Finding Life Purpose through Irish Myths and Stories

 

I tell old Irish mythological stories connected to the beauty of the wisdom mind.  This is your mind that is connected to the Source – the One Mind.  These old Irish mythological stories are not simply entertainment.  They are invitations to the return to the source of a meaningful life and the meaning inherent in your life.  One mythological story that I tell is the story of how the river Shannon in Ireland got her name.  This is really a story about wrong intention and the price you pay for trying to use certain kinds of powers in a certain kind of way other than for the highest good of all.  This is a great story for those who use the Law of Attraction for purposes other than serving Love.

 

This Irish mythological story about how the river Shannon got its name begins with the story of the maiden Siannan.  She was an outsider.  She did not make herself an outsider.  In the beginning she was like anyone of us.  The Source of Creation created her as a dance of Love in form within in this dimension of time and space – this vale of soul making.  However, she was different in a way which was approved.  She was the union of two blood lines.

 

 

On one side she was Formorian and on the other side she was Tuatha de Danaan.  This could have been a great opportunity to unite the opposites within herself but rather than deepen her magical abilities by turning the lead of separateness from Love into the gold of union Siannan turned bitter.  She made the purpose of her life vengeance for all the hurt that had been heaped upon her because she was made to feel different rather than the new creative possibility that Love in its intention intended her to be and to become.

 

Thus Siannan gets stuck in the energy of the first chakra.  This is the energy of the blood ties and the energy of her Formorian ancestors. It is the energetic of fight and flight and fear.  She does not do the work that is required to rise above her sense of separateness.  She focuses her intention and the power of her intention on acquiring powers that she intends to use for vengeance.  She intends to use these powers that she has no knowledge of to avenge the hurts that remain locked inside her heart that has become armoured and absent of joy.

 

 

This focus of making others pay for the suffering of one’s life can become the purpose of one’s life.  We spend our life’s energy in ensuring that those who have wronged us pay for that wrong.  You see this happening in the lives of couples engaged in bitter divorce.  I see this happening within the dynamic of my own family.  It is often within families that this kind of dynamic goes deepest.  It also happens within Nation States.  You see this happening with Ireland and England.  You see it happening within the collective that is my tradition in Northern Ireland with its main focus on the mantra of “no surrender.”

 

What you think about expands.  This is why it is so important to become the guardian of your own mind and the thoughts that you allow to become the foundations of your life.  In my own life, and the life of most of my friends, the foundational thought that we were taught as children was that we were sinners.  We where assured that being sinners we were existentially wrong because we existed.  These poisonous stories are still being told and I see them destroy the lives of the most vulnerable.  They are being told by the Formorian mind that thinks it knows the beauty and grace of the Source without ever having done the work of surrendering to such Source and becoming at one with it.

 

Within you is the wisdom mind.  It knows you by heart.  It is the mind that has loved you all your life.  It doesn’t know any other way.  In the Irish mythological stories that I tell the Formorian mind is the ego.  This is the false sense of self that has taken over the Palace of Love.  The ego is all that you identify yourself with as being me, my and mine.  It sees itself as separate from others and it lives by doing and acquiring and feels itself as living separate in a body within time and space and within a timeline between birth and death.

 

 

We have more in common with Siannan than we might wish to admit.  She is both the sense of the separate self but  she has within her the blood of the Shining Ones – the Tuatha de Danaan.  This is the blood line of those whose lineage is the knowing of the true Self.  These are the ones who live from the direct knowing of the Source.  They are those who live from the Buddha mind, from Christ Consciousness or from the Tao.  These are the shining ones who have the ability  enter the light of the One source.  This is the knowing of the light that creates all things from no thing.  It is termed enlightenment.

 

 

Siannan is exiled from Love – from her source.  It has made her bitter.  It has made her want, not love, but power that she intends to use for her own purpose.  This purpose is to make people respect her, to make people fear her.  She is blinded by her dark intent.  Such power will not give her her true hearts desire which is her ability to love and be loved. The meaning of life isn’t in the satisfaction of ego desire.  As our consumer society proves this simply becomes a form of addiction to ever more  meaningless acquisition that peaks and  troughs leaving lives destroyed in the process.  The meaning of life is found, not in acquisition, but in giving your life away to the highest purpose that can live through you.

 

You begin to attend to this higher purpose through the power of intention.  You begin to ask yourself through some spiritual practice on a daily basis what your higher purpose is.  This may be through prayer or meditation or some other daily practice.  This is the invitation to the shining power of grace and beauty of creation expressing through you.  You don’t make your life a means to an end.  You don’t dictate outcomes.  You begin the process of surrender to the way of Love.  It knows how to work through you if you are willing to allow it.  You begin the process by trusting in your inner knowing which paradoxically speaking isn’t yours but is not separate from you.  This knowing is what you are and not something that you acquire.  It is more a revelation of who you are rather than more information you acquire about who you think you are.

 

I have a certain sympathy for the outcast Siannan.  She was made an outcast by her people.  We used to do this in Ireland with woman who birthed children outside marriage and with those who we thought a little odd.  We did it to those we sent into the care of those we gave our power.  These are the one in four who in Ireland have suffered some form of sexual abuse.   These people are still looking for a sense of justice that the hierarchical institutions responsible for such abuse refuse to acknowledge.  So some of these people become like Siannan and get locked out of their personal power to love and be loved.  This I think is a double tragedy.  It is heaping suffering upon suffering.

 

Storytellers are not just entertainers.  They should be magicians. They are usually magicians who have been exiles from Love in some form or another.  I am both, archetypally speaking, the orphan and the magician.  I have in my time walked the frozen lands of a loveless life.  Except that the Source of that life is not in any sense Loveless.  It is only that I learned how to forget and to focus my energies on a sense of self that was always living in the darkness of the illusion of the separate self.

 

Now I get to sit at the source of the Shannon river and I tell stories.  These are my stories because they are the  stories of the journey of the soul in its return to the Source of the Oneness of all things arising from no thing.  It is in this way that I give my life away with the intention of inviting the direct experience of the true Self.  The journey of my own life could so easily have been the journey of Siannan who eventually gets washed away by the forces of the unconscious that she wanted to use for the sake of avenging the hurt she held within her.  We are all in our own way embracing the Siannan within us when we seek power in any way other than for the highest good of all.

 

 

Let your story be the story of the full integration of the Formorian and the Tuatha de Danaan within you.  Let your life become the grace note that it is intended to be.  Do no die with the music still left within you and do not be attracted to power other than the power of Love for the purpose of Love.  Give your life in service to Love’s purpose and how it is intended to be lived through you.  In the silence of a daily spiritual practice begin to learn the process of allowing the still small voice within you to speak to you in images and experiences of inspiration.

 

This voice speaks in unique ways.  Your work is to allow yourself to trust the knowing way that lives inside you and which creation expresses through your once you are willing to allow the will of Love.  Then you will avoid the fate of Siannan who tried to outrun the forces of the unconscious that rose up and washed her away and in their wake, but not in her awakening, left what is now called the river Shannon.

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