Regaining Wholeness

“Where are you rushing to young man? You’re already there.” — Old Venetian Saying We’ve been conditioned to lean forward in time, to chase after the red balloons, the dangling carrots, the golden ring, the hottie, the soul mate, the ideal weight, the image of success. We hurry through time, afraid that we’ll miss it. It’s always just up ahead, that thing that always eludes your grasp. Gotta keep going so that you can keep reaching toward it. When we are goal oriented, rather than path oriented, we live in a state of chronic time sickness. We hurry distractedly through time trying to get someplace we think we see up ahead. Meanwhile, the time we are living in, the nowever, is degraded by our trying to hurry through it to get to where we think we want to be. But no matter how much we try to hurry through time, we are still always in the nowever. Our lives unfold and people, places and things all change, but it’s always us in the nowever. If we are preoccupied with the current people, places and things, or the ones that we hope to find in the future, then we neglect those [...]

Your ego may judge the light and dark threads of the tapestry as good or bad, but a non-dualistic view sees them as interrelated. John Toland’s biography of Hitler begins with a quote from a Graham Greene character: “The greatest saints have been men with a more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.” The dark side of the force is implicit in the Babylon Matrix. We must accept it, but not allow ourselves to be ruled by it. Although history is largely about the dark side of the force, we must not fully externalize the dark side, but must first grapple with it from within. If you are not aware of the dark side of the force operating within yourself then you are in a state of dangerous blindness and the dark force is able to act as an autonomous complex within you. Many people are in a state of denial about this because “dark side of the force” sounds dramatic and exotic, something pertaining to serial killers and Nazis. Actually, it is more often mundane and may be ubiquitous in our thinking. Here’s a very mundane example of the [...]

I Stood Upon a High Place I stood upon a high place, And saw, below, many devils Running, leaping, and carousing in sin. One looked up, grinning, And said, “Comrade! Brother!” – Stephen Crane (1871-1900) The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Everything has a shadow side. If you don’t see the shadow of a person, you don’t see the person and are blinded by idealization. If you don’t see your own shadow, you are in denial, and will project your shadow onto others. When I took this detail shot of the person in the photo I had not seen much of their shadow. Since they are a Gemini I knew that there was probably a hidden twin that I hadn’t met. When the darker twin came forward it was painfully apparent. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t see a person’s shadow, you have not seen the whole person and should not relate to them as if you had. Many people begin romantic relationships from a place of idealization and are sometimes even foolish enough to make long term commitments based on that woefully incomplete comprehension of the other person. Similarly, if you are not [...]

Don’t lose your power and magic to infatuation and other forms of relationship obsession, or to the longing for glittering objects. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on that. Many human beings are extremely vulnerable to romantic obsession, falsely believing that they can only find wholeness through capturing someone else. One of the most powerful enchantments or spells of the Babylon Matrix is the delusion that wholeness (the inner alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine, yin and yang, within) can be imported from the outside. Dominated by this delusion, a person becomes a ring wraith forever seeking “The Precious,” which may be the Hottie, money, celebrity or some other combination of outside objects and events. But wholeness can only be found where it already lies—within. I recommend the book Love 101 which the late Peter McWilliams generously posted free online. What follows are my favorite quotations from the book: The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as [...]

Bring your masculine and feminine sides together to find your vision. From a neurological point of view, the highest creativity occurs when the right and left hemispheres are working together. Some people confuse androgyny (an intrapsychic orientation) with bisexuality (an interpersonal orientation) or hermaphrodism (an anatomical/genital anomaly). Hermaphrodism, as June Singer uses the term, means the confusion of masculine and feminine, an immature pastiche of qualities typical of rock stars and rock star wannabes, costumed adolescents, and also their admirers. But androgyny is a deep intrapsychic orientation, an integration, a fusion (not a confusion) of your archetypal masculine and feminine aspects. The androgynous person has creative access to the left and the right hemispheres, to critical thinking and intuition. From the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: “Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female [not] be female…then shall you enter [the Kingdom].”

