Wholeness is not a static position. It’s an ever unfolding, deepening process, leading to more clarity, greater consciousness, and a more profound appreciation our developing relationship with the Self, the deeper directing force of our lives. We gain more and more information about our own life patterns and our deep unconscious forces, including the Shadow, so the ego can gain more consciousness about its self and this life it is living.
The aware/conscious ego, sitting, you might say, on The Unconscious, has as its task the integration of all the material that comes to consciousness which has been residing in the Unconscious. This material rises to consciousness ‘when it is time.’ Those who’ve gone through this journey, experience it as a mysterious process controlled by the Self that opens the Unconscious a little at a time, providing more of our personal material, our ancestral heritage, and the collective Unconscious to the conscious mind. This hitherto unavailable material helps us know ourselves better and facilitates the individuation process. This is like learning any new subject, we move forward as we’ve integrated what’s come before. The Unconscious, in my experience, has an amazing sense of timing and presents that which ’comes next’, when it’s time to forward the action. The psyche likes movement and it likes the still point where we rest in order to see it, ’get it’, and integrate it.
As I have said earlier, most people live their lives without being conscious of their inner world. They deal with the outer world as if it’s the only world there is. They meet whatever challenges, difficulties, advancements, growth opportunities, and set backs as just what happens in life, perhaps getting angry at the way others treat them or their bad luck, or being happy at their good luck, frequently fighting to preserve ‘what’s right’, and getting others to agree with them so they can get their way and be in charge, and/or somehow find their way. Carl Jung said that ‘Nature does not put the question as to the meaning of their lives in the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one need answer.’ Therefore, if the question isn’t there, there is nothing to answer. We pickup our pieces and go on. And, we’ve seen, if the question is placed in our mouths, we really must answer. The poet speaks of being chased through the labyrinths of time by the hound of heaven. My experience is that if the call comes, it will be insistent and ‘will continue to up the ante’ to persuade us to answer. It can be relentless. Whether conscious or unconscious, we have the life we are given and we have to ‘Go for it, live our lives fully, take whatever steps are offered to us. We walk boldly into life, take on the difficulties, and move forward.’
If it is our lot in life be get conscious and live our lives ever deepening into this awareness, then we’re called to see what Life is all about, to see what we’re all about. We’re called, as Jung says, by ‘absolute/dire necessity’, to get conscious. to become conscious of what’s going on in our inner world, see how it fits in our pattern and why, and then how we might act with more awareness. We find we have no choice but to open the door and look. Look and see what parts of us, as well as how and why, are placing obstacles in our way and contributing to the difficulties in our lives. We see more clearly our talents and the gifts we can make to life. We see and accept the Shadow and understand how it has held and carried all the aspects of our lives that we weren’t yet able to ‘take on’, to live out. These aspects that weren’t in line with the Persona our ego was carefully constructing as the way to present us to the world in these earlier years, those aspects our younger self thought we ‘should’ be, which fulfilled the values of our family, society/culture, religion, friends, etc. Fitting in was good enough, until it wasn’t, even through we were living only a only a skeleton of our potential, and, still, unconscious about everything.
We’ve managed, with the help of the ego defense mechanisms to hide away anything thing that is ‘too much’ for us to take on because of our judgments and fears about it. Then, if getting conscious and opening the door to all of who we are and living a freer life, moving toward wholeness, is our path in life, circumstances will bring this necessity forward.
And we are called just to look upon Life as it is and see the many layers of this life that lives us. And we’re called to be witness to the forces of Life itself.
At this point, this dire necessity calls us. Otherwise we would not take this step.
Once some part cries out for help, acknowledges that all’s not right with our world, then something is mysteriously set in motion. And in its own time, the resources begin to appear that we need. The teacher appears. The process begins to begin.
We learn to observe without judgment that we might see more clearly. We begin to see our patterns and the inner reactions, beliefs, thought patterns that activate them, as well as the outer circumstances that contribute to our activation of the patterns. Then, without trying to get rid of it, we see the function of our patterns for some part of ourselves. From this place of curiosity and the excitement of ‘being on an archaeological dig’, we begin to see our own dynamics, and the circumstances which activate them and which perpetuate them. And we learn to see without self critical judgment. Just noticing. Just noticing from a place, ‘Oh, I see what that’s all about.’ We plumb our depths.
