Maintain stability within the self, a sacred loving place, even as chaos reigns, even as the world crumbles from a known to an unknown form, even as that which you once thought you could count on can no longer be counted on. In times of great change and challenge, the individual is as important as the whole, for if the individual is not strong and steady the whole will collapse. Your own personal inner strength and condition, based in heart centeredness, no matter what comes to destroy, will uphold the energy of love and kindness so badly needed, so that from the ashes true love and compassion for all may arise. Remain focused on that, a positive outcome, no matter the path taken to arrive there. Indeed, you are in the midst of great change, but such change offers the opportunity for compassionate greatness to arise as well.
The feature song of Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance, asks the deepest question of all, what happens to the heart when we leave this world? The heart, after all, houses the deepest treasure of our Earthbound odyssey, love.
Love, as we experience it in this life, is a developmental process that begins post-birth in the raw emotion that cries out for attention, for comfort, food, and security. This is the love of primal attachment, facilitated by the inborn post-uterine archetypes triggered upon arrival at birth. Thus the rooting reflex in the infant, and the instincts to nurture, protect, and bond in the parents, combine to initiate the love odyssey of a lifetime.
Emotion is the love energy that roots us to this Earth as it compels us to attach through sensual desire and hunger for fulfillment. Without emotion we exist only on a mental plane, out of body, or in the head. No disrespect to the mental plane, but without emotion, there is no real connection to life.
Nonetheless, emotion as experienced through passion, need, and want is merely the outer wrapping of love that must be peeled away for love to truly take up residence in the heart, where love loves all. The overwhelming tantrum of anachronistic narcissistic, infantile entitlement to attention in adult years must transmute, to include the world beyond its own self, before it can reach another in the utter calm of true love.
What makes love such a powerful driver in this life is its intent for us to rediscover our lost wholeness. Life in this world of time and space, where people come and go, highlights our experience as distinct separate human beings. This is contradicted in quantum physics, where it can be demonstrated that, at a subatomic level, everything and everyone is energetically ONE. And that ONE only becomes separated into distinct physical particles when human beings interact with it.
Thus, we are fundamentally an interconnected ONE, having the solid dream of a life, that begins and ends as a separate human being. This manifest dream is merely a surface version of our true underlying interdependent Oneness. Thus, the love dramas of our lives are our surface attempts to find our way home to the latent reality of our underlying wholeness.
When Carlos Castaneda asked don Juan Matus which was the true reality, energetic or physical, don Juan’s reply was that both were real, although energetic reality was the ultimate reality. Physicists would agree. Newtonian physics and quantum physics are both right. One deals with the dream of physical reality, the other energetic reality. What is solid and separate is ultimately energetic and ONE.
We are apparently in this dream of separateness to fully experience the glue that binds us in our ultimate oneness, love. From childhood attachment to family, onto adolescent crush beyond the family, then onto the multiplicity of adult relationships throughout the life cycle, we project all that is missing in us onto people and objects, as we desperately seek to unite with, then mercilessly must let go of, everything, in death. This labyrinth of love teaches us, in dream after dream, to arrive at our One true love, love that loves all.
Though I know Leonard Cohen now knows the answer to the question he posed before he left this world, I venture an answer from this life.
Q: What happens to the heart when it leaves?
A: Transformation into the love of pure equanimity—love that loves all.
Beyond the stormy and cloudy skies of now, this is the love that our physical world dream is inevitably approaching. Full steam ahead!
Your real goal is wholeness and freedom, wholeness within yourself, all your fragmented parts brought safely home, and freedom from fear. Your fragmented selves are all the secrets you tell yourself, all the lies you uphold about yourself. And your fear rules you, keeping you safely ensconced in your secrets and lies. Accept your wholeness, all the parts of yourself you do not like, that you reject. And acquiesce to your fears; confront them, and in the process find your wholeness and your freedom. Only then will you truly know what it means to be all that you can be. Only then will you truly know what love is. And only then will you truly have achieved something, the real work of a lifetime.
The coming of night affords a natural break in continuity… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Most simply defined, the quality of our mental health reflects the degree of continuity we can maintain as our known selves, the familiar, separate human beings that we are. Familiarity rests upon a predictable world and a predictable self that interacts with that world. When our normal expectations of ourselves and the world are disrupted, our security and sanity are threatened, as reflected in psychiatric symptoms in response to this break in continuity.
