FROM CATERPILLAR TO BUTTERFLY

What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the
world calls a butterfly ----Lao Tsu‌

A man found a cocoon for a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as... if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no farther. Then the man decided to help the butterfly.

He took a pair of scissors and snipped the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. Something was strange. The butterfly had a swollen body and shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and deformed wings. It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand, was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the small opening of the cocoon are God`s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon. Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life.

If God allowed us to go through all our life without any obstacles, that would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. Not only that, we could never fly.

What do butterflies have in common with the human spirit? Meet Maggie, a middle aged wife and mother who was about to find out.

...Maggie wasn’t rich like a millionaire or poor in a manner of being homeless. She was living an average comfortable life. It was made even better when a beautiful baby girl came her way. She and her husband made sure their daughter had her needs met and they were still able to take a yearly vacation by the beach.

Maggie was a partner in her husband’s business. They both had a different set of duties which kept everything in balance. One day a devastating blow came to her husband’s business, and over a three year period the business dropped out of site. Her husband had to totally reinvent himself and was yearning to fulfill a dream with a new vocation. She was happy for him and supported him fully, but still the money was not coming in.

Maggie began to feel guilty that she wasn’t contributing with any kind of income. It had been a long time since she had worked outside the home and had to work for someone else. Needless to say she was scared but still had faith that everything would be okay. She began job hunting and found filling out applications somewhat difficult, especially the part asking for job references. Keep in mind that she was self-employed with her husband for almost 20 years. It felt as though that didn’t count for anything as she was never called for an interview.

At the time she was job hunting her mom became more ill than she had been and ended up in the hospital for a week. Once Maggie’s mom returned home she became her mom’s helper one day a week. She did the shopping, changed sheets, vacuumed and did other things that her mother was not able to do anymore. Of course her mom would pay her for her time and labor but she still felt she needed to find another source of income.

One of the first applications she had filled out finally came through. She passed the interview with flying colors and was told she was “exactly” what they were looking for. Although it was only part time it was exactly what she wanted. It was important for her to be home when her daughter arrived home from school. She was told they would be in touch when the schedule was ready. Knowing she had the job made her feel contented and productive again.

Within a few weeks though, she received an e-mail saying that the company had changed the job into a full time position and she was not qualified. Maggie was devastated. She felt betrayed and felt she had been lied to. That evening she was alone as her husband and daughter had gone out for the night. She welcomed the aloneness and wanted to drown her sorrows in a hot tub of bubbles.

As she knew she would, she began to cry, softly at first just from the sheer pain of being rejected. Three long years of struggle had finally caught up with her. Then she became angry; angry at everything from the circumstances that got her there, to God himself. She cried harder and yelled, “What do you want me to do?” She really felt that God had abandoned her.

When she was able to cry no more, she became exhausted and gave up. It was at that moment that a silent idea came to her to offer other elderly people home care assistance.

Using another talent for computers she printed off some flyers and cards and distributed them to her church, grocery stores and even placed a small ad in the newspaper. Within a week she had procured two new clients.

Now, even though she’s not a CEO of a major company or a power player she feels happy and productive again. So, had God really abandoned her? Let’s look at nature for the lessons and the answer.

Before a butterfly can emerge out of it’s chrysalis it has to go through a lot of struggling. Yes, struggling. Each time it lunges out to escape, acids are being removed from its wings. If someone were to come along and break the chrysalis open for it then the butterfly would die from those acids. In essence the struggle is necessary for the butterfly to survive. Then in the stillness, when the struggle is over, the butterfly can come out and share its beauty with the world.

We as humans are not any different. There are times that we need to struggle, to rid ourselves of the acids that make up sadness, fear, and anger. It is only at this time when we are exhausted and still that we begin to hear the Universe whisper to us.

The caterpillar spent most of his existence struggling to survive, and only thinking of his immediate needs. The caterpillar struggled for existence against many predators, and the caterpillar was unable to see past the few leaves in front of him. The caterpillar could not imagine what it would be like to be a butterfly soaring in the wind, and seeing the beauty of everything around him. The caterpillar could not see the true beauty of the world, because the caterpillar was in the dense vegetation, struggling to survive.

How could the caterpillar even begin to imagine, what the butterfly sees? If the caterpillar had a vision. If the caterpillar understood what was going to happen. If the caterpillar knew that there was going to be a metamorphous. If the caterpillar knew that he would one day glide on the wind. If the caterpillar knew that he would one day soar above the world. If the caterpillar knew that he would one day see beauty which he could not imagine. If the caterpillar knew that he would spend the rest of his days going from one beautiful flower to the next. Could the caterpillar really imagine what this new existence would be like?

