Zara - The Sacred Feminine

Zara passes through the mystical death and discovers the vastness of her true nature, the sacred feminine and the real elixir of life.

CHAPTER 1 (1 of 21)

Time frozen, Zara finds an inconspicuous seat in the departures lounge; the long wait for the next flight to London inescapable. Her heart racing, she nervously glances at faces, Granada airport much too small to hide her inner torment.

“Pause; breathe out, empty the lungs, let everything go,” her mentor’s voice dimly echoes through past clouding her mind. Frenzied thought conjures, ‘I must go back to the beginning, to that first meeting with him.’

His words repeat:“Individuals appear, each making their personal commotion, like Cleopatra, Napoleon made their particular commotions; yet without exception all are consumed by the nothingness behind the dust of it all, never again to be seen, time swallowing the momentary flash of every personal endeavor. No one can escape this reality. So why waste your precious life worrying about personal issues?” Her heart speaks. ’The Magus knew me so well; he was my mentor, my great balancer, and now he’s gone forever when I need him most,’ the burning pain in her chest too much to bear, no one out there to help her escape the torment. Her thoughts re-enter the time before knowing her father; the father she eventually found and so dearly wanted to love; last night the terrible ending of the father unable to be, ‘by my own hand torn from me for eternity, both gone, ships passing in the night, leaving me abandoned to my terrible fate in this unearthly aloneness.’

She reflects on Dublin just a couple of years past, her senses picking up the musty room where the seekers of truth had gathered, the Magus calm, serene, speaking with such inner authority; unruffled by the ones who mocked him. “So these are the words from a higher state of consciousness,” a listener acclaimed with a hint of sarcasm. “Are they not too far out, too far ahead of the human condition, this programmed mind at large for the ordinary person to understand?” The Magus didn’t reply, his silence speaking ‘some are not yet ready.’ She reflects on the innocence then, how she cautiously listened; the opportunity offering the first real escape from the grip of the man her mother had married, the psychologist deceived into thinking he was her father. “The inner psyche is the force behind all outer projection,” the Magus was to explain. “Truth cannot be blocked, not even by a mother in denial unable to see beyond her entrapment.”

The psychologist was in self denial, knowing while refusing to know he had been tricked, his pride more important, Zara now understands, even to the point of forgiving him for trying to break her spirit. The conflict goes on in her head. ‘I endured it then, holding firm to the feminine principle as my one unwavering guide, the unseen presence of the Mother-Earth-Spirit pulsing my heart and taking me beyond the parameters keeping humanity bound.’ She remembers the innocent child seeing through the societal shaping, closed doors permitting the mental abuse from a man forcefully claiming the role of father while failing to rise above his condition. Her body trembles, her real father appearing, alas, too late to be a father, and far too late to learn.

“Who are you?” the Magus directly confronts her on that first afternoon in Temple Bar. “I’m Zara Steinhart on my spiritual journey,” her instant reply, tone sharp and piercing. "This is your problem, young woman; you have given an answer to a question not asked. I did not solicit your name or the reason why you are here, I asked something completely different. So tell me please. Who are you?” Finding it sudden and offensive, Zara struggles with her mind: “Well, I am woman on this planet, ”her voice quivering. “Close, but not close enough,” the Magus hits back; sense of authority in his voice triggering her resentment. Rising to her feet she challenges, raw anger flashing in her deep blue eyes: “What do you mean? My God, I am woman, as real as you can get, having suffered enough by the hand of man to know it!” Tense fingers cut through her hair: “Are you another such man?”

The face of the Magus lights up in a smile. “Be assured I can see it,” he proclaims in calm certitude. “Your outer fire does not eclipse your inner radiance. You are indeed woman, the new woman of this earth. However, there is something far more prevalent you may have forgotten. When you tell me you are here on your spiritual journey I know you have started on the wrong foot. You see yourself as a human in search of your spirit. What a terrible plight! You are attached to your body that is going to suffer pain, get sick, grow old and die. This is the world, your world Zara that is happening through your particular mind.”

Anger contorts her face. “What do you mean it’s my world? My suffering is inflicted upon me by man’s stupidity. I’m a victim of his world of screwed-up ideas and I’m supposed to respect it!” her studies on Descartes, Freud, Sartre’s existentialism measuring the limitation of the male mind, the immaturity of men, the man her mother had so easily deceived, the would-be lovers only interested in sex; in her experience, man and his world the degradation of life on the planet. “This is certainly not happening through my mind,” she challenges. “Are you another such man imposing yourself upon this blessed earth and my presence?” The crowd hushed into nervous silence in her direct attack, the Magus repeats: “Steady down, Zara; I am only a mirror reflecting your true nature, your spiritual essence ever present behind the turbulence of the world you perceive; we have been brought together for this reason.” Zara listens, something within her urging to give him space to clear what she might have misunderstood.

“First and foremost, you are spirit participating in this human experience. This is the journey of the spiritual being and not of the human. The instant you enter the body this knowing is with you; but slowly you accumulate the knowledge of the world, building time and memory upon it, overshadowing the real knowledge that you are primarily a spiritual being. I am speaking to all of you present. This forgetfulness is caused by the world of the mind misguiding you into seeing yourself firstly as a human in the form of woman or man trying to find substance in its misplaced projection. This is the personification I wish to free you from if you are one of the few ready to listen.”

