This blog post is an essay that forms part of the material in a Web Course from the Hero’s Journey Foundation, called Walking In Two Worlds.

Ally – defined - a person that cooperates with or helps another in a particular activity.

Synchronicity – defined – the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

The Mystery of Commitment

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius,
Power and magic in it.

– Goethe

When one is able to make a wholehearted commitment to one’s soul journey, as the most essential and heroic task one has for their lifetime, then something mysterious and profound begins to take place.   Goethe was a late 18^th century German writer, artist, biologist, and theoretical physicist, whose expertise and influence spanned a great many subject areas.  He expresses his wisdom in the passage above.

The moment one commits one’s self, then Providence moves too. When our heart’s desire acts in alignment with God’s will, our authentic lives begin to be supported both from within and from without.  We have a sense of being provided for; as well being able to provide what is needed for ourselves.  We have a sense of resourcefulness.

Joseph Campbell said that we have to just take that one step towards the gods, and they take ten steps towards us.  The unseen world needs our embodied actions, on behalf of the highest good of life, and so cooperates with our actions, when they are in service of this aim.

So a basic truth is this:  when we step forward with wholehearted intent towards our soul’s deepest calling, things get moving.   Goethe and Campbell reference this from an action-based, masculine, yang energy perspective.  We take that decisive step forward, extending ourselves beyond the familiar and into the unknown, and we find that the universe is also extending itself towards us.  We go forth, propelled outward – towards the world, and we trust the process of life to support us as we do.

There is also another level of commitment that needs to take place, which may be less obvious – but no less challenging.   It is an inward step, a deep surrendering within to what will come.  It is an inner undoing, as opposed to the outer doing, of the hero.   Here is Rumi, describes this deep level of letting go, so that we can learn to let Providence come to us:

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

Rumi encourages us to enter this state of being positively, letting go completely of our individual will long enough, and fully enough, for grace to enter us and carry us forward.    This is a deep level of surrender that we are usually reluctant to enter; thus we only find our way here in extreme ordeals or circumstances.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

Again, more honesty, humility, and surrender is required.  Being lost, undone, we have no perspective or vision, like the mouse.  Admitting we can’t sense the beauty of divine grace and Providence even as it approaches us.   But once it is very close to us, if we don’t see it, or say ‘No’ to the possibility of grace coming to us, we are beheaded – locked up in our heads, ensnared in hostile projections and judging states, and cut off from our hearts.   This indeed shuts tight the window the opens us to spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

In the authenticity of deep inner surrender, the ego is certain of nothing; the will is surrendered to whatever comes.  We can be sure only of our own embodied presence, in whatever state we are in, and of our vulnerable, willing heart.   This is the very condition that brings forth the compassionate minds and able bodies of allies.  This also elicits the same merciful (and often intriguing) response from the unseen world of spirit, surprising us with synchronistic happenings from beyond.

At our deepest surrender point, we can finally open ourselves to the help that wants to come, and open ourselves to be led and guided, balancing against the ways we must courageously step forward and make our own way.  As Rumi says, when we have totally surrendered to that beauty, we shall become a mighty kindness.  These are beautifully balanced words – mighty – present with all our might, strong and full, and yet kind – gentle, tender and nurturing.   Here, we become an embodiment of the zeal of eternity for a full and meaningful incarnation in space and time.

Allies

“You know, the jackass doesn’t have much sensibility.
But even he gains spirit from the company of his own kind.
But when the jackass crosses the desert alone,
how many more blows it takes to get him there.
Now, this is what this poem says to you:
If you’re not a jackass, don’t cross the desert alone!”

- Rumi

An ally, from our mythic journeying perspective, is a particular kind of helper.

He or she is one that is capable of being in it with us.  They are the ones who can stand beside us, as they have the knowledge of similarly lived-through experiences.  They are the ones who are able to understand the richness and the complexity of the mythic adventure.

An Ally is also someone who is able to have a differing perspective from our own, which we will need as we journey through life.   They are individuated people, clearly differentiated from us, yet also identified with us, and with our journeying ways.

Here is another essential task for the hero, the task of discernment, as he or she embraces their way of mythic adventure.  One must be able to learn the difference between doing things FOR one’s self, and doing things BY one’s self.   Many of us assume these two matters to be the same.  Of course, it is of the utmost importance, if one is to become the hero of one’s own life, that one act wholeheartedly on behalf of those matters, which bring one towards being fully alive.   No one else can do that for us.

Yet we can’t afford to confuse this vital way of living with selfishness, because it is in fact the very opposite of self-centered ways.   The meaning and vitality the hero receives by being true to their own path is precisely what is needed, so that he or she has what it takes to be able to give of their aliveness to others.  This is what true service is about, which goes beyond the charity of one’s actions.

However, it is foolish and prideful to think that one can make one’s way solely on one’s own.  We all need helpers.  Many of us have justifiable reasons why we resist or refuse help from others.   Most of this reasoning is a defense against the vulnerability of opening, and learning to accept that powers greater than ourselves can lead us, restore us, and ultimately, transform us.

When I undertook the painstaking ordeal of intensive studying for my state’s psychology licensing exam, while also having a full-time psychotherapy practice, I began asking for help wherever I could get it.   My mother, sister and close friends provided me with meals; I didn’t have to cook for myself even once in the four months of studying.   People took care of mundane details for me.   Friends ran my errands, family helped out with caring for my daughter.  I went to New York City to take a prep course, a kind of help I typically would have viewed as unnecessary.  I had numerous people tell me they were praying for my success.   I was provided a suite in a religious convent, where I studied for long periods of time with no distractions.   I was deeply moved by these constant gestures, and I am once again, as I recall them.

Over the four-month period, an inner transformation began to take place: I no longer resisted certain topics I had dreaded, like inferential statistics; I actually took up an interest in learning them.  I followed the advice of the prep course, and took regularly scheduled mini-tests.   A sustained focus and intensity developed; I began to get energy from my effort.  One day I became aware that my old fear of failing had fallen away.  Passing or failing the examination no longer defined me.  The fear was simply not there – it was somehow gone, faded into the background of something larger.

One day it struck me that I had already passed the real test – the one of self-acceptance, no matter the outcome.  I was deeply contented by the realization that I had allies who could rally in a big and extended way for me when I needed them.   Passing the licensing exam took on this new and larger perspective, and I relaxed.  There was no more dread of failing, and having to do it all over again.  I was no longer concerned about taking the exam, or receiving the results.  If I had to choose between my allies and a license, there was no question which one meant more to me.   In the end, I happened to pass the exam, but more importantly, it was more a celebration of how much I was cared for, which mattered much more to me that my own performance.

Synchronicity

“Synchronicity as a term explains nothing, it simply formulates the occurrence of meaningful coincidences which, in themselves, are chance happenings, but are so improbable that we must assume them to be based on some kind of principle, or one some property of the empirical world.”