If the caterpillar told the other caterpillars what was going to happen, most of the other caterpillars would think that the caterpillar was going insane. Most of the other caterpillars could not even begin to conceive that what they were told was possible. Would any of this mean that what was going to happen to each caterpillar, was not real? Would it simply mean that the other caterpillars were not ready to know the truth?

When the caterpillar first created his cocoon, the caterpillar did not know what was happening. The caterpillar was still attached to the caterpillar's old world, but the caterpillar was no longer a part of the caterpillar's old world. The caterpillar was closed off from the caterpillar's old world, but the caterpillar was not ready to enter the caterpillar's new world.

The caterpillar constructed his cocoon from all of the accumulated rubbish from the caterpillar's existence. This is what the caterpillar must discard before the caterpillar can become the butterfly.

The metamorphous which the caterpillar must undergo to transform from the caterpillar into the butterfly is very painful, but unless the caterpillar endures the metamorphous, the caterpillar cannot become the butterfly. The caterpillar has ...no idea what to expect when the process is complete. As the metamorphous progresses, the caterpillar slowly starts to understand what it is happening. However, the caterpillar has difficulty believing what is occurring, despite the wings which are forming.

After the caterpillar's metamorphous is completed, and the caterpillar has become a butterfly, the butterfly is still in the cocoon. Regardless of how hard the butterfly tries, the butterfly cannot possibly fly until the butterfly first discards the cocoon. Before the butterfly can fly, the butterfly must force it's way out of the cocoon, which takes some effort.

One day, the butterfly breaks out of it's cocoon and soars off into it's new world, leaving an empty shell behind.

The butterfly looked back and remembered how he once believed that the leaves in the butterfly's old world were the most important things in the universe. The butterfly recalled that he had worried about which caterpillar had the juiciest leaf, and whether the leaves would always be there. The butterfly now knew how insignificant the leaves really were. The butterfly now saw the trees and knew that there were other trees. The butterfly now saw all of the trees, and so much more. The butterfly saw things that the butterfly had never known existed, and could not have conceived.

The butterfly could not understand why he had believed that the insignificant leaves on a single tree had been so important. However, without those insignificant leaves, the caterpillar could not have sustained itself, and grown to become the butterfly.

The butterfly lands on the flower of a tree. The same tree that the butterfly had lived on as the caterpillar. The butterfly carries pollen to another flower, to fertilize the seed, which will fall to the ground and grow into a tree for caterpillars to live on.

Do four butterflies gliding around a meadow of flowers know that they were the same four caterpillars that lived together on a single branch? If the four butterflies do not know that they were the same four caterpillars that lived together ...on a single branch, does it mean that the four butterflies were not once four caterpillars that lived together on a branch?

When the four caterpillars lived together on the branch, could any of the four caterpillars have conceived that the four caterpillars would one day be four butterflies gliding around a beautiful meadow, or even that the meadow existed?

We have to accept the analogy of the caterpillar and the butterfly, and we have to know that the transformation will be worth the pain.

Think about the caterpillar morphing into the butterfly, a beautiful analogy for change in the spiritual sense. We all feel like a caterpillar at times, an ugly, undeveloped self (I personally don’t think caterpillars are ugly, I think they’re kinda cute in their pudgy way!). We all want to be the butterfly, the gorgeous finished product, flying about in grace and beauty, experiencing bliss everywhere we go. We all want to be seen as beautiful, respectable, and lovely. How do we get to that? It isn’t so easy, some would say.

We see people who have become the finished product, a successful, beautiful, powerful human being who has it all together. We all see people who we respect, admire and wish we were like, right? However, those people did not come into it without a lot of work on themselves spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically.

We all want to be the butterfly, but do we really want to go through the process that it takes to become that? There is a molting period, a liquification of self that is part of that process of going from the form of caterpillar to butterfly. It doesn’t necessarily look like a pleasant process, morphing into another form. Literally there has to be a breakdown of the first form, a dissecting or dissolution process, and then there is room in reality for the new form to be born.

It is a death and birth process, and both of those processes tend to be messy, dramatic, and difficult in their own respects. When you do both together, it gets even messier and more difficult! Death and rebirth at the same time are a superb event indeed.

Think about what you see in yourself as the caterpillar, the undeveloped and “first form” type of self. You might be all caterpillar in your opinion, or some percentage of caterpillar versus a percentage of butterfly. Perhaps you’ve been working on yourself for quite a while and you already transformed some parts of yourself that were “ugly” or undeveloped before now. Perhaps you feel like you might even be getting close to being a butterfly. Just examine where you think you are in the morphing process of the death of the old self and the birth of the new self.

