Returning to what you have forgotten about yourself
Soul4you · Georgina Kovacs · Spiritual reflections, Part 3 of 3
Across the previous two essays, I have followed two inward images. With Zacchaeus, the fig tree became an image of an awakened inner axis; with the figure I contemplate as Nimrod, carrying the lion became a way of exploring our relationship with our own strength.
Now I arrive at the most personal question in the series. What happens when the tree and the lion meet within you?
I am not asking how many symbols you can interpret. I am asking about a moment of recognition: in an early-morning silence, after an unhurried breath, during meditation, in a child’s gaze, or perhaps in the midst of a difficult change.
Something stirs, and you find yourself thinking: I know this from somewhere. I am not only learning; I am remembering.
That is the experience I want to explore. It is also one of the questions at the heart of the Soul4you journey.
Where the two images meet
First, let us place them side by side. In Luke’s account, Zacchaeus is a wealthy chief tax collector who climbs a sycamore fig tree because he wants to see Jesus and cannot see over the crowd. (Luke 19:1–5)
In my symbolic reading, that upward movement becomes a return to an inner axis. He leaves the position from which he cannot see, and the encounter begins from somewhere unexpected.
The second image is the lion-bearing figure considered in my Nimrod essay. There, I contemplate a figure carrying a lion and a flowering branch, without presenting it as an archaeologically authenticated portrait of the biblical Nimrod. (The Soul4you Nimrod essay)
For this series, the important movement is carrying. Strength is neither denied nor turned into domination; something powerful is held with responsibility.
Now bring those images together. A person finds their axis, then learns to stand there without being overwhelmed by the strength they carry.
Ascent and carrying become two aspects of one movement. And there is a third point at which they meet: arrival.
Arrival, rather than escape
By arrival, I mean the moment when the symbols cease to be only things you contemplate. They become recognisable in your own experience.
You feel rooted and open at the same time. There is strength, but it does not need to announce itself.
This is what I am calling cosmic consciousness in this essay. It is a spiritual term within my own account, not a clinical category or a state I claim can be objectively identified in another person.
The word “cosmic” can make us expect something overwhelming. Yet the moment I am describing may be quieter than the life around it.
It need not remove you from your body or your ordinary surroundings. It can bring you more fully into the place where you already are.
Nor do I equate it with being permanently calm or happy. Grief, anger and tiredness do not make a person’s spiritual life less real.
And it is not a mark of being chosen above others. I do not use this language to establish a hierarchy of human worth.
What “cosmic” means to me
In my metaphysical understanding, our present life belongs to a reality larger than its immediate circumstances. I do not mean only that we feel connected to a community or inherit cultural memories, although those connections also matter.
I mean a real spiritual continuity that exceeds the account we usually give of ourselves. The body is here, this life is ours, and neither exhausts the reality to which we belong.
That is the sense in which I speak of an ancient knowing moving through the present. I am expressing a metaphysical conviction, not proposing that a feeling establishes biological ancestry or provides verifiable information about an ancient civilisation.
For me, cosmic consciousness includes several recognitions:
- Embodiment: This is my body, and I can inhabit it without reducing my whole being to it.
- Belonging: This is my life, and it is part of a wider reality.
- Responsibility: My decisions remain mine, even when I experience guidance beyond my ordinary thinking.
- Presence: I can stand in a kitchen, a street or a bus stop and still know that my life is not isolated from the whole.
I do not become less individual by recognising belonging. I become less dependent on isolation as the definition of myself.
The Zacchaeus and Nimrod images help me approach this recognition. They do not establish that the people represented by those names experienced precisely the state I am describing.
Light, and the darkness beyond light
Purisaca Golenya Ágnes’s A Kék Vér Gyermekei trilogy is one of the acknowledged influences behind this part of my thinking; its volumes include Imhotep, a Kékség Papja, Az Isis-kód and Utazás az aranykorba. (The author’s book information) I retain the Hungarian titles because I am referring to those works, not to English editions.
In an excerpt from the first volume published on her own website, Golenya explores darkness beyond the usual opposition of light as good and darkness as bad, and uses the image of the seed within that darkness. (Golenya, “A Fény fényezése”) What follows is my reflection on that imagery, not a verbatim translation of her teaching.
I find the image demanding because spiritual seeking can itself become a pursuit. We want another opening, another experience, more light.
But what if arrival is not simply a greater intensity of what we are already chasing? What if the movement eventually asks us to stop reaching?
The darkness I contemplate here is not cruelty, despair or a judgement about anyone’s identity. It is the unformed: a silence before the distinctions through which we ordinarily recognise things.