- Carl Jung

Synchronicity is that unignorable thing that rivets our attention in the present moment. It brings something that was deep in the background of our awareness suddenly to the foreground.  It is an indicator that something wants us to be paying attention, and that mysterious forces are at play.  This feeds our sense of adventure, provides us with a moment of ‘swing’, one that can propel us forth on our journey.  It is something that has an intangible origin point, coming that other world, and brings something forward in this world for us to glimpse, as a kind of guidepost.   Synchronistic happenings are like sudden turns in the road; they can change the focus and direction of our journey in an instant.

To summarize, synchronicity is that which both captures our attention, and also causes us to pay more attention to an unseen track that is there, waiting for us.   Synchronicity helps support one of the primary functions of myth, which is to pull us forward in life, and onto that very track that is meant for us.   Joseph Campbell emphasized this dynamic repeatedly in his teaching:

If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.

When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.

I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you
that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else

- Joseph Campbell

Redefining Heroism: To Be in Alliance with One’s Highest and Best Self

Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself…His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.  Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.

- Herman Hesse, Demian

In the Implicate Order, the totality of existence is enfolded within each ‘fragment’ of space and time – whether it be a single object, thought or event.  Thus everything in the universe affects everything else because they are all part of the same unbroken whole.

- David Bohm

Ultimately, synchronicity helps to guide us towards an alignment with our highest and best purpose in life.  We learn to say “YES” to our own largeness, our own potential, and to line up wholeheartedly with this aim.  It is an alignment with our full commitment to the journey that is meant only for us, and to the one journey that will take us, and pull us forward.  This is an essential and consciously repeated internal action step that must be undertaken by anyone who seeks to be the hero of their own life.  Here is a prayer for

“On my own mythic adventure, let the exact circumstances and opportunities come to me that will inevitably bring forth the highest and best self within me.”

“All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time.  The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.”

-       Carlos Castenada

Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you’re going about it any more that you would be fixed if you were setting about to paint a great work of art.  Be alert; be self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, you can actually rise to it.

-       David Bohm

When we are open to being helped by people that matter to us, and when we can feel carried by unseen forces, we enter into the way of beauty.   Our willingness to be in alliance with others provides us with a sense of being intimately loved and cared for through meaningful companioning.

Accompanied by journey companions, and deeply struck from time to time by uncanny and improbable occurrences, we begin to cultivate the ‘extra-ordinary attention of the spirit-warrior’, as described by Carlos Castenada.  We are on alert, being self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, and our ‘cubic centimeter of chance’ appears in front of our eyes, we are ready for it, and can act decisively.

As we prepare to face adventures and confront ordeals, the heroic aspect of our nature must practice two things: active waiting and decisive acting.   When we learn to wait with alert attention, with one foot in the world of daily routine, and one foot in the realm of mystery and adventure, we must be ready and be patient.  We are patient because in our hearts we know that it is inevitable that the gods will give us chances.  Our unique opportunity to step towards largeness will come.

And when it comes, we must be able to act decisively.  To say yes to the adventure, and accept that it will turn into an ordeal at some moment.  And in that moment of challenge, when we find our authentic and vital response to the ordeal, we have become contributors to living.  This is modern day heroism, and we are all called to play the part we were born for, no matter how we’ve played it to date.  Today could be the day your window of opportunity opens.   Or perhaps tomorrow.

Remember, that which you are seeking, is also seeking you.

- Michael Mervosh

Boon – a symbol of life force energy, geared to the needs and requirements of the one on whom it is bestowed.  The ‘pearl beyond all price’.

Return – to turn one’s attention back to (something); a feeling of coming back or recurring after a period of absence; to feel, say or do in response to (something).

The hero returns, born again, and must survive the impact of the world.

“In loving the spiritual,
you cannot despise the earthly.
The purpose of the journey is compassion.
When you have come past the pairs of opposites,
you have reached compassion.
The goal is to bring the jewel back to the world,
to join the two things together.
We are not there until we
can say “yea” to it all.”
-       Joseph Campbell

When the hero-quest has been accomplished…
the adventurer must return with their life –transmuting trophy.
The full round, the norm of the monomyth,
requires that the hero shall now begin the labor
of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece,
or the sleeping princess back into the kingdom of humanity,
where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community,
the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.
But the responsibility is frequently refused.
-       Joseph Campbell

We have all experienced moments of bliss; we all have had mystical, magical encounters with nature, with our lovers, and with the seen and unseen forces of the universe.  These moments live outside of time.  They enrapture us and capture us; they fill us with wonder and awe.  Moments of mystery and soul connection that transport us, move us, inspire us.  They unmistakably connect us to something larger than and beyond our known selves.

We can’t make these experiences happen, even though we can seek them out.   We can create and enter the necessary conditions within which they may occur.  When these moments outside of time do happen, we are surprised, over and over again; we are filled with grace and gratitude.

In order to allow this mystical enchantment to take place in our hearts, we must surrender control, open, and say yes to what comes.  Our spiritual center of gravity turns towards the unknown, and the unknowable.   We enter the realm of mystery, we feel carried by a spirit of adventure.  We cannot know the outcome of our endeavors in advance, nor can we attach ourselves to these outcomes.

As we take an authentic soul journey, we experience success and failure, and we learn and grow from both.  This is especially true of our failures.  We enter the light and we enter the darkness, and when the adventure goes well, we find the unifying life force energies in between and beyond each of these polarities.

When we journey in this way, we enter the reality of mythic adventures and ordeals.   Through these experiences, we are destined to feel our lives being pulled downward and inward, then forward and outward yet again, like Jonah from the belly of the whale.

Ultimately, by going through these mythic encounters that move us beyond space and time, we discover something about how the ‘zeal of eternity’ wishes to embody us, and express itself through our unique personality and circumstance.  This is the discovery of the boon, the vital and meaningful inner life, which awaits us at the core of our very being.

Then we must return, once again, to that which was at once familiar, and perhaps now foreboding.   We must find our way home again.

Crossing the Return Threshold

The first problem of the returning hero
is to accept as real, after an experience
of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment,
the passing joys and sorrows,
banalities and noisy obscenities of life.
Why re-enter such a world?
-       Joseph Campbell

Those of us who have had the experience of life a giving, mystical ‘other-worldly’ encounter can certainly relate to the disenchanting aspect of returning to what we would rather eliminate or leave behind in our lives – crowded airports, heavy traffic congestion, standing in lines, stacks of (e)mail, un-stocked refrigerators, hassled and stressed family members.  We inevitably feel again the confining nature of everyday life inside of four walls.  We feel bound by the routine obligations we have undertaken within the culture we inhabit, and know so well.