Truly, the new self was always there, just as the butterfly was always there in the caterpillar. It isn’t visible before the transformation, but the blueprint and the potential was always there and present. I think of the new self as the eternal, deeper self, the You that was always present, even as the idea of yourself as a human seemed to take precedence for a while in the first part of your life.

The eternal self that you are is the butterfly, and it was always there. It isn’t born or created, it is only the idea of being a human version of self as the sole identity, the caterpillar, that needed to be liquefied and disintegrated. Then the already present butterfly underneath the illusion can emerge from the cocoon of change.

What is your version of the cocoon? What is your version of the cauldron or catalyst for change? How is it that you are disintegrating the idea that you are just a human, mortal self with a specific name and identity? How are you molting into the new form, seeing yourself as immortal and eternal self? How are you becoming aware that you are consciousness dreaming itself to be a specific human with a certain collection of experiences? Your cocoon of change is unique to you, and you are inside it, searching, seeking, and spiritually growing.

I would encourage you to simply stop and be the butterfly that you already are. Stop all the figuring, strategizing, fixing of yourself, and all the searching. You are already what you want to become. All you have to do is literally “drop” the old form, the old ideas of self and step out of who you think you are for just a moment. It is only a matter of readjusting your perceptions of who you think you are in the journey between caterpillar to butterfly.

It doesn’t actually take work or effort on your part to become the new self. The caterpillar does not “work” to become the butterfly. It doesn’t “do” anything! It simply waits for the old form to drop away, being patient while the discomfort of dissolution happens, if it is uncomfortable at all. Maybe it’s not.

Maybe it is us who makes the morphing process so difficult. We are so mind focused as a species and it might well be ourselves who are interfering with how easy the process of letting go of the old form. We can simply let it fall away, but in our own minds we find that hard to be at ease with. We have to make it hard and uncomfortable, for some reason.

Discomfort and difficulty might not be the nature of the process of transformation at all. Perhaps the period of transition from caterpillar to butterfly is not that difficult. Perhaps it is a state of bliss and relaxation for the caterpillar as it becomes the butterfly.

I encourage you to look at how you might be interfering with your own process of transformation from the old self to the new self. Perhaps it would be so much easier if you just rest your mind, don’t try to fix anything, and simply be present in the moment in a relaxed state of mind, patient with the process of the old falling away and the new showing up. It doesn’t have to happen overnight, and perhaps that is where much of your dissatisfaction with the process is coming from. You want the butterfly to be in full flight already, but there is a period of dissolution and resolution still happening. You can’t rush that process.

Be patient. The butterfly-you is present and already perfect, already formed. All you have to do is relax, drop the old stories and identities, and simply let your eternal nature emerge. It is actually very simple. Sure, some of your old caterpillar ways might reappear and assert themselves now and then, but you can always redirect your awareness back into the butterfly-you at any and all times.

You could think of the human condition as the caterpillar, and the eternal self that you are as the butterfly. Both exist, both have form in the same lifetime, and you are able to switch back and forth between both of those forms. The goal is to rest in the butterfly version of self more often than you might now, but that comes. It is a lifelong goal, a lifelong period of readjustment.

Be at peace. You do not have to fix everything in your personality. That all becomes “fixed” automatically when you shift your point of view into that of the eternal self rather than that of the struggling human. You do not have to find anything that you don’t know about already, it is all there inside you. It is innate knowing within you. All you must do is relax and let the butterfly come forth. It is already here, present and completely whole. Simply drop the old forms and ideas, the old ways of being, and the new you is already here, fully functional and present.

Think about the caterpillar morphing into the butterfly, a beautiful analogy for change in the spiritual sense. We all feel like a caterpillar at times, an ugly, undeveloped self (I personally don’t think caterpillars are ugly, I think they’re kinda cute in their pudgy way!). We all want to be the butterfly, the gorgeous finished product, flying about in grace and beauty, experiencing bliss everywhere we go. We all want to be seen as beautiful, respectable, and lovely. How do we get to that? It isn’t so easy, some would say.

We see people who have become the finished product, a successful, beautiful, powerful human being who has it all together. We all see people who we respect, admire and wish we were like, right? However, those people did not come into it without a lot of work on themselves spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically.

We all want to be the butterfly, but do we really want to go through the process that it takes to become that? There is a molting period, a liquification of self that is part of that process of going from the form of caterpillar to butterfly. It doesn’t necessarily look like a pleasant process, morphing into another form. Literally there has to be a breakdown of the first form, a dissecting or dissolution process, and then there is room in reality for the new form to be born.

It is a death and birth process, and both of those processes tend to be messy, dramatic, and difficult in their own respects. When you do both together, it gets even messier and more difficult! Death and rebirth at the same time are a superb event indeed.