Our notion of ourselves as separate beings traces back to the birth of consciousness, or the coming online of our ego. In biblical terms, this was the moment we were separated from the Garden of undifferentiated wholeness, Eden, and were cast into the world as separate, thinking beings, capable of our own decision making.
Alienated from our true energetic oneness with everything, where knowledge of what was right to do came as unthinking knowing—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call silent knowledge—our orphaned separate selves were challenged to find a way to successfully navigate life.
Thus began our history as thinking human beings, alienated from our original connection to direct silent knowledge. Knowledge obtained through thinking is grounded in rational cause and effect, observation and interpretation. Direct knowledge is channeled from the source through our greater energetic self, whom we lived more fully and intimately before the fall.
Ego, as a defined separate self, creates boundaries to ensure its unique integrity. These boundaries have the secondary effect of severing the ego’s connection to its greater energetic self, which lacks such defined boundaries. As a separate self, ego is constantly focused on its own importance as the means to maintain its integrity as a functional unit.
Nonetheless, the cynic in all of us sees through the falseness and limitations of the persona, or mask, that ego presents to the world. Underneath it all, ego is a fragile, inadequate part of the self, trying to hold its own in the world. Hence, its constant obsession with self-worth, self-esteem, and the positive attention of others, in order to bolster its fragile existence.
Our evolutionary destiny is driving us to regain our wholeness, the energetic self we left in the garden. To get there, we must break from our obsession with maintaining the self-important defense of our ego as a superior separate entity. In essence, we are all being called now to break the continuity of our ego’s stand as the one and only self.
Trauma could be defined as a break in the ego’s continuity, which forces it to confront the irrationality of power exercised beyond a rational world. Trauma levels ego; ego is completely humbled by a rupture that transcends its ability to assimilate. Lucky are those who have had the opportunity that trauma affords! And yet, we are all confronting the trauma of now!
The full assimilation of traumatic experience requires fluidity, the ability to go with the flow of what is or was, not the limits of what the ego expects the world to be. Healing, for the ego, requires an expanded ability to acknowledge power and forces that exist beyond its rational expectations.
Achievement of this expanded ego state is fundamental to ego discovering its true home, as an energetic being, first, and as a separate solid being, second. Ego is then positioned to accompany its energetic foundation on journeys in this world, and beyond, with access to the full library of silent knowledge.
Our time might be defined as a major break in continuity. Our world leaders are tricksters, who are unapologetically rupturing our expectations, throwing us into the thrill and the chaos of a tidal wave of unpredictability. From this perspective, they function like teacher shamans, recklessly opening a door, exposing us to our fuller energetic reality.
At the same time, they threaten the stability of mental health, which is dependent on a predictable world. And we see the casualties of this break in continuity in the shootings that abound daily. We are confronted with a collective PTSD of a world ego under fire. Nonetheless, healing can only be achieved by ego achieving the fluidity needed to navigate the greater energetic world that transcends rationality.
Our trickster leaders, ironically, mirror our greatest stumbling block to achieving that needed fluidity: self-importance. In fact, world leadership boldly embodies its separatist self-important superiority, ego’s greatest defense. We could say, that our leaders both deliver the punch and mirror the culprit that must be transcended if our ego is to truly find its way back to the garden of its energetic oneness with everything.
We have no choice now but to ride this train of break in continuity, as that train has already left the station without brakes. Change the metaphor, to that of the Tao, of the river that flows. Rather than try to push the river, as the ego used to do, become a riverwalker, one who knowingly walks with the flow.
Remain upon your path of change, and your path of heart, no matter what comes to distract you, to test you, to tease you. Your commitment to yourself, to your wholeness, body and spirit, is of utmost importance, even though there are many other important things to consider. If you are not okay, the world is not okay. That’s the bottom line. If you are unstable the world is unstable, for you and your energy effect everything around you. It’s good to remember this. When you are sad and depressed, sadness and depression find you. When you are in a state of joy and elation, notice how joy and elation naturally greet you in return. Find balance and equilibrium within yourself and discover that there is balance and equilibrium in the world outside of you too. Find peace within and discover that it naturally surrounds you wherever you roam. Life meets you where you are. If you want change, make it happen. All power lies within. Take that first step, and then another, and another. It all begins with you.
