Crystal Healing

Depending On No-thing audiobook, Chapter 64

Depending On No-thing, Chapter 64 - Crystal healing

Read by David Matt

Q: Hi Robert, while I have been following your Facebook page for some time now, to be honest, I was not giving it too much attention. I am very suspicious about everything “spiritual” these days. Even from myself.

This suspicion feels strange, since I am one of those people who see themselves as spiritual. I enjoy quite a lot the idea that there is more to all this than there seems to be. I am energetically very sensitive, and I can feel and sense vibrations very well. I have been calling myself a “sensitive” and a “healer” for years. Most of the time, I feel that I have a mission in this world, which is to help people to rise from darkness and suffering.

I have been repeatedly searching and giving up. Moving back and forward. I guess when my search gets close to touching some of my deepest fears, that is when I feel attracted to moving on.

I am writing this because I’m frustrated by what life is like for me lately. Perhaps you can bring some clarity to it.

I use “spirituality” to earn my living. I love crystals. I love to do handcrafted works with them, and I feel intuitively the vibrations that come from the stones. I sell crystal arrangements for the purpose of healing. I love to make people feel better, so I do what I call healing, by working with the sun, the moon, the earth, and the energy of each crystal, to restore balance and remove dense energies from people. In this work I ask for intuitive guidance from other realms of spirit. I ask them to help me to heal people.

When I am doing this spiritual healing, it feels right. It makes sense to my heart. But then I see your views on these things, and I start to question. Am I truly helping people to awake into higher states of consciousness, or am I deceiving them and myself as well? Is it wrong that I am earning my living doing this?

I want to read your book. It is calling me. But I confess, I am afraid. I’m afraid to get even more confused.

Well, thanks a lot for your time, Robert. I love to gaze at your profile picture. You are very beautiful. Thank you.

A: Hi. Thank you.

You ask if your work with crystals is really helping people to awake into higher states of consciousness, or if you are only deceiving them and yourself as well. And given your doubts, you wonder if it is wrong to be earning your living this way.

Those are good questions. You are courageous to ask them.

While you are in this open, questioning mood—which I understand feels painful and insecure—you might also ask yourself what you mean by “higher states of consciousness.” What if higher and lower states are only something you once heard about and believed? What if there really is no higher and lower consciousness, but only this aliveness existing exactly as it is right now, prior to all categories and judgments?

Everyone needs to make a living somehow, and if you can do that by helping people to feel better—by serving as a kind of healer of moods—why judge yourself? If you believe that crystals have powers, perhaps they do. Or perhaps they don’t, and those “powers” are only imaginary. But human contact can heal bad moods; that is a known fact. So if relying on crystals is part of the way you work, maybe that’s OK, even if you have your doubts, and even if crystals have no actual powers of their own.

Do you know the story of Dumbo? If not, here it is:

A cute little infant elephant is born to a circus-performing mom. Mama elephant adores her baby despite his one flaw—gigantic, oversized ears, for which he is teased and told he is ugly.

When Mom dies, leaving her baby an orphan with no means of support, Dumbo is forced to become a lowly clown elephant just to get by. But a helpful circus mouse points out that, if he opened up his giant ears he could fly, and thus become a star attraction: “Dumbo, The Flying Elephant.”

Dumbo is afraid to try, until the mouse offers him a magic feather. If Dumbo will hold the magic feather in his trunk, open up his wings and jump off the high-dive platform, he will be able to fly, the mouse tells him. Desperate to get away from the nasty clowns, Dumbo gives the magic feather a go. His big ears catch the air and off he goes flying around the circus big top. Soon, Dumbo becomes a main attraction, drawing large crowds.

Weeks go by, and Dumbo continues his star turn, convinced that the magic feather is what keeps him aloft. Then one day, a gust of wind whisks the feather out of his trunk, and Dumbo starts to drop like a stone. The mouse, who was hitching a ride in Dumbo’s hat, screams at the elephant that the feather was only a ruse and that he could fly just as well without the feather.

Could this be true? At the last possible moment, just before he and the mouse have a crash-landing, Dumbo opens up his giant ears and soars.

What if crystals are your magic feather?

It’s good to have doubts, I say. They are a sign of open-mindedness, which I find sorely lacking among many people who like to call themselves “spiritual.” Keep your doubts close to you as long as you need them. They are a powerful ally in finding your own mind, the natural awareness prior to belief in anything at all. Until you find an unencumbered awareness, you will never be at peace, “higher consciousness” or not. If you do find your own naked awareness—your own mind—doubt will no longer be an issue.

The finest, purest crystal in the world cannot give you peace of mind, I say. Only standing on your own ground, free of magical beliefs, can do that. As long as you cling to beliefs, you will always be troubled by doubts, because doubt is the shadow side of belief. And so doubt must exist as long as one believes or has so-called “faith” in ideas that may not be true.

As for reading The Ten Thousand Things, everything in its own time. Meanwhile, forget about “spirituality” if you can. It is your own mind you need to discover, without relying on the many things you have been told and believed.

Don’t be hard on yourself. Try to let your beliefs go and concentrate instead on your actual feelings from moment to moment, allowing everything to be just as it is, including doubt.

I wish you well.