She remembers his calm certitude, the gentle yet firm tone of his voice, tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘I didn’t see the profound impact he was about to make on my life. Over the weeks and months that followed he mirrored my depth, and I unmoved by his admiration of my fiery spirit and his comments on my sharpness being a double-edged sword.’ The voice on the intercom crackles; the connecting flight to London is delayed, another hour before update. Justifications battle the judgments crowding her mind, her mother’s loveless marriage to the psychologist husband imposing unrelenting pressure on the innocent child; unspoken reality screaming deep resentment, enough verification that the inner psyche cannot be fooled. “The worst circumstances in our lives can give us the best learning opportunities,” the Magus explained, still finding it hard to accept, she tries to focus on the speed of events leading up to this moment. “Stay with the truth. It will lead to the love your heart aches; only then will you be sufficiently awake to receive the elixir’s key.”

Zara questions the circular motion of her thoughts. ‘What drove me to study the mind frame of Nietzsche? Did I really want to do psychology or was I subconsciously trying to compensate for my mother’s deception? Could I have been searching for empathy somewhere in my efforts to understand his torment? Why am I thinking of him now, when he is the least important? But there is nothing separate, the Magus claimed, all are father in one way or other.’ Inner disturbance twists her stomach; hand ruffling through purse for coins to feed the impartial machine. She sips her coffee, sitting again facing the large glazed window portraying the distant mountains, the serene peaks of the vast Sierra Nevada unperturbed by her plight. ‘Knowledge is useless without love, seeing the danger of it when employed the wrong way; my teenage years of dejection and those languid periods in mental hospitals muting my spirit, with no understanding from a silent mother or from his psychotic world.’ Her body shudders; thoughts ripping through of her confinements in the psychiatric wing, love dead, and medics always nearby dousing insight with drugs; the image of Frank flashing the futility in words, the first to show her how to let the mind fall still. He had excelled in biotechnology, his speed attracting large multinationals. Frank had been working on new research in Germany when his mind snapped. Zara recalls him speaking of the pulse in the atom, “Faster than the speed of light,” he insisted. “We are here and not here simultaneously;” his intellect taking him beyond the material world of the scientists. Transcending the mediocre was his crime, his entry into the realm of the unknown causing dilemma for knowledgeable peers who dumped him by the wayside; then the medical minds, the fixers and do-gooders masquerading rescue; with drugs as their only expediency, his vision quickly doped into the matchbox world of their understanding. Gratitude fills her heart for all she received from him, seeing the link between her brief encounter with Frank preparing the way to the Magus who was able to clarify her questions relating to the pulse in matter and other anomalies. The impartial observer sees it. She again felt that oneness when she opened to him about Frank’s realization and he answered her directly.

“In our existential world nothing can enter our consciousness before its time. It first becomes rejected because it is seen as a threat to the established structures built on the relative known. We as our structures oppose because our structures are based on the past. We live in the past; even the future we perceive is an ongoing projection of past. The fear of the unknown prevails and so it continues through sequential events until eventually the unknown unfolds when the time is right. History demonstrates this fact when Galileo dared to voice that our planet is not as then believed, he was ostracized by the power structures and obliged to refute his discovery. Some of our greatest prophets faced the same issue when the structures of their time banished them, like the followers of Jesus driven underground by the interpretative minds creating their own version of his life and events as a means for restructuring control, peace upon all of them. It is exactly the same today; our scientists are our new high priests, still trapped within the narrow confines of mind.”

Zara was puzzled by the paradox, being here in bodily form while simultaneously not here. “Let it go,” the Magus encouraged; “The depths of alchemy cannot be grasped by the mind. Be still and know that all things are now, all time is now; every event, past, present and future is now; past and future are mind, the future a mind projection moving into the past; all time is past forever regurgitating itself, while you are now, the unmoving point of immortality.”

Her mind falls silent to the sound of his voice in her head. ‘Of course it is so,’ she endorses, having travelled with him at his speed, the alchemy is in the now, the door to the timeless, memory the reflection of all time to be entered at will. Our task is not in dealing with the ignorance we see in the world; people living in the past are terrified of real change, the new always perceived as a threat, social recognition of utmost importance in the preservation of the old; the multitudes born within these confines act out their lives according to the repetitive program. Her heart aches: ‘If I had seen this clearly yesterday, my father might still be alive.’ The pain too much, ‘I found him, loved him, and now he is dead.’ Her mind escapes, pausing on the flashback of one particular night in the other man’s world. On her way home to that house of deception she stood at the top of the road, gazing across Dublin Bay at the pulsing city, feeling as though looking across the entire span of humanity. She remembers seeing how we are given the privilege of life and how man in his pride seems to have forgotten, creating his own design of a fastidious God in his mind world, manufacturing more psychological time, more time to expand his world, more time to defy the essence of all that is God and more time to repent.

The Magus pointed to the fact that God cannot be made particular or ratified through images of past perceptions; “The mind-world can never understand, for nothing can happen before its allocated time, everything serving and being served in accord with its position in the cosmic order of all things. God is love and man turns his back on love through his mind, the blessed earth having to pay for his mess.”

She remembers walking barefoot on the wet sand, sharp grains squeezing between her toes, water splashing her legs, the north wind sweeping heavy dark clouds in the direction of the Wicklow mountains, the artist’s brush blending all into the night sky, the message clear: ‘The energy of life is love. Are we not here to be its joy, its celebration, and not to crash on the particular?’ Now as then, there is no reply, time frozen, nothing arising, silence speaking beyond the symbol of words ...

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