Think about what you see in yourself as the caterpillar, the undeveloped and “first form” type of self. You might be all caterpillar in your opinion, or some percentage of caterpillar versus a percentage of butterfly. Perhaps you’ve been working on yourself for quite a while and you already transformed some parts of yourself that were “ugly” or undeveloped before now. Perhaps you feel like you might even be getting close to being a butterfly. Just examine where you think you are in the morphing process of the death of the old self and the birth of the new self.

Truly, the new self was always there, just as the butterfly was always there in the caterpillar. It isn’t visible before the transformation, but the blueprint and the potential was always there and present. I think of the new self as the eternal, deeper self, the You that was always present, even as the idea of yourself as a human seemed to take precedence for a while in the first part of your life.

The eternal self that you are is the butterfly, and it was always there. It isn’t born or created, it is only the idea of being a human version of self as the sole identity, the caterpillar, that needed to be liquefied and disintegrated. Then the already present butterfly underneath the illusion can emerge from the cocoon of change.

What is your version of the cocoon? What is your version of the cauldron or catalyst for change? How is it that you are disintegrating the idea that you are just a human, mortal self with a specific name and identity? How are you molting into the new form, seeing yourself as immortal and eternal self? How are you becoming aware that you are consciousness dreaming itself to be a specific human with a certain collection of experiences? Your cocoon of change is unique to you, and you are inside it, searching, seeking, and spiritually growing.

I would encourage you to simply stop and be the butterfly that you already are. Stop all the figuring, strategizing, fixing of yourself, and all the searching. You are already what you want to become. All you have to do is literally “drop” the old form, the old ideas of self and step out of who you think you are for just a moment. It is only a matter of readjusting your perceptions of who you think you are in the journey between caterpillar to butterfly.

It doesn’t actually take work or effort on your part to become the new self. The caterpillar does not “work” to become the butterfly. It doesn’t “do” anything! It simply waits for the old form to drop away, being patient while the discomfort of dissolution happens, if it is uncomfortable at all. Maybe it’s not.

Maybe it is us who makes the morphing process so difficult. We are so mind focused as a species and it might well be ourselves who are interfering with how easy the process of letting go of the old form. We can simply let it fall away, but in our own minds we find that hard to be at ease with. We have to make it hard and uncomfortable, for some reason.

Discomfort and difficulty might not be the nature of the process of transformation at all. Perhaps the period of transition from caterpillar to butterfly is not that difficult. Perhaps it is a state of bliss and relaxation for the caterpillar as it becomes the butterfly.

I encourage you to look at how you might be interfering with your own process of transformation from the old self to the new self. Perhaps it would be so much easier if you just rest your mind, don’t try to fix anything, and simply be present in the moment in a relaxed state of mind, patient with the process of the old falling away and the new showing up. It doesn’t have to happen overnight, and perhaps that is where much of your dissatisfaction with the process is coming from. You want the butterfly to be in full flight already, but there is a period of dissolution and resolution still happening. You can’t rush that process.

Be patient. The butterfly-you is present and already perfect, already formed. All you have to do is relax, drop the old stories and identities, and simply let your eternal nature emerge. It is actually very simple. Sure, some of your old caterpillar ways might reappear and assert themselves now and then, but you can always redirect your awareness back into the butterfly-you at any and all times.

You could think of the human condition as the caterpillar, and the eternal self that you are as the butterfly. Both exist, both have form in the same lifetime, and you are able to switch back and forth between both of those forms. The goal is to rest in the butterfly version of self more often than you might now, but that comes. It is a lifelong goal, a lifelong period of readjustment.

Be at peace. You do not have to fix everything in your personality. That all becomes “fixed” automatically when you shift your point of view into that of the eternal self rather than that of the struggling human. You do not have to find anything that you don’t know about already, it is all there inside you. It is innate knowing within you. All you must do is relax and let the butterfly come forth. It is already here, present and completely whole. Simply drop the old forms and ideas, the old ways of being, and the new you is already here, fully functional and present.

Once a little boy was playing outdoors and found a fascinating caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it.

The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.

One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy worriedly called his mother who came and understood that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon. The mother explained to the boy how the caterpillar was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.

The little boy was thrilled to hear about the changes his caterpillar would go through. He watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.

At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!

The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He ran to get scissors, and then walked back (because he had learned not to run with scissors…). He snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!

As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He knew that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.

But neither happened!

The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings.

It never was able to fly…

As the boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong his mother took him to talk to a scientist from a local college. He learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle. In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.

As you go through school, and life, keep in mind that struggling is an important part of any growth experience. In fact, it is the struggle that causes you to develop your ability to fly.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE