Living With The Great Mystery, Our Best Friend

At Labyrinth Garden sessions, one of the most personally challenging expressions from me is how to express a sort of ‘one size fits all’ connection to what I will say here as ‘The Great Mystery’.

A huge passion I have is that people using our Labyrinth Gardens, especially the Tree Labyrinth, is they enjoy space and surrender to what The Great Mystery is to them.

It is a contemplation space 
for imagination and expressing imagination, 
so this great question fuels it all

Still, a very common word used is ‘God’, though the majority of Labyrinth Garden users are women so their most common word in that space is ‘Goddess’. Both God and Goddess causes me a bit of an itch of discomfort because I cannot vision The Great Mystery as having a gender, but maybe a constant dance of both genders together.  The old fables include many Gods and Goddesses, though.

Sometimes I think of The Great Mystery as being the bond, ‘energy’, connecting the genders.

Any of these interpretations are of the ‘unseen’ so there we have ‘The Great Mystery’. Its there, but what is it? How do we give it a name? These are questions for our entire life, folks, and I do not think we are allowed to find an answer.

Meanwhile this lifelong question 
serves us a lovely purpose of living, 
and especially loving, if we allow this. 

My own favourite namings from this Mystery are Guiding Spirit, Guardian Angel, and Harvey the Invisible Friend. Some folks may describe these as being messengers, sons, and daughters of The Great Mystery, The Great Spirit. Then we also have the Athiests who enjoy life, more about them later.

The unique thing about this Great Mystery is that nobody and no living animal, bird, bug, tree, plant, or fungi can live independent of it, even the atheists.

I believe an essential part of storytelling is flexing our freedom to choose to create our interpretation of how we question and experience the Great Mystery, and what image or images do we mould this into?

Through this, our interpretation should be a little different to the next person, a different use of colours, rather than a cloning of interpretation.

If we clone an interpretation of the Great Mystery, 
who set up the template? 

Who took on the authority of that and why? Who copied and pasted the God image, Allah image, Goddess image?

I believe God, Allah, and Goddess are very cool and useful names for intense belief and guidance. They are very meaningful if we accept the many shapes and colours that people transform from their interpretation of these spirit induced names.

The singular point of this waffling article is expressing my belief that there is no “right” way or “wrong” way to experience and describe what I call the ‘Great Mystery’ here for convenience.

As expressed through my ‘To Hell With The Devil’ article yesterday, some people may choose to experience The Great Mystery as a God that punishes them for sinning, and blesses them for resisting temptation.

Becoming popular now, is expressing this Great Mystery as ...

an ‘energy’, ‘frequency’, the ‘Universe’. All very valuable from the mind of consciousness of each person.

What I feel is awful destructive and life wasting in the cloning of a template of an image of the Great Mystery. God is heavily used this way, for example. There are challenges when anyone insists that their God is the Only God.

Of course, everyone’s image of the Great Mystery and their ultimate guide for living is the Only One. It’s their’s, but please let it out to play with other people’s Great Mystery images to learn from and support each other.

Athiests do not escape the Great Mystery either. Maybe they are at an advantage as they do not transform it into an image with a name. They carry a ‘don’t worry, enjoy yourself’ lifestyle but are usually as kind, caring and loving, as anyone else. I am not atheist, myself as I carry images and tell stories about them, but I experience no discomfort or enforced judgement when someone explains they are atheist. I certainly do not think they need praying over.

Here we enter the life choice of forming walls or bridges

One great wall creator is when someone tries to clone their Great Mystery image onto others and demands it replaces the one they carry. A major irritation for atheists, I suspect.

This is done with clever fear mongering skills. The usual stuff, put ‘snakes’ into people’s lives so they mistrust their own ‘Great Mystery’ image. Then step forward saying how your ‘Great Mystery’ image can get rid of the ‘snakes’.

Another strange wall building is when people believe they are one thing, and that The Great Mystery, or God, is something else ... over the other side of the wall, maybe.

I somehow think this belief would create a very easy entry of disease?

One thing that the question of The Great Mystery journey should reveal to us is that we are all in this together. There are no separate living entities, just lots of different life holding bodies of different shapes, sensing and creating images of the mystery that are as varied as our shapes.

None of this changes our human lives. Accepting and holding the love and enlightenment of The Great Mystery, is not an eternal pass into a life of smiling, peace, and calm. There are still the bills to pay, children to mediate with, arsehole car drivers we dodge around, and being pissed off when someone’s noise distracts our thoughts. Being even more pissed off when someone assertively tries to clone their God onto us and claim that our’s is crap, evil, and has horns.

We are getting somewhere when 
these experiences come and go 
and we don’t hold on. 

This is becoming a bit of a mantra within my articles, but I feel we are also getting somewhere when we stop trying to judge and side things as good and bad, black and white. Its better and more comforting to visualise the wholeness of the endless shades of grey between black and white, and the endless shades of colour between them two

Separateness through erecting boundaries between black and white, putting things in boxes, and trying to separate ourselves from the Great Mystery, are forcing barriers between us, and peace, happiness, and the flow of love. Its a lonely longing place.

At Carrowcrory, before anyone enters the Tree Labyrinth Garden I invite them to accept and trust how the Great Mystery flows through them as their God, Christheart, Goddess, Angel, Guiding Spirit, Bird Totem, or return of their childhood invisible friend.

For each person, this image that partners in trust and love is perfect. It’s our best friend as well as mentor and guide.

Who is your Great Mystery guide? 

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