As we re-enter the dense and demanding atmosphere of daily life, the beauty, mystery and eloquence of the timeless, mythic realm can feel far away in a hurry.  Experiences that were momentous just a few days ago can now seem silly or irrelevant in the midst of the day’s normal routines.

We may feel ourselves wanting to turn away from the return back to earthly life.   The appeal and lure of the mythic adventure pulls us back.   We avoid grounding ourselves back into our familiar physical locations in space and time.   We can immediately begin to abandon the fulfillment and the promise of mythic adventure, losing faith that it will now begin to arise from within the midst of daily life, and that it can bring forth new love where we are presently planted.

For many of us, as we return home, we may feel out of place in our old worlds, in the same ways we might have felt initially lost or uncertain in the mythic adventure.

We can feel lost in the cement jungles and rectangular forests of urban landscapes.   As we re-enter the selves we have been in these worlds, it can feel as if the clothes we once wore no longer fit us, and we don’t yet know what else to wear, or what our new size is.  It is to be expected that we will feel ‘out of place’ in places that once suited us very well.

Joseph Campbell tells us very clearly that the problem we face is to maintain one’s sense of the eternal in the face of immediate earthly pain or joy.  The pull towards temporal life, and the fruits of this world, draws our attention and focus away from the new spiritual center we have discovered, as part of our boon.   We can be pulled instead, sometimes as strongly as ever, towards the more peripheral crises and dramas of the current circumstance or moment, and become re-absorbed in them.

This is where the hero will fall or fail, losing sight of the boon of new spiritual awakening and awareness.   We need some kind of spiritual insulation to keep the seeds of the boon nourished, and to keep remembering ourselves to the newly forming identity.  And we must also re-define what ‘home’ is to us, and where that is located within us.

Redefining Our True Home

The sense of ‘home’ we all know and learn to cherish is a place of shelter, nourishment, safety and warmth.   It is being contained in a desired and familiar way, known deep in the bones of our being, deep in the heart of what we know best.  We are wanders, seekers, and journeyers, who also long for home.

As part of our return, we are called to re-examine and re-define the difference between one’s house and one’s home.   What is the difference is between a physical shelter and a storage unit for our possessions, and that sense of space and place where we bring our hearts, minds and bodies for rest, refuge and sustenance.

We tend to feel at home in places and spaces where we can feel most like our real or true selves.  This is not necessary a physical location, though it often involves a relationship to a particular exterior space.   For instance, I feel deeply at home in various mountain terrains, for reasons I cannot rationally explain.   Yet I also feel at home, to this very day, as an urban city dweller, especially at night, and especially when I am in the south side of the city in which I was born and raised.

I also feel bucolic sense of home in the realm of various forest regions: the green fields and open skies of rural environments, ancient and soulful, unconcerned with modern technological progress and aspiration.  From time to time, I feel a somewhat melancholic pull to reside in the midst of nature’s sounds, smells and visual delights, a certain kind of timeless, country comfort.

In another sense, I feel at home among the company of family members in one way, and at home in a very different way when I am among the adventurous soul journeyers who have become kindred companions to me.

We all need some anchoring, some actualized sense of place, where we can rest in ourselves, and prepare ourselves for future adventures and meaningful experiences.

Where do you feel most at home?  With whom do you feel most at home?  What reflecting mirrors do you need; where do you long to be most; what best reveals to you a sense of ‘at-home-ness’ within yourself?

From the opposing perspective – where does the wanderlust in you live?  Where are you restless and ever-on-the-move?   Where are you not yet at home?

Remembering the Boon

One of the fundamental tasks for the returning hero is remembering.  One must be willing and able to ‘re-member’ to one’s self forgotten, lost, unknown or disowned aspects of one’s eternal soul nature.  The purpose of the heroic journey is to re-connect with and re-member to an essential soul calling: a talent, a capacity, a certain something that has risen to the surface from within, that has come into awareness from the deep wellspring of one’s eternal being.

These often come forth as a result of the adventures and ordeals we undertake.  They create the exact circumstances and conditions needed to elicit the vital and re-creative life force energies from within us that reveal to us the boon – the deep knowing of one’s soul gift to the world.

Once we achieve this discovery of the boon in the mythic realm of adventure, this self-revelation can be easily lost to us as we return home.  We become vulnerable to one of two fundamental ways of failure as we attempt to bring back our boon.

One way we fail in our return home is by over-attaching to what we have discovered.  In the Buddhist tradition, the problem would be termed as one of ‘grasping’.   We cling to what feels important to us; we attach a kind of ‘specialness’ to it.  This kind of ‘preciousness’ begins to cause us to narrow and control the flow of vital energies within.  We become willful, and want to lock ourselves into a path that becomes confining by taking our gift too literally, too specifically, or too preciously.

I remember a council sharing that took place among our Hero’s Journey stewards a good number of years ago.   As part of our annual week long Journey Intensive, those who are the stewards and keepers of our Journey ways create a Spirit Fire.  A Spirit Fire is a ritual fire that burns continuously throughout the life cycle of the Journey – from the time of the journeyer’s first arrival at our base camp, to the final departure from our community space.  It is a living symbol of the Spirit, which flows within each of us, and also of the Great Spirit of life, from which we all have come, and to which we are all connected.   All of the stewards see to it that this fire is kept burning, day and night.

The teaching is that we all must learn to tend to our inner fires, and keep them burning, through the joys and sorrows of our life.

In our opening talking stick council one year, one of our men shared how the year before, he felt that it was important to him to light a particular votive candle for himself from the week long Spirit Fire, and carry that lit fire home with him, in order to keep his own inner fire burning.   He thus indeed light his own flame candle, and kept it close to him, carefully protecting it from the element of wind, throughout all of his preparations to return home.

This became his primary focus as he departed the mountain in his vehicle.  Yet by the time he came to the end of the six-mile descent from our base camp, the flame had somehow become extinguished.   He felt defeated, and was despairing about how quickly the flame can go out.

Slowly something new came to light in him – the light of awareness.  He came to realize that he must let go of the experience he just had, and stop clinging to it.  He had to allow the fire to go deeper within himself, beyond what he could see, and just let it come alive through him, when it was needed.   He had to become the light, when the light was necessary.

This was a far bigger challenge than keeping a literal candle flame burning, but also more vital, and more meaningful.  Moving from a literal and specific ego attachment to the outcome of our vision, and to move deeper towards the realization of the spiritual fire that burns in the interior space of our being, is a necessary step towards the integration of the soul’s gift within the self.

Another way we fail to remember the boon is precisely the opposite difficulty.  We fail to take hold of what is truly ours, and ours alone, to take.  We fail to actualize our unique soul gifts.  We sometimes do not make enough insular time to go through the necessary thresholds of the journey back to home.  Thus, we more quickly feel lost or disoriented once more, and are easily pulled into old and familiar wounds, distractions or dramas.  We feel empty, and old feelings of inadequacy or uselessness surface yet again.

