Becoming the beloved
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-- T.S. Eliot, in
The Four QuartetsThis is a very important message, FOR ME. It puts the last 25 years of my life's journey into such clean perspective. Having been through tons of psychotherapy (starting at about 30) with many amazing counselors, guides, psychologists, and therapists, along with many other forms of group psychology exploration and work, both to heal my past and to learn more about my rather intense human nature, as well as tons of meditating, reading, and other forms of spiritual formation work (or maybe it has really been mostly His work in me on this one) over the last 10 years, accelerating and intensifying dramatically with the death of my father 5 years ago, at whose funeral I read the above piece of a T.S. Eliot poem, I can really relate to ...
what can happen at the end of all our exploring ...
"Becoming the beloved is simply pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the human ordinariness of who I am in my roles in life and what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about, and doing from hour to hour, minute to minute, every day. I must know myself to become more of, and ultimately more than myself."
-- Henri J.M. Nouwen
and how it happens ... (read slowly and chew well before digesting)
"At the very beginning of any inner transformational work, it is easy to feel frustrated and overwhelmed with the slow (if it even feels like any) progress that seems to be happening. It is also easy to begin to see our personality as an enemy that must be defeated since it is, after all, the repository and residue of so much unnecessary 'baggage' from our past, with all of its hurts, damage, and disappointments. When we are tempted to think this way, it is good to realize that the personality is not separate from us - in fact, it is an important and legitimate part of ourselves: the problem is simply that we so often mistake the part for the whole. Personality depends on our identifying with (vs. possessing) certain states, feelings, thoughts, and reactions even though whenever we do so, we experience ourselves as less than the totality of who and what we really are. We lose access to Spirit and the powerful realm of a deeper spiritual reality.
The personality is always composed of a small fraction of the total range of our potentials. It contains imitations (and limitations) of the real, more expansive qualities of our Essential nature which include joy, love, peace, compassion, strength, understanding, and many other priceless qualities. Moreover, our Essence awakens us to the beauty all around us - to the gifts of nature and the miracle that is other people. In every moment, there are treasures and sources of delight, if we could only keep our heads' eyes' limited sight in perspective and fully open our heart's eyes to them. In the world of personality, we are too filled with our own petty projects and preoccupations, worries and hopes to notice the exquisite pleasure of being alive and the astounding variety of life and relational possibilities.
But as we expand more fully into our Essential nature, our senses are awakened - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, intuiting. The world is more immediate and has a deeper impact on us; everything becomes more vivid and alive. We have all had moments in which a veil seems to have been removed so that the enchantment of even the smallest things touches us deeply. We experience the world once again with the innocence of a child, with all of the awe and mystery of life restored.
When we are functioning in personality, however, to varying degrees, our attention is caught up in imagination and is looking fearfully and tentatively to the future or painfully and shamefully toward the past. Personality is always in some kind of 'reaction' to the present moment. When we are functioning in Essence, we are grounded, present, and 'receptive' to the present moment. We see precisely what is necessary, and with exquisite economy, we are able to do it without unnecessary effort or resistance. We are capable, substantial, and real.
Further, because it is not what is real in us, but merely a construct in our minds, personality does not have any authority or power in itself. When we are lost in personality, it is not surprising that we often feel powerless, confused, and unsafe, because we are basing our identity on an artificial construct. If we are identified with something that is not real, then many things are going to be extremely threatening. Our entire identity structure has been built up in our memory and imagination, whereas our true power and authority comes from our Essence, from our contact with the Divine. (See the Henri Nouwen quote at the top.) And yet, ironically, we fear and resist opening to that which is most real in us. When we trust in the process and give ourselves over to it, however, our authentic self comes forth. The result is real integrity, love, authenticity, creativity, understanding, guidance, joy, power, and serenity - all of the qualities we are forever demanding that personality supply, and which it can never do so.
The part of this process that is so difficult to understand is that we do not have to do anything to experience our true nature. The almost magical part is that our old personality patterns change without effort on our part in proportion to the depth of awareness that we bring to them. All we need to do is to stop identifying with the agendas of our personality. The effort is in waking up and letting go. The rest will take care of itself.
Thus, no matter how entranced in our personality we are, the amazing thing about Inner Transformation Work is that things begin to change rapidly as we simply bring awareness to the compulsive aspects of our personalities. The more we allow ourselves to feel the pain of our self-abandonment, the Essential qualities that we have been longing for begin to arise in us. The unfinished business of childhood begins to resolve itself in our psyches and our hearts begin to heal. When this happens, the ego matures and becomes a suitable 'vessel' for further transformation. But until some degree of personality completion has taken place regarding the losses and vicissitudes of childhood, any spiritual attainment we have will be either fleeting or illusory.
