Putting the Pieces Together

I have just finished a Dreamland interview with the extraordinary Maureen Caudill, who told me about discovering so many new incredible synchronicities in her life after her studies at the Monroe Institute. Jesus often exasperated his listeners and disciples by speaking in parables, when what they wanted was the PLAIN FACTS. Matthew 13 says, “And his students came up to him and said, ‘Why do you speak to them in metaphors?'” (This is from The Unvarnished New Testament translated by Andy Gaus). But parables reveal truths that cannot be expressed any other way, and it seems to me that walking on the spiritual path is a matter of putting the pieces of your life together so that when arranged in the right way, they take on a deeper meaning and become a sort of “living parable.” This idea was brought home to me by a good friend’s revelation as well as by the thoughts of an English writer who has been dead for many years.

While the first part of the parable I am creating comes from Maureen Caudill’s information, the second part is made up of a message from a friend, who wrote me that she has been “finding more tangible links to who and why I am.” She has remembered being in a UFO “before I was physical” and being shown the earth and told she had to return and feeling “NOT being happy I had to be physical again. [But] I was given my papers and sent on my way.” This reminds me of so many of the extraordinary letters I’ve read over the years.

She was inspired by my diary about how childhood abuse seems to open up a doorway to Visitor contact and compares it to being a butterfly, “who to be free and become its true self, must go through this painful metamorphosis [inside the cocoon].” She now sees how “atrocities can make one sensitive, and [cause you] to turn toward the pain, and shed light on the darkness so that transformation can occur–I would certainly NOT be who I am had I not been tortured in that way.” She is putting the pieces together to form a parable, based on her own life, about the role she needs to play.

There are three parts to this message for me and the third part came when I picked up the current issue of the Atlantic and read an excerpt from the author C.S. Lewis, first published in that magazine in 1959, in which he talked about the kind of ordinary expedition from which parables are made: going to the barber. He wrote that since an appointment in London had been cancelled, he decided to put off getting a haircut there too, even though he needed one, “but then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, ‘Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut.’ In the end I could stand it no longer. I went.” Many of us are familiar with this “little nagging” voice in our heads. He went on to say, “Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of many troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes been able to help. The moment I opened his shop door he said, ‘Oh, I was praying you might come today.’ And in fact if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him.” Lewis used this incident as a kind of proof that God exists and that the power of prayer is real, which is something that Maureen and I talked about. C.S. Lewis explained it this way: “For [God] seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. This is how “God makes something, indeed–makes gods–out of nothing.”

I think this means that it’s up to us…not to DO everything, but to notice, to listen to that small voice when it comes, to evaluate its message and try to keep our egos and belief systems from getting in the way so we’ll take the appropriate action, small and inconsequential though it may be.

But one small deed stacked on top of another–and then another–adds up to a parable of a life lived the right way.

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.