the spirit has different ideas is strives for perfection strives to make things better strive to strive to take things higher. So how to work with both of those opposing tensions in ourselves is the cause for and aim of alchemy. And when the spirit and soul work together, we get magical alignment, magical will, which is a topic for another episode. That's its whole own thing.
But for now, know this, there is no healing, creating and manifesting from magical will without surrender to the unknown surrender of control, surrendering our conscious notions and ideas, our desires and intense for things.
So one of the most important things I learned to incorporate in my navigating is the moment when I realized that nothing is going to save me from something that I have to experience. It's a pivotal moment. It used to come with a lot of dread, sometimes even terror for me. But then I slowly started realizing that this moment was the portal to the soul. The moment that my beliefs and tactics and methods were feeling ineffectual in the ways I wanted them to work in that moment, something other something beyond, the unknown, was asking me to set aside what I wanted to have happen when I was working toward set it aside, set it aside, make room for a different experience. There is no control in this I know I know.
But you can know that if you are doing everything in your power to make something work, make something happen heal something in a certain way, and it's just not working. Something other deeper wants to be known.
I'm remembering this line from one of my favorite books the Shamans Body by Arnold Mindell. This line always sticks with me. He says "the dreaming body will never be healed through healthy living alone." The dreaming body will never be healed through healthy living alone. The dreaming body in shamanism is something more multifaceted than just the soul. But we could say this for the soul. The soul will never be healed through healthy living alone.
Discovering living healing the soul takes more than just doing the right things, the healthy things, the conscious things you can control with your willpower, the checklists things.
The soul is discovered and incorporated into the consciousness through the strange, the seemingly backwards, the counter intuitive, the baffling, the very place you do not want to go. The very thing you do not want to feel or think you should not have to feel the very last place you want to look. By going into the place you've been avoiding. Sometimes without even really knowing you're avoiding it. That's where the healing comes in for the soul.
To finish this episode, I want to read a piece that I wrote in March 2013. This came from a time when I was beginning to understand and realize that there was so much surrender involved in creating and living with the soul, that the soul awakens in the nothingness in the surrender space, in the danger of the edge, in peering over into the abyss, not in what I can control and do, not in the steps I could take or how hard I could try. But when I didn't know what else to do or what else to try.
Yes, this place used to terrify me. But over time, having faced it enough, I have come to appreciate its place, its importance in magical creating magical alignment. In working with the Philosopher's Stone, not only its importance, but its absolute necessity. In order to navigate with soul, we have to incorporate that edge, that abyss, that unpredictable, surrendering, realizing that we can't just control everything, through our methods and our conscious efforts.
When you come to the end of everything you know, and then you take one more step, that is where the magic happens.
This piece is called When Nothing Saves You
***
I remember the exact moment. Late night grocery shopping. Cookies and pastries to my right. A fellow shopper scrutinizing nutrition labels to my left.
I'd been aching. Big time. I'd been alone. Big time. I'd traveled so far and shifted so much inside myself.
(What the hell was I still yearning for!?)
I'd been searching through a sea of everything and coming up with nothing. I felt desperate and in need of something to deliver me from my emptiness that night.
I looked at the cookies and felt nothing. (And that's saying a lot because I really love cookies.)
I exchanged smiles with the fellow shopper and felt nothing. (And that's also saying a lot because I really love human connection.)
I listened for the song playing over the speakers and the music sounded like white noise. (Nooooooo! Not the music, too!)
It was a moment in time. I stood there, a hollowed out statue of my love and loss in the bakery aisle when something rose to say:
This is the part where nothing saves you. Not a fellow human being. Not a batch of your favorite cookies. Not a set of 7 or however many steps to this or that. Not a hundred days of meditation. Not a book, a juice fast, a song or a prayer. Nothing. This is the part where nothing saves you.
You'd think that would be the most hopeless, depressing, worthless thing anyone would want to hear at a time like that. But I felt relieved. Because it was the truth. And the cold hard truth feels better to the soul than a soft comforting lie any day.
And because this is the part in any hero's journey, in any go around the spiral where it gets really good. The part where you surrender everything known and bank on the mysterious workings of your soul to lead the way. The part where you find out what you're made of beyond what you already know you're made of.
And you damn well better have nothing to hold onto when you get to this point. Because still having something can really get in the way. The alchemy of your soul and spirit has a plan, and your five-sensory self is not keen to it (not yet anyway). You're being pulled along by things you can't see and things you can't explain. You don't have a prayer, a way, or anything to save you because you don't need it. Because this particular journey begins where all those things end.
So you can buy the new wardrobe, you can eat the cookies or do the juice fast, you can read the blog that everyone is raving about, you can take the trip to Hawaii, you can spend $800 for the latest self-marketing program, but it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna change what your soul has up its sleeve.
You might very well be carrying on with life-as-usual on the outside, but when you're in it this deep, when you've traveled this far. When your heart is weary and your bones are too. When you've meditated and self-helped yourself into oblivion. When you've climbed the 7 steps to happiness up and down and back up again. When your yoga mat doubles as a punching bag, and you're not sure if God is laughing at you or the Universe is loving you.
When you've done all you can at the end of every spiritual rope, and you're falling, falling, falling, the things that saved you before will not save you now. Because they are not meant to.
You are falling into your own soul, and all you need is that, your truth, the hollowed out grief shape of you standing there in the bakery aisle (the produce aisle works too), and a willingness to do whatever it takes to see it through.
And you've got that, baby. Oh, you've got it.
***
Thank you for tuning into this episode. I hope to be back next time with a song. I've had to take a break from recording the songs while my partner and I have been transitioning into a new living space. And I've been setting up a new studio space, which is a big deal. I haven't actually had a real studio space for over 10 years. So this is exciting and I do hope to be back next time with a song.
Thank you all for listening and supporting this podcast. If you'd like to support further you can go to www.McCallErickson com visit the "give back" tab. You can also find more of my work there.
Until next time, be well in mystery and soul