Here, significant faith is required of us in order to let go of everything that is non-essential in our lives for a certain period of time, in order to take hold of what is most essential for a period of time.   We must return home to the depths of our own heart spaces, wander around or simply rest in there for a while, and wait without any demand or expectation for some days, and trust that that which is most essential is coming together inside of us, in new and surprising ways.   On the return home, this is our true ‘leap of faith’.

Many of us lack this kind of faith, this kind of patience, this ability to wait and let the seeds of new life take root with us.  Many of us fail to make this type of fertile inner space, one that allows for an integration process to take place in its own time.  We are challenged to practice self-nurturance, nurturing the seeds of something worthwhile, and uniquely our own, little by little, until the time is right to take new heroic action.

Cauldron of changes, blossoms from bone.
Arc of eternity, a hole in the stone.
We are an old people,
We are a new people,
We are the same people,
Deeper than before.
- A song from the Hero’s Journey tradition

I have recently returned home from another summer men’s journey in the mountains of West Virginia.  It was a satisfying and exhausting experience of communal wilderness living, in service of bringing forth what is most essential in each of the men who were undertaking their own journeys.   We had 60 men from across the Americas and Europe who found their own rich inner sources of meaning and vitality.  From this time and way, I feel well spent.

It is now one week later, and I have been waiting for the past two days for my own personal integration time to begin taking root.  I have had the opportunity for aloneness and silence.  I have had a birthday celebration and family time, social and musical time with friends.  I have had time alone in the woods with my horse.  I have spent time gardening, doing simple chores, and yard work.

Waiting for something, and for no thing.  Waiting in the space of ‘no-thing-ness’ – no particular thing of significance yet.  This phase of the journey usually feels both timeless and endless to me.  Like I have been here before, and have to be here again, for a long time.

This morning, it has been more of the same.  Now the rains have come.  Somehow this was the essential ingredient for my integration, at last.  I feel nurtured by the rain today, like I am a seed being watered.  I am able to let go of my expectations for myself.  I let go of the day’s demands, and I just feel the grey, cool, moist air.

It is now that I am also able to drink in a particular soul gift reflection I received via email yesterday. It was from a dear man on this past Hero’s Journey.  He offered me a reflection of who I am in his eyes.  It is one that feels most vital to take to heart.  His Gratitude rains down onto me today, and I feel able to become deeply absorbed in his reflections.  I am opening to who I am, and I soaking it in like a sponge, undistracted for a timeless moment.

Today, I am remembering.   I am laying more of claim of my gift of being a ‘Herald’.  I am an ‘Awakener’- someone who can call out in an impassioned and embodied way to others. I can gather people together, and create a space for something meaningful and lasting to happen.

At last, it is more than just a thought, more than just a feeling.  It is a new kind of knowing, born from the not-knowing space.  Something in me knows this aspect of myself to be true beyond any specific fact or particular event, beyond anything I could describe or explain.  Like myths, it is truer than just a fact or an event.

This truth is coming together inside of me, once again, renewed, today.  This soul presence just echoes within me – just ‘is’ – once again.  Thank you, dear Journey friend, for sending your message my way at just the right time, for it has opened this seed within my being.

I do not know where this ‘zeal of eternity’ will lead me from here.  And it doesn’t feel necessary to know.  It just feels important that I know that it is alive within me, right now, in a new way.

I can reflect on and embody further what personal meaning this particular life energy and awareness holds for me.  I can write from here, I can sing from here, I can gather others to here.  I can speak out what I know to be true in my heart.  That feels like enough for me, something worth living more deeply into in the days ahead.

I know that I will get lost again in technology hell, in petty concerns, and in fretting over whatever immediate issue or personal angst happens next.   But today I am taking hold of the archetype of the Herald, that which wants to live in me again, and express itself through me.  I choose to say ‘Yes’ to this eternal presence.  So, today I say ‘Yes”.  Tomorrow, we’ll see.

Bringing Forth the Gift

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
- Gospel of Thomas

“The work of representing eternity in time,
and perceiving eternity in time, cannot be avoided.”
- Joseph Campbell

Once we lay claim to what is truly ours, and know it to be true within the very depths of our hearts, then we will need to further cross the threshold into daily life.   We do this by bringing forth our particular soul gifts, and offering them to the world.

We will have to take action.

We move from the downward and inward movement of soul awakening and soul cultivation, and shift towards a new direction, coming upward and outward towards self-expression, towards manifestation, towards definitive action.  Life moving forward, making our own way, as only we can, as we go – the way of mythic adventure!

This is no easy or simple task.  You may have noticed by now that the world is not sitting around waiting for us to make an essential self-discovery, and shout it out.  It is not asking us to pour our talents and gifts out into the waiting arms and needs of the world.   We have work to do.  We have to create the pathways for that work to flow outward.  We must learn to find those soulful places where timelessness and time meet, when our ‘deep gladness meets the deep need of the world’, as Frederick Buechner says.

So, today, I call out to each of us, that it is time to Return Home.  Is it time to return home to our true nature, to spend time with like-minded and kindred spirits.  To rest until we settle into what is truly ours, and ours alone, and feel that energy come alive within us.

And when the time is right, express ourselves from that unique place.  Take a risk, take an authentic and heroic act, and bring it forth in this hungry and needy world.

It is up to us.

- Michael Mervosh

“What I think is a good life is one hero journey after another.
Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are
called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?
And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also,
and the fulfillment or the fiasco.
There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”
- Joseph Campbell

Boon – defined – a symbol of life force energy, geared to the needs and requirements of the one on whom it is bestowed.  The obtainment of the ‘pearl beyond all price’.

The hero moves beyond the world of opposites,
And discovers the vital life within, rooted in eternity.

The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house.   Therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear.

-       Joseph Campbell

Out beyond the ideas
Of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
“each other” doesn’t make sense anymore.

- Rumi

What does it mean to let go of attachment to an outcome?   What happens when we move beyond our grasping onto right and wrong, good and bad?   What allows us to enter that space that Joseph Campbell refers to as ‘moving beyond the pairs of opposites’?

On one hand, this requires moving beyond the way we cling a sense of personal or moral righteousness, which carries a sense of superiority or indignation.  From this vantage point, we view deficits and flaws as being external, as being in the realm of the ‘other’, or in the society.  Our wish is to rise above or distance ourselves from the deficit or the plight we perceive in the other.

On the other hand, it also requires a moving beyond an immobilizing sense of inadequacy, shame or ‘badness’; beyond the heavy burden and deadening weight of guilt that we carry for the mistakes we have inevitably made.  From this perspective, the deficit is experienced as internal, as residing deep within the core of the self.  We feel unworthy, helpless, damned.