Likewise, “light” in this passage is spiritual language. I am not making a claim about electromagnetic radiation or the physical origins of the universe.
The seed offers me a way to stay with the image. Before a form unfolds, the possibility of that form is not yet visible.
The absence of visible brightness is therefore not, in this reading, an absence of life. It is a way of imagining the fullness that precedes expression.
For me, this touches the deepest aspect of cosmic consciousness. Not a demand for ever more spectacular experiences, but an original stillness in which belonging does not have to be demonstrated.
The phrase “blue blood”, which appears in the title of Golenya’s trilogy, also requires care in English. Here I engage with it as spiritual imagery, not as a statement about royal lineage, race, biological purity or one people’s superiority.
The distinction matters because the direction of this essay is towards shared belonging. Nothing in it requires anyone to possess a privileged ancestry.
The sentence I would leave beside these images is my own: perhaps the movement is no longer higher, but homeward. Not away from life, but towards what makes it possible to inhabit life more fully.
Seven gentle ways of approaching the experience
I offer these as points of attention, not a system or a promise of a particular state. You do not need to complete them in order, and none is a test of your spiritual development.
Allow a moment of not knowing
For a brief moment, let yourself have no answer to the question that has occupied you. You are not abandoning thought; you are making room before thought rushes to close the matter.
I associate this openness with the seed. Something need not already have a name in order to be present.
Feel the body as an axis
Stand or sit in a way that is comfortable and accessible to you. Notice the contact supporting you, and the space above you.
Let the tree become an inward image of rootedness and openness. There is no posture you must achieve to deserve the experience.
Practise carrying rather than fighting
When a difficult feeling appears, see whether you can acknowledge it without either attacking it or allowing it to dictate your next action. This is how I use the image of the carried lion.
Gentleness does not mean remaining alone with something overwhelming. Sometimes the responsible way to carry an experience is to seek support.
Listen for silence within the day
Put down the phone for a moment, if that is possible, and notice what is here without filling the space immediately. The silence I mean need not depend on an entirely quiet room.
I am interested in the pause in our compulsion to add something. What can be received when we are not continually reaching?
Give recognition room without making it proof
When something feels deeply familiar, you do not have to dismiss it before listening. You can give the experience space and observe what it brings into your life.
But familiarity does not establish the factual truth of an impression. Listening inwardly and checking outward claims can remain part of the same honest practice.
Approach a tradition with attention
A song, a handmade object or an old story may help you feel a continuity that ordinary explanation does not fully capture. For me, these can be carriers of spiritual meaning as well as cultural memory.
This need not depend on a pure or single line of descent. Family, language, adoption, chosen belonging and respectfully encountered traditions can all form part of a person’s life, without making different cultures interchangeable.
Trust that your presence has a place
My deepest practice here is trusting that my life belongs within a reality I do not yet see in full. That trust does not require me to call every circumstance fair or every relationship safe.
Belonging is not a command to stay where I am harmed. Sometimes it is what gives me the strength to leave.
Your golden age
In this essay, “golden age” names an inward quality, not a date on a calendar. I am not predicting a global transformation that everyone must experience in the same way.
I mean the beginnings of a life less organised around the need to prove that we deserve to exist. It may become visible in something very ordinary:
- Being loved: You notice that pleasing everyone is not the price of your worth.
- Speaking truthfully: You find a careful way to say what you have been afraid to name.
- Choosing: You listen to the heart without abandoning responsibility for your decision.
- Being present: You experience your body as belonging within something larger, rather than as an obstacle to spiritual life.
- Receiving support: In a lonely moment, you allow the possibility that you do not have to carry everything by yourself.
I call these small beginnings of a golden age because they change the quality from which we live. I do not mean that inward change guarantees that the surrounding world or other people will change with us.
Yet our presence matters. We can carry what we are learning into an encounter without turning it into a lesson someone else must accept.
Three questions to take with you
The three-part journey ends here: the tree, the lion, and the possibility of arrival. The images remain available without requiring you to force an experience.
- Direction: Where in your life are you beginning to want homecoming rather than another higher position?
- Recognition: What has felt quietly familiar, and how could you explore it honestly without either dismissing it or turning it into certainty about facts?
- Listening: If the roles and expectations around you became quieter for a moment, what might you hear within?
My own sense is that what awakens in us is not always something newly acquired. Sometimes it is a recognition of a belonging that was already there.
Thank you for travelling this far with me. Your way of continuing can have its own pace.
With love,
Georgina
Soul4you