I heard a Jerry Cantrell song this week I had never really listened to before. His first solo album from 2002. Degradation Trip, a song entitled “Spiderbite.” In the song, he sings the following:
A caterpillar body and a butterfly brain.
I haven’t been able to put it away. In nature, the caterpillar is the base nature, the body that has to change into something else entirely. It moves slow, is green like new leaves, and is at the bottom of the food chain.
Then, the caterpillar makes a cocoon around itself and it completely shifts into a butterfly.
The butterfly can fly, is multi-colored and gorgeous, and is only food to those who can catch it.
It’s like enlightenment. Humans cannot become another being, though, so the shift to butterfly is a quantum change only.
Enlightenment is like the caterpillar turning into the butterfly—it’s just you will be the only one to know the shift occurred.
“A caterpillar body with a butterfly mind,” to me, means an enlightened human.
It is very difficult to be enlightened in the mind yet stuck here on earth in this base body. Therefore, once enlightened the only thing that matters is chasing happiness.
I have decided that if you want happiness, you have to create it. I’ve learned you must make the shift to butterfly mind to create happiness the correct way.
Beware: I have also learned that creating happiness means tearing down everything archaic—things that no longer fit the paradigm of your life. You must drop all habits that no longer align with your happiness path, too. For instance, if you are unkind to people, you are 1) not yet a butterfly mind and 2) you are sowing hate, not love and happiness will be unattainable to you.
You must also have a complete disconnection from any and all things, circumstances, and people who do not align with your happiness.
Shucking off what you no longer need and do not want is always more difficult than attaining your desires.
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