This moving beyond the pairs of opposites is not easy to do.   This is the liberating realm of consciousness is that often sought after and strived for, but it is not easily attained, and it is certainly difficult to remain anchored and centered within this boon.

This is why many of us must first enter ‘the belly of the beast’ phase of the journey. There, the challenging conditions and the trying circumstances provide us with an ordeal that we not only must learn to say ‘yes’ to, but also must give ourselves over to, with a wholehearted surrender.  It creates the pre-condition for the boon, and can undo our sense of unworthiness and helplessness.   But this feels like being swallowed by a whale, and entering into its belly feels like impending and certain death.

These days, life rarely feels simple, and it often feels unmanageable, especially without a spiritual foundation rooted in meaningful relationship to what is eternal.  The flourishing capacity of our global media keeps us in constant contact with the state of conflict playing out on the world’s stage: whether it be through the violent or oppressive political climates in Syria, Iran, or Egypt; the economic frailty playing out in Europe, or the chronic maelstrom of war that fuels the inevitable starvation epidemics in many parts of Africa.  We also have to contend with growing concerns about the sustainability of our global environment, as our populations continue to grow, and consume valuable and finite resources at an alarming rate.

Closer to home in the United States, we have our own taxed two-party political landscape, governed by severe bipartisanship; the ongoing revelations of sexual abuse of minors by those in positions of trust and regard in our religious institutions and sports worlds; and we have our own troublesome concerns about our country’s economic stagnation and urban deterioration.

How do we learn to walk in two worlds – the world of daily life which contends with socio-economic and political concerns, as well as the personal concerns of our own significant relationships, our own families, and our own hearts – and the world of mythic adventure, and the mystery of what is infinite, where we learn to see that these troubling social conditions create the particular circumstances needed to bring forth something unrealized from within our own individual souls, something that has its roots in that which is wonder-filled and everlasting?

This is the hero’s journey for our modern times; this is the ancient wisdom path to be taken up by those of us currently involved in our technologically advanced, economically stressed and environmentally distressed daily lives.   Who can afford to make the time and space necessary in order to look inward, in the midst of such busy and demanding days?

And yet, who can afford not to?

Let’s look how these very dynamics are perhaps playing out right now, in your own life.

Let’s stop for just this one moment, and slow ourselves down.  Let’s keep it simple. Now pay attention to what, if any, troubling thoughts come to mind, when we are attentive enough to notice.  Pay attention to the precise matters of concern that come forward.  What specific fears, upsets or anxieties rise up?   Are they economic in nature?   Are they related to your social world?  Your interior world?  Your physical, mental, or emotional well-being?  Do you feel isolated, alone or overwhelmed by these thoughts?  Do they govern your mood this day?  Do they influence the decisions you might make, or avoid, today?    Do you have a sense of helplessness or powerlessness related to these issues or concerns?

Notice the impact of simply paying attention to them.   Can you find a way to just bear these thoughts, and simply allow these thoughts to exist?   Can you allow yourself not to have to respond immediately, or react reflexively, for just the next few moments?  Long enough to pay attention to sense what may be underneath these thoughts, feelings or worries?   This will take a just a few moments of your time…

Can you also notice how the familiarity of these ongoing thoughts tend to define and shape your sense of who you are, how you view yourself, and how you feel about yourself and the live you are presently living?

The art of self-reflection requires that we slow down enough to look at what we have been unable to look at, and live within, thus far.   Perhaps we have to look within at what we have been afraid to see – something that feels lurking, and is ‘as yet unknown’.  Our fears project strong and negative future-oriented thinking.   And we tend to most strongly project onto a future outcome something that has already happened to us, in our past. Particularly when it involves an unhealed wound, or an unprocessed life experience.

When these deeply held thoughts go unaddressed and unprocessed, they tend to recede into our unconscious minds, and shape our most fundamental beliefs about life.  And what we believe to be true, will tend to play out as true, positively or negatively.  That is the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy.   We live out what we most identify with, and believe to be true about ourselves.  With our unprocessed pain or our undeveloped and limited sense of self, this is especially so.

So back now to whatever you are presently focusing your attention on in your daily external world.   What thoughts are pulling you away from yourself, in a negating or diminished way?   Can you simply observe these thoughts, without ignoring them, being distracted from them, or most significantly, not succumbing to them (by over-identifying with them?)

As I practice this very thing right now, I feel the pull of so many tasks I have created for myself.  These thoughts give rise to a recognizable uneasiness, then a vague, familiar anxiousness within me.  These various tasks all feel important, and they create a feeling in me of being unable to respond to them all.   As I track this old sense of feeling unable, I notice how this feeling creates a tension in my stomach, and then also in my jaw.  This is fuel for a generalized, mild yet unmistakable feeling of tension and inadequacy for me.  As if somehow I am not valuable or lovable if enough of these tasks are not completed in a timely fashion, and also done well.   There can be no peace until an undefinable amount of these endless tasks are completed.

This dynamic, in turn, creates a sense of immobilization, a subtle kind of trancelike state within me.  This is precisely how I create a stopping current for my life force energy within.   I can feel how I would welcome any kind of distraction right now, as I sit on my back porch, and feel the sun’s heat bearing down on my skin and my mood, mid-way through this hot summer’s morning.

And right this very moment, a small but striking synchronicity happens.   Two young bucks, an eight-point and a ten-point, amble down my driveway, about 15 feet away from where I sit.   I stop my typing, drop my internal focus, and feel what happens inside.   I am pulled right into the lived experience of the present moment.   I feel alive inside, alert, relaxed, and excited.   Ahhh – excitement, once again!   I watch them walk, and I quietly whistle to them.  They stop, look at me for an instant, and simply stroll on through my backyard, and go own their way.   I am alive.

In the next moment, one of my neighbors is yelling at the deer, shoo-ing them from her yard, and then another neighbor cheers her on, also wanting the wildlife to go away.  As a gardener in this neighborhood, I understand their reaction completely.   As a journeyer in the world of mythic adventurer, I am struck by this play of serendipity that just transpired.   How something wild and untamable walks in the world of domestication, gardening, and lawn care.

What makes some place in us wish for that which is wild and untamable within us to go away, and go away quickly?  Do not disturb the flower gardens in our lives, our plans for what we want to create, and do not threaten those things that we possess, and have invested our time and energy in.   And yet, how is it that the mystery seeker, the mythic adventurer within, also longs for this spontaneity, for a wild and memorable encounter, for surprise to pull us towards a rapture we cannot manufacture with our individual wills.

Now I am walking between two worlds.  Yet again.  In a subtle way, I am somehow in a very different internal space from the one I was in five minutes ago.   I am, as Joseph Campbell spoke in the opening passage of this essay, passing back and forth across the horizons of this world and another, in and out of the dragons I make with my mind, as readily as only one who is masterful can, through all the rooms of his interior space.