Your ego may judge the light and dark threads of the tapestry as good or bad, but a non-dualistic view sees them as interrelated. John Toland’s biography of Hitler begins with a quote from a Graham Greene character: “The greatest saints have been men with a more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.” The dark side of the force is implicit in the Babylon Matrix. We must accept it, but not allow ourselves to be ruled by it. Although history is largely about the dark side of the force, we must not fully externalize the dark side, but must first grapple with it from within. If you are not aware of the dark side of the force operating within yourself then you are in a state of dangerous blindness and the dark force is able to act as an autonomous complex within you. Many people are in a state of denial about this because “dark side of the force” sounds dramatic and exotic, something pertaining to serial killers and Nazis. Actually, it is more often mundane and may be ubiquitous in our thinking. Here’s a very mundane example of the [...]

As we come to believe that we need the baubles of the external world to be whole and submit to social conditioning, we become stereotyped and mechanical. Seeing the mechanical nature of our conditioned personalities can be a dark night of the soul, but is the only way for the Tin Man to find his heart. Free will needs to be earned and requires the ability to break from our mechanical, habituated subpersonalities. The path of evolution is in returning to our essence after being conditioned into mechanicalness. According to the Taoist I Ching, evolution occurs on the path of “reverse alchemy,” the path of “returning to the Tao.” Evolution does not necessarily occur by perpetual attunement to the Tao. Daisies, spiders and viruses live perfectly attuned to the Tao, never deviate from it, but don’t have the potential for individual evolution that human beings possess. We are born in touch with our essence, but relentless programs of conditioning work to separate us from our original essence. However, if we are able to travel the difficult path of reverse alchemy, undo the many layers of conditioning and restore our original essence, then we will be evolved. Consider this a propitious [...]

Grounding yourself by finding your center. According to the I Ching, you have only one obligation in life — to get your relationship to yourself right. Do that and your relations to sex, time, money, power, food, body, career, society, the cosmos, etc. will all be as good as outer conditions allow. Omit, distort or neglect any part of your relationship to yourself and all those other relationships are accordingly skewed, diminished or lost. Working toward the empowered stance of inner independence and androgynous inner wholeness makes you as effective as possible in the outer world. For example, if you are a martial artist trying to survive an attack by multiple assailants, your primary responsibility is managing your relationship to your own body and its movement through space and time. Mastering your relationship to your own body gives you the maximum chance of defending yourself from the bodies of the attackers. Any flaws in your relationship to your own body diminish your chances of surviving the attack. Yes, we are all interdependent in many ways, and it can be fascinating and fulfilling to be with others, but we must also be inwardly independent and disentangle our emotional/psychological/spiritual equilibria from the [...]

In order not to live continually clouded by the many wizards of deception, you must keep your will focused on pulling back the curtain. First you must never lose sight of the curtain and the awareness that there are forces just out of sight, manipulating our perception, even constructing the reality we perceive. We look about at a world of seemingly solid objects while intellectually we know it is mostly empty space inhabited by subatomic particles, some of which are clouds of probability not to be located in any particular place. We tend to experience our bodies as a coherent whole when we are actually a cooperative network of fifty trillion cells, each of them like a small city with numerous processes going on simultaneously. There is, in other words, a curtain hiding vast complexity and strangeness from all of our sense perceptions. For example, a living, breathing person enters my perceptual field and stands before me. I do not see his fifty trillion cells. I do not see the bizarre world of subatomic particles or vibrating multi-dimensional super strings or whatever it is that makes up those cells. What I do see is ambient light reflecting off the topography [...]

Be wary of those who approach with hollow intentions. Choose your companions with infinite care. Know the difference between an acquaintance and a friend or spiritual ally. Are you hanging out with people with whom you would trust your life? Life is too short to spend in hollow company when it could be lived with true friends, soulmates, spiritual allies, or creative solitude. Some people approach us with hollow intentions; they seek us for pleasure, manipulation, money, power or just out of impulsive, neurotic chaos. We must be discriminating and set strong boundaries between those who approach with unworthy intentions and ourselves. T.S. Elliot wrote a haunting poem entitled “The Hollow Men.” Here are a couple of excerpts: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless… The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley You are not the first to notice that there are amazing numbers of hollow people. Lacking a strong individual core, hollow folk are inevitably determined by outside conditioning. Hollow folk in the Fifties lived [...]