Transformation

The Caterpillar

For aeons of time including this lifetime, you have been brainwashed and trained to believe that you were nothing more than a caterpillar. You've always been a caterpillar, everyone around you is a caterpillar and you could never be anything more than a caterpillar. Even in your soul you've come to believe that you are a caterpillar.

Yet deep within you, a voice tells you, "There's something more." That quiet yearning nags at you to keep searching for that "Something More." You may accumulate great wealth, power and fame, yet there's Something More. You read and study the self-help books that promise to add fulfillment, peace and better relationships. Still, there's "Something More."

You may try poverty, become active in church, do volunteer work for the homeless or in a hospital. Still you remain a caterpillar and there's Something More. You try yoga, meditation, explore ideas of metaphysical; you fast or do special diets to look better and feel better, trying to be the best you can be. Always there's more. Always you're still a caterpillar - a wise and wonderful caterpillar - yet a caterpillar nonetheless.

We as a culture are unfortunate in that we have recorded only one instance in our histories where one of us discovered and became that Something More, that butterfly of humanity. That person lived among us nearly two thousand years ago and we, of Western culture, call him Jesus.

Jesus went beyond being the caterpillar and became the butterfly. He tried desperately to tell us that what he had done we all could do, but very few of the caterpillars of his day or since could comprehend what he was talking about. So first he was ridiculed, then persecuted, then executed. Then, since part of becoming a butterfly of humanity grants power over death as caterpillars know it, he resurrected his body and then departed this dimension.

Caterpillars still didn't comprehend, so they deified him, constructed new caterpillar religions around his memory and put his teachings into caterpillar structures. This kept their caterpillar worlds from coming apart. After all, if he were the only one to become a butterfly, he must not have been a caterpillar at all, right?

Actually, there have been many. But because the reaction to them is usually the same, those caterpillars who learn they also have the potential to become a butterfly of humanity and eventually achieve it, do it quietly and out of the public eye. Butterflies upset the status quo; they are no longer held in bondage by the social structures of the caterpillar kingdoms and are therefore threatening to the various caterpillar kings and priests.

They are mocked, persecuted, and often killed along with their families to dissuade others from even exploring the possibilities. Yet each of us, even the most treacherous of the caterpillar kings, has within us the small, quiet, nagging voice pressing us to find that "Something More." That Something More is, of course, the urging to move beyond being the mere caterpillar and to become what we are all destined to become someday - the butterfly.

So, as those moments come in your life when everything seems hopeless or boring or frustrating or depressing - and these moments do come to each of us - listen. For it is in these moments that the voice of the potential butterfly within us comes through. It is saying to you, "There is Something More." If you will but truly listen to that voice and begin to look within, that voice inside you will begin to guide you on your own path to becoming that glorious butterfly.