Now back to paying attention to the chronic and habitual ways of thinking that tend to consume your energy and your attention, and shape your day-to-day sense of yourself.

Can you observe your thinking once again, without have to act right away, and without having to distract yourself from what you think?  Without succumbing to the underlying feelings they generate?   Can you just let the thoughts pass, let them be what moves, and you stay anchored, centered and still within?

Now – what can you extend yourself towards, that holds meaning for you  – that is not of this world?   Something vast, eternal, and benevolent.   Something that fundamentally useful and thus good.  Perhaps a nature setting, a sacred spiritual or religious symbol, or a mantra – any pathway that can open you to a different and larger energy, a bigger presence than just yourself, and your own mind?

Let that come towards you now, through you internal capacity to clearly visualize that presence, and breathe more deeply into the core of your being, while grounding the lower half of your body, and also resting into the ground underneath you.  What happens when you make just a few moments for this internal shift, right now?  Pay attention to the subtlety of any shift you are experiencing, as this is how it will deepen and root within you, as you attend to it.

Pause here for a little while, being with what you have just experienced…

Now let’s also work with the potency of the written word, through the medium of poetry, to explore further how we consciously walk in two worlds, and notice that place inside where they become one.  Here is a poem by R.S. Thomas, a 20^th century Welsh poet and Anglican priest.

Before going any further, consider closing your eyes, and taking a few slow and deep breaths into your belly, inhaling through your nose, and exhaling out from your mouth.   Pay attention to the movement that happens through your body as you breath, and the felt sensations in your body, as a result of your breath, a ‘life force in motion’.    Then drink these words in slowly, like warm, refreshing tea….

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.

Feel the impact of the first half of the line.   This is what the two young bucks walking down my driveway and through my yard, did for me.  They were like sunlight breaking through, to illuminate the small field of my interior life.   I held a state of wonder for a few moments that were alive and outside of time, and beyond any ego concerns I carry around.    Then, I gradually re-focused myself on the task at hand – continuing to write this essay.   Soon, I will go on with other tasks, taking a rest from my writing, and will have forgotten about my encounter with the young male deer.  I can easily resume my concerns over the undone tasks for this day.

Without help from something greater, without the structure and context of a soul’s journey, we readily fall prey to our ego’s concerns and our personality’s worries.  They are endless, and varied, and well established – ready to come forth in any given moment.

But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.

This capacity to go beyond our ego concerns, our self-interests, our sense of being right (or wronged), this is the pearl of great price.  This is what is truly heroic for the people of today.   To look within our troubles, and see our way through them, in order to – in some way – be taken beyond our identification with them to a larger sense of who we are.

Here is where we learn to accept the limitations of our fate, and not simply resign ourselves to it, and thus become fated.   Here, we take hold of a gem of ancient and universal truth: where our fate binds us, there our destiny will find us.

Where has the sun broken through to illuminate your field of existence?   How can you pay attention long enough, clearing the clouds of despair and confusion enough, to see where the illumination of eternity shines through, right here in this world you live in, today?

Can you devote yourself to the hero’s task of focusing your attention on the breaking through of insight, awareness and synchronicity right here and now in your life?  Where you may least expect it, or even allow it?

Can you tolerate the internal disruption you must bear, when a higher energy frequency wants to disrupt your lowered energy, your sameness, smallness or dullness, your familiar, stale and comfortably dark places within?

Can you stay with the journey of transformation long enough to bear witness to exactly how you walk away, over and over again, out of habit and out of discomfort, from that sun which illuminates your small field?  Can you manage to not be defeated by the witnessing of your own forgetting, failing, avoiding?   We are all doing this, day in and day out, so your failures aren’t really that special or unique.   No problem.  Just come back.

Resilience is a necessary skill for the mythic adventurer.

Now here is some more wisdom medicine being offered by Thomas.   Take a few more sips from his poem:

Life is not hurrying on to a receding future,
nor hankering after
an imagined past.
It is the turning
 aside
like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Isn’t it true that we always seem to be hurrying towards our future?  We must have the capacity to recognize that this hurrying is defensive in nature.  It wards off the present moment, which we sub-consciously believe we cannot bear or withstand, whether it is positive, negative or neutral in its nature.   This is why slowing down is so essential to a developmental process.

The paradox is, the more we slow down to pay attention to our unfolding interior lives, the faster we will cultivate our capacities as functional and compassionate human beings.

Isn’t it also true that we tend to hold on to the pain; to the old, limiting belief systems that where formed by childhood minds; to a fear-based victim identity – until we get the proper amount of support and regard to let them go?   Many of us bury the past, and confuse this will having let it go, or having moved beyond it.   Then the unfinished business of our past re-creates itself in the present day, like a ghost in the machine, until we unearth what went wrong, and apply a compassionate and corrective response to it, from the present moment of our being.

Our ability to transform ourselves will inevitably require the presence of helpful others in our present day lives, who will need to be internalized, and thought about.  We have to learn to receive what we were never given, before we can truly give from a place of abundance within.   This requires us to open, to go where we have not gone before – the hero’s act of courage.

Vital life force energy, accessed and revealed through the emergence of soul coming forth in the mind and body of the hero on his or her journey, is transitory.  It can be fleeting, and it is also incremental.  The revelation of soul consciousness can only happen little by little, across the span of a lifetime, for the one who has embraced the hero task of reclaiming one’s soul purpose.  There is no other way.  This is because each little revelation has profound magnitude and gravity, in and of itself, for the ego self.  Small glimpses of soul are all that we can manage, without becoming blinded by the light, or swallowed by the darkness.

What becomes understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable….

- Joseph Campbell

The boon, the pearl beyond all price for the hero, is the arrival and discovery of an embodied sense of vital life force energy, along with penetrating insight, awareness and irony.  This will be accompanied by a sense of surprise, wonder and awe – combined with a rightness of place and timing, and a peace beyond all human comprehension.

This inward experience is intimate, like that of a deeply personal visit from a universal presence that cannot ever be described, and could not in any way be ignored.   It is the felt sense of the eternal meeting us, as Campbell says above, in the field of time – which can only be found here and now, in this present moment.  This is how eternity awaits us all.  This is not something to wish for only once we die.  This is something to journey for while we are living, with awareness.

I recently visited my daughter in Dallas.  She has just relocated there for a career opportunity, having just graduated from college this past May.   I could feel the passing of time as a palpable experience, and outside of time, all at once.  This past Father’s Day, my daughter gave me a picture of her and I in front of the golden dome at Notre Dame.  She is in her graduation gown, I in my suit.   Then I received from her mother a photo of my daughter and I at the bus stop, the morning of her first day at school.  She is six years old, wearing her backpack and carrying her lunch box.  Both of these images touch me deeply.