Q: When I dared to write to you, I knew this would probably happen. I spent the day processing your answer, and do you know what I came to realize? I realized that there is excitement in seeking and searching. Some kind of novelty or addictive suffering. Because when I stop to meditate without crystals, without focusing on certain chakras or light visualizations, I feel a deep dissatisfaction with meditation, and boredom. It seems that there is a huge desire to keep the mind busy, and I actually become too afraid of what will happen next. Can you say anything about this? Thanks a lot.

A: The first thing I want to say is how much I enjoy witnessing the opening of a mind that had been clinging to pet beliefs and outgrown self-definitions. Although it might feel uncomfortable, this liminality is rare and special, so try to appreciate it for as long as it lasts.

Liminality means the condition of uncertainty, ambiguity, or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer retain their earlier pre-ritual status but have not yet entered into a transition to the status they will possess when the rite of passage is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of defining their identity and a new way that completing the rite will establish.

As I see it, you may be on the threshold of an important understanding that I will illuminate if I can. Since you have demonstrated such unpretentious, honest mettle, I will just say it straight up.

Yes, there can be excitement in seeking and searching—like a treasure hunt, isn’t it? You aim to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But there is no end of the rainbow, nor any pot of gold, I say. This right now is it: all one ever has or ever will have.

In each moment, what is is, and, except in fantasy, cannot be different. If this moment feels insufficient or unsatisfactory, that cannot be repaired, but only seen and noticed.

Seeing and noticing is what real meditation is about—not focusing on crystals, or so-called “chakras,” or trying to produce any state or condition at all. If you go at it with some self-improvement purpose—to balance chakras, to raise qi, to commune with fantasized “higher powers,” etcetera—that is not what I call meditation. Meditation in the best sense is motiveless, clear-headed noticing of whatever one can notice in this very moment—not about fixing or improving anything.

Anxiety is part of life. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we really know that, in the next moment, anything at all can happen. Any breath might be our last. We are all subject to events beyond our control, and there is no protection from that uncertainty, only ways of papering it over. This fragile body we call “me” is going to die, and we know it. And when it does, that may very well be the end of “myself.” We may like to believe otherwise, but we do not know otherwise.

One might try to sugarcoat the anxiety of ordinary living with religion and spirituality, but fixes like that don’t last. Eventually, doubts must arise, because doubt, as I said earlier, is the shadow side of belief. Belief and doubt are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. So if you embrace beliefs, you must live with doubts that you will always be trying to sweep under the carpet.

You could live in a house constructed entirely of the most perfect crystals, drinking from a crystal goblet, eating from a crystal bowl, and sleeping on a bed of perfect crystals—and still be searching for the peace of mind that eludes you. Your belief in “higher consciousness” and “guidance from other realms of spirit” may be as imaginary as chakras for all we really know.

The human mind can believe all kinds of things, but belief, no matter how firm, does not make any of them true. And what you are calling “intuition” is not some kind of flawless power either, but just another word for thoughts and feelings that come to mind, we know not how or why.

What one really knows, I am saying, is almost nothing, and part of the anxiety you feel stems from clinging to beliefs while doubt waits in the wings.

Your questions indicate that peace of mind is what you really want, and the humility with which you express that desire is a gift. That is why I am speaking so directly.

This aliveness that we call “myself” is a mystery and always will be, regardless of traditions and magical thinking. We may nibble around the edges of that mystery, but the core of it, I say, is beyond our ken. That is what I call human limitation. No matter what any system or religion may claim, no one really knows anything at all about ultimate matters, including higher powers, higher forms of consciousness, life after death, or whether being alive has any inherent meaning at all, except that which we have been taught to project onto it.

I understand your fears. They are natural enough. Abandoning beliefs that have seemed like certainties can feel like a loss of something precious. But there is, I say, something far more precious, and that is up to you to discover.

In that, I wish you well.

Q: Thank you so much, Robert. Seeing the truth can be very painful at times. I have experienced a mixture of anger, sadness, happiness, and gratitude during our conversation. I don’t want to take more of your time, but I feel you are guiding me into something here, so I ask if it’s OK to ask more questions as they arise.

I have been reflecting on all you have said, and after the storm of feelings and emotions, there is definitely a sense of relief and a relaxation into being present, being me. I have seen so much from your replies to my questions. I can’t even express how deeply blinded I have been by my fantasies. That blindness is a part of the anger I was feeling. I’ve seen so much arrogance and ugliness attached to this spiritual identity with which I meet the world. I became like a dictator. By clinging to the idea of how perfect and divine this world should be, and how people ought to behave, I forgot to see how beautiful everyone is just as they are.

I feel so grateful for your advice. I have no words to express the love I feel for your open, compassionate, nonjudgmental teaching. Thank you. I feel there is a lot more in me that needs opening to reality. But it seems I have found a door to what I am really searching for, here and now.

Thank you, Robert.

A: You are most welcome. Honesty and humility always touch my heart, so feel free to ask questions if they should arise.

A moment like this of walking out from under an outworn identity can feel exciting. It’s as if one had been carrying around a useless burden that now can be set aside so that one walks more freely. And walking more freely feels lovely. Just remember that an insight—no matter what insight—is never the last insight. Awakening never ends, so keep on walking.