Of course, the very fact of being receptive to spirituality can vastly accelerate the process of healing the deficits in our early development, provided we not use spirituality as an evasion for going through the whole healing process. And, by the same token, using the tools of psychology to heal the gaps in our development gives us the capacity to sustain spiritual states of consciousness. These two processes - the psychological and the spiritual - are therefore connected and need not be considered separate things; they are really stages in the full development of the complete human being.
From this perspective, saying that one is interested in spirituality but not psychology (or vice versa) is like saying that you want to learn to be a writer but are not interested in spelling or grammar, or that you want to be a doctor but do not care about biology. Psychology that does not address peoples' spiritual hungers is not going to lead to any complete and satisfying result. It is like climbing only half way up a mountain, or taking a dish out of the oven when it is only half-baked. We still get some benefits, but do not achieve the final goal. Psychology without spirituality is arid and ultimately meaningless, while spirituality without grounding in psychological work leads to vanity and illusions. Either way, disappointment and deception result. To be most effective, spirituality and psychology need to go hand in hand to reinforce the best in each other. (I feel like my life has resulted in me being cultivated as a bridge between these two worlds, assisting in the integration of them within growing human - including my own - consciousness.) Another challenge is the common belief that to live in Essence is to have left personality entirely behind. This is not the case since both personality and essence are integral parts of each other, two sides of the same coin - the whole self.
As one becomes liberated from the negative aspects of personality, Essence becomes more fully developed. Or, more aptly, the balance between Essence and personality shifts from personality to Essence until more of the self is living out of its Essence (that is, authentically, from the depths of its being - again, the Nouwen quote). The personality remains ready to be employed as a useful and necessary tool, but only as an extension and expression of the deeper, essential self - a self that, because it is an expression of Essence, remains unfathomable to the ego mind. Without some degree of personality to express the self in ordinary daily life, we could not communicate with each other and, ultimately, our Essence would be unrecognized and remain undeveloped.
The full development and expression of the true self, along with its unlimited access to the divine, is what we seek, and this cannot be done in a vacuum. Because we cannot live without form, our human Essence must express itself through the forms of our personality type, just as talents must be expressed in action if talent is to be developed. A dancing master does not become so perfect a dancer that the master no longer dances. Dancing is not forsworn as evidence of having achieved perfection: on the contrary, mastery is expressed by losing the self in the dance.
If we are fortunate, we are nurtured and guided in our development toward a stable, well-integrated ego, one that is therefore 'ripe' for transformation. The idea is not to return to the infantile state, but to mature as adults so that we can move ahead with the process of transformation. In the famous phrase of Jack Engler, 'You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,' and we must develop a whole, well-integrated personality before we can really 'give it up' in the transformational process. The healthy, well-functioning human ego plays a crucial role in the process of self-realization, and so our developmental deficiencies must be healed if our transformative experiences are to have any lasting effect.
Thus, personality is as necessary to the development of the soul as Essence, and it is to be used for living in the world and for contributing to it. Once we have begun to integrate and to live in Essence more habitually, we become the master of our ego and are increasingly able to express ourselves freely and appropriately. Ego no longer controls us: Essence speaks through personality. Our Essence is always available because at our deepest level, it is what we are. If we are on a spiritual path, we must begin to question our basic assumptions about ourselves and our identity. As awareness grows, we will open up to an expanded sense of self that includes more than the preoccupations of our personality; indeed, more than the personality can even imagine, and ultimately into full access to way more than our whole, entire selves, into divine love and wisdom."
-- Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, in "The Transformational Process"
This is such a powerful piece - and can be said in so many ways, both psychological and spiritual - that I will be chewing on it and using it often over the coming weeks, to be sure. I hope you found it both useful and enjoyable. And if you're still with me after reading it, and enjoying the ride, try this one on, as a further example of what I just said:
"The over-layering of personality on essence is often likened to clothing protecting our body, and we meet in many teachings with apparently strange ideas about the necessity of 'removing our clothes' and to 'become like little children.' This, for us, is a necessary first stage of growth, but must be done carefully. Yes, it is necessary to remove these old clothes, this personality, this 'old Adam,' but it is also necessary to then acquire a new protection for our essence—protection from the often harsh and potentially damaging influences of life in the modern human world. This new covering, or filter, is our true, mature personality.
And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side,
and the fowls came and devoured them up:
Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth:
and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
And when the sun was up, they were scorched;
and because they had no root, they withered away.
And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit,
some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
-- from the Gospel of Matthew
The analogy of the seed states that the outer husk is personality, which protects the kernel, or essence, allowing it to begin to grow. But too restrictive a husk, and the seed perishes. Too unprotective, it perishes as well. With a proper shell, or true personality, the seed is both protected and nourished and, when the time is right, and the environment is right, the husk falls away to allow the new growth - or mature, fully integrated individuality - to emerge.
What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
And what you sow is not the body which is to be,
but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.
But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.
-- Paul of Tarsus, First Letter to the School at Corinth (Corinthians 1)
-- John Raithel, in "The Path of Personal and Spiritual Development"
Labels: psychology and spirituality