Where does time go?  Why does it feel like there is never enough of it?  How is it that everything beyond this particular day, and point in time, feels dream-like?   How can a memory, accessed through captured images on paper, create a sense of something that happened so long ago, and also like it was just yesterday?   How is it that this feeling can move me so deeply inside, and feel so familiar, like an old and cherished friend?

Such a mystery, this life as it moves us, and takes us forward.  Walking in two worlds, the way we as human beings walk on two legs.  One foot moving through time, and one foot rooted in eternity.

Living with this awareness, I have the privilege and the opportunity of having the experience of being an embodiment of that which is eternal – intangible in nature, infinite in possibility, and destined for what I have been born to do.

- Michael Mervosh

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva, the one whose being has awakened.  Rather, he is the one who holds the world, the lotus.  Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses pain and pleasure, with profound repose.  And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.

-       Joseph Campbell

The boon bestowed upon a worshiper is always scaled to his or her stature and the the nature of one’s dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case.  The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may be for the boon of perfect illumination, what he or she generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay the neighbor, or the health of one’s child.

-       Joseph Campbell

Paradox – defined – a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

The hero goes inward, disappears;
only to re-appear, born again.

The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.  The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died.

-       Joseph Campbell

There is an unknown territory, a mysterious area where
the presence of death does not equal the end of life…

The point is to be able to undergo a little death
in order to find the
genuine thread of one’s life.

-       Michael Meade

This essay offers a reflection on the paradoxical nature of surrender.   Of undergoing the little ego deaths that must happen to give birth to a larger soul presence, and to allow that presence of soul to become more incarnate in this world, within and beyond the ego that contains the personalities that we are.  This letting go must happen, again and again, while we live into and through our lifetime.

Each time we do, we bring back more soul substance from that other intangible realm of existence, and bring it forth into this world we live in.  This is our fundamental hero’s task to be undertaken and fulfilled, before we journey back one day to that world from which we came.

“This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, but only seekers find it.”

- Abu Yazid

Surrender is not something we can willfully choose to make happen, though we may assent to undergo the process with our full being.  Even though it cannot be a conscious choice of will, we have to be willing, in order to experience it.  We can’t say, “I choose to surrender now”, and then it becomes so.  We can only ask for the best conditions to come into being, those that necessitate a bringing forth of the surrendering process within us.  Then we can choose to say ‘yes’ to the surrendering as it happens to us – when the timing and is right, and when our defenses can be let down enough to be taken, the way a raft is taken by a flowing river.

Surrendering is more of a conscious attitude than an action step, a thing to do.  It is more ‘a being done to’, a state of being that allows something to happen inside of us.  It is a position of humility that comes from strength; yet is also a deep yielding to a force or a power that is much greater that one’s own self.

As these moments of surrender arrive, the ego knows it’s true place in relation to Divine Will.  It knows something about its genuine capacities as well as its true limitations in relation to something larger.   Some place inside the self wants to surrender over.  Mythic journeying helps one to become ready, and strong enough to do so.   The hero’s task is to bear the dynamic tension that holds the fear and the awe of yielding over to something mysterious and beyond itself.

Surrender is not submission.  When we humble ourselves, when we bow down in front of something we perceive as holy or sublime, we do not give away our power to that ‘other’ presence.  We join with this ‘otherness’, which also joins with us.  In doing so, we surrender over more deeply to a presence inside of ourselves.  True surrender is always towards something larger within the self, not to something outside of the self. It is an expansive, as opposed to contracted, state of being.

The nature of paradox is such that when we honor the limits of the self and the smallness of our being, we can then grow beyond that limitation into an identification with something much larger than the self.  This is very different from an inflated ego state, where the sense of largeness is over-estimated (and conversely is an indicator of pettiness), and not in proper relationship to the otherness of this world.

As we engage in the realm of mythic adventure, we can feel and accept our smallness, like a boat upon the sea; we can then ask to surrender, in order to join with the sea.  As we do, we can feel the largeness of the sea alive within us, while in our small boat that we call the Self.

As we continue along the hero’s path of mythic adventure, we journey further and further into regions unknown to us.  Inevitably, we come to grips with the precise adventures and ordeals that will take us directly into ‘the belly of the beast’.  Entering this realm, we look within ourselves to confront those very things, which hold us back from realizing the boon of our lifetime, and from becoming signposts, transparent towards what is transcendent and everlasting.

Facing the Dragon – Going Against the Ego’s Initial Impulse

Learning to face the dragons in our lives – what Joseph Campbell considered to be a direct confrontation with the internalized demands of the society or culture upon the individual – is facing all the primitive “Thou Shalts” and “Thou Shalt Nots” we absorb as young children.  We abide by these expectations and demands, often in order to be received and accepted by our families, our social networks and our institutions.

Once we have internalized the cultural expectations that give us a sense of place or status in our culture, we organize ourselves by these externally based values and determinants.  As we do so, we may lose sight of our deepest longings and soul desires for life-giving adventure, and passionately lived experiences.   When we decide at last to follow our own bliss, we come up against deeply embedded internalized forces that can feel monstrous in their size – as if these forces could and would annihilate our most cherished longings and impulses.

These internalized mythic energies are the fire-breathing dragons that live within our psyches.   They are the internal beasts that lie in wait for us, when we venture out beyond the protection of societal rules and cultural norms.  And we inevitably must confront and wrestle with these dragons or beasts.

Ordeals bring us towards epic internal encounters with forces that would apparently seek to annihilate our deepest wishes.  We do not yet realize that these energies are disowned aspects of our own true nature. Rather than running from this life force energy within the self, at some crucial transition point in our lives, we have to face them.  This is what we call ‘facing the dragon’, from the mythic perspective.

The late 19^th – early 20^th century German poet Rilke intimately understood this internal wrestling.   He knew what must be undertaken by the ego, in order to surrender into ‘communion with the ineffable’.  He offers us words to better understand the dynamics of such a challenge, of the courage and effort needed to come up against opposing forces within, and how that leads towards the creation of conditions necessary for surrender to take place inside.

And if only we arrange our life
according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult,
then that which now still seems to us the most alien
will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

If only we live our lives according to the principle that we must hold to the difficult… Well, frankly, this rarely holds much appeal to anyone at first.   Who asks for a difficult life?  The paradox here is that when we avoid difficulty as a way of life, we can begin to perceive our lives as being more difficult than they truly are.  We learn to see struggle as a bad and unnecessary thing, and we form a life-negating relationship to life’s challenges.  Thus, our character becomes avoidant and passive, and gradually begins to wither.

Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

By living our lives as a mythic hero’s journey, we understand that adventures and ordeals help bring meaning and vitality into our lives, through facing and overcoming challenges that can bring forth our unlived potential.  We accept that anything worthwhile involves some sort of ordeal at some point, beyond the conceptual ideals we tend to hold.  Marriage, parenting, and commitment to vocations – these are all worthwhile, and they are all ordeals – as desirable, meaningful and fulfilling as they may ultimately be.   Surrendering to the reality of the ordeal is essential, in order to open ourselves to the boon.  And this takes us into the “belly of the beast’.

When we ready ourselves, and gather support to ourselves, we become more capable of surrendering to the ordeals of life, facing ‘what is’ – life on life’s terms.

We become more able to look towards what is right in front of us, as it is, and we confront the demons of fear held inside when necessary.  We face all that holds us back from what we could become.   Rather than willfully conquering this fear, and striving to overpower or overcome it – or reflexively fleeing from it, and hoping to rid its presence from in our lives – we relax into its threat or tension, and learn to be attentive to what happens inside as we do.

This is how we join with threatening external or internal forces.  This is how we don’t just not succumb to it, or reinforce it or argue against it.  We learn about ourselves when face the dragons within us in this way.   We begin to see exactly what keeps us from changing.  We let this trouble us in the best possible way.  This and this alone is what shifts one’s internal motivations, which in turn give us the energy and the focus to change our thinking, and eventually, more and more, our behaviors.

When we face the mythic dragons in our psyche, we face what we perceive to be most threatening to us in our lives.   When we enter the belly of the beast, we are required to enter a metaphorical space in which we are more intimately relating to what most disturbs our peace, usually in some variation of depressiveness or anxiousness.  We when are swallowed by whatever ‘whale of an issue’ we are facing, we invariably will enter a place of darkness, a place of tension, a place of deep unknowing.   But we are also given an opportunity to become more intimately connected to, and eventually expanded by, something that has previously been too threatening for us to see with clarity, or to engage with presence.

When in the belly of the beast, we face what we perceive to be ‘other than us’, something outside of our identification – that which is distinctly felt as ‘not me’.   Opening to a connection with this disowned and threatening presence is indeed uncomfortable, and it feels most un-natural in the beginning.  We can tend to use this sense of threat to project evil onto this aspect of what is alien or foreign to us. This distancing posture is the very thing that allows us to justify, maintain and reinforce our fixed ego positions towards life.

This is precisely what keeps us closed, small and defended about our positions, viewpoints, and attitudes towards the world.  This is ultimately what is deadly, as it prevents us from venturing forth towards what is alive, and worth living for.

But when we can know ourselves well enough, when we feel a connection to others and to a power greater than ourselves, we gain the resources we need to face the dragon of differentness, or that which feels alien to us.  By facing this presence, and and bearing what happens inside us as we do, we grow stronger.  We gradually learn, little by little, and only by our own lived-through experience with the dragon of difference, that we do not get annihilated by the fire breathing ‘not me’-ness – nor do we have to annihilate the presence of the dragon!   In fact, we incorporate it as a vital and even healthy part of ourselves.  This is the hard-work miracle of personal transformation.

We endure the encounter, we live through the experience, we continue to exist, we expand our capacity, we incorporate new (and previously foreign) energies, and in doing so, we begin to feel how we are no longer the same.   And we grow a gladness about and appreciation for the encounter; we feel a deep satisfaction, and a growing inner confident, through our participation with previously unknown worlds.

Rilke says that when we can face that which is most threatening to our well-being, or even to our very sense of existence, when we can tolerate the intense powerlessness we may feel, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

So again, this is the transformative dynamic that comes into awakening inside of us.  We begin to grow stronger right at our broken (open) places, deeper at our most threatened (vital) places, when we do not remain small or defended.  We can trust our ability to encounter people, places and things which are increasingly different from our ways, without losing ourselves, or without having to eliminate the other, or the ‘otherness’ from our minds, or from our lives.   This is how we mature and grow, as vulnerable and as magnificent as human beings can become.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths
about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses;
perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being
something helpless that wants help from us.

How does something so threatening, so beyond our ability to control – and thus beastly, or monstrous – turn into a princess – something of beauty, vulnerability and honor?    How do we find the strength to change our minds, and thus our experience, about inner demons?    How do we learn to open ourselves to the external, beast-like, threatening encounters with other-ness, that which is “not-yet-me”?    How can we stay present to ourselves as we are taken, or swallowed by, our emotional reactions to unpleasant or hostile situations, to the things in life we cannot control?

This is being in the belly of the beast.

In the end, what allows us to realize, from a heroic perspective, that all the dragons of our lives have contained within them princesses, who have gone unattended to for so long?   Can we gradually learn to recognize that buried within each potentially horrible person, within each potentially horrific outcome, is the as-yet-unrealized potential of the jewel point?

This awakening requires of us the hero’s valor of courage – a certain strength of heart in the midst or threat or fear – which will awaken the ‘sleeping beauty’ in our lives; and which will bring forth all that is beautiful in this world, as well.

Joseph Campbell once said, “any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life”. He would speak of this heroic way of developing one’s self as a privilege, as something that provides us with the opportunity of becoming who we truly are, and providing us with a chance for a spontaneous pouring forth of our own nature.

In the ways of mythic adventure, as we embrace the journey of living, there is room for failures, fallings, losses, downward arcs, and the ego deaths that come with them.   These places of failure and defeat seem to be the polarized opposite of the ‘apotheosis’ point, the highest culmination of one’s true potential.  Yet paradoxically, by bearing these dark inner spaces, one can be made ripe and ready for surrendering and softening into states of love, acceptance and peace that would not come through any other means.

Campbell speaks unequivocally of this, in Hero With A Thousand Faces. When we enter a state of surrendering over to what is divine and eternal, we can do so through suffering or through joy.  Through whichever doorway will open us, and can be made open to us.  Both deep suffering and deep joy can bring forth the profound sense of reverence, right at that very threshold point of joining with something frightening, beautiful and mysterious.

This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation….The hero goes inward, to be born again.   The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into the temple – where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is…The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond…are one and the same.

Perhaps what Rilke says in the last line of his prose is true, that everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Or, in the least, something that needs help from someone who is in a better space or position than the ‘terrible-ness’ one finds themselves in.

Both the science of modern day systems theory, as well as the ancient wisdom teachings on compassion down through the ages, have stressed this very point:  That a larger force of nature, when moved by both its ability to respond (agency), and its desire to respond (compassion), can bend towards and accommodate the weaker force.  This in turn, allows for an opportunity for the weaker force to adapt itself towards, and join with, the stronger force – until it can identity that larger presence within itself.

We all tend to reflexively do whatever is most familiar when placed in our greatest stress positions.  Here, the heroic action step is to move from beyond the most familiar pattern, to the one most