We begin see our own dynamics, hopefully from a position of non-judgment and compassion, from the Heart Center. Sooner or later we learn to really see our reactivity, our judgments about others, the pointing finger, our projections (both positive and critical on to others). We begin to see that our reactivity gives us major clues as to what’s going on. In addition, the Unconscious has its ways of bringing to our awareness what we need to see; it can be through illness, accident, loss of relationship, job, self esteem, position in the community, perhaps depression, anxiety, nervousness, or things just not being right, or maybe a ‘wow, I think I’ll do this!’. As we see the Unconscious dimensions of our psyche and how it all fits together, we begin to get a notion of how to conceptualize our lives. Change, transformation, the renovation begins with a house cleaning. We begin to see what to let go of. Not that we have a lobotomy, but that we are able to make clearer, more appropriate, loving responses to life.
In the early stages of life, we do our basic therapy, our human homework, we put our lives together as best as we can. We go about creating the Persona by which we live our lives and that makes us feel ‘like somebody’. Then, at some time, this Persona must fall by the wayside to give us the space we must have for what else wants to happen. A new picture of things begins to emerge. We sense things moving in a new direction. Perhaps slowly and subtly, old things begin to fall away and change begins. About the time we get comfortable with this first step, things shift again. One level of wholeness shifts to another level of wholeness, and to another and another and another. Fuller, more complete levels of wholeness. This reminds me of the trim tab on a large ocean liner. The trim tab is a small piece on the rudder of the ship. As the Captain begins to turn the ship around, it’s the very small movements of the very small rudder, with the even smaller trim tab that makes this possible.
The way I experienced it was that once I began to be aware that things needed to change, opportunities presented themselves, although I didn’t know this at the time. In retrospect, I see that my responsibility was to respond with a ‘Yes’ to the opportunity, or to the call. Relationships fell away, job changes began to happen, new relationships came onto the scene and then they fell away. Trim tab at work. I had no idea what was happening. I just knew that new things were occurring and I also knew that relationships and jobs to which I became attached fell away because they had served their purpose. My ego, however, was not in agreement with this, at all. This determination to have it ‘my way’ created tons of suffering. I thought that I needed everything that I was attached to. Thought I’d fall apart if ‘it wasn’t my way’, and God knows, ’ i’ liked to be in control. Nevertheless, I began to get it that ‘i’ wasn’t in charge. Reality was not what I thought it was. This set in motion a long developmental process that has shifted everything again and again and again, and it continues to this day. One example for me is how this website has presented itself and wanted to be.
When I began, I thought I’d be following a different line of development. I didn’t know this was what I was going to do. The forces kept presenting themselves. I could see that they were right, so I began to put myself in accord with them. Read More: About Judith, My Beginning, and My Path.
Wholeness requires that our ego stay conscious, aware, focused in the Heart Center, and again and again subordinating itself to the Self, following the inner voice as it presents itself. We buckle our seat be, prepare for the ‘E ’ticket ride at Disneyland, and embrace the process. ‘E’ tickets are the best rides in the park – unpredictable and scary- again and again, taking us to our edges. However, once you’ve ridden the E tickets, you don’t go back to the ‘A’ rides.
The Unconscious holds everything we need to see, know, experience, realize, and be. “The light you seek is in your own lantern’. We may utilize various outside teachers, books, movies, etc., but, ultimately, it comes down to this:
This is a full fledged willingness to moment by moment open to Unconditional Love, place ourselves in accord with the unfolding direction for our own lives from this Self (some might call it the Higher Self), be present to what is revealed to us and called for from us, and to trust the process and experience greater and greater degrees of Wholeness.
Trusting, and opening to the process, leads us to Peace. We experience peace in the midst of all the change, renovation and transformation. Peace, for me, became a trusting of the process, as well as of myself, when I’m in accord with these inner truths. And you know when you are in accord. Things flow. There is either a place to stand, or you don’t really need one.
Along the way, I saw that continuing surrender of the old beliefs of my ego was a good thing to do.
I accepted that it would take not less than a life time, and that this was a good thing.
I recognized the truth of ‘For This I’ve Come.’
I remembered that I’ve always been enough.
And, then, aware that I had some degree of comfort in navigating life on the physical plane, I was aware that I was faced with the next step of my journey:
releasing my attachment to the ego and the life I’d created, even the Ego and its Partnership with the Self, and I saw that the call was continuing the deepening to a deeper realization that had already begun a long time ago, and now dire necessity presented itself again.
Thought for Reflection
Has dire necessity presented its self to you?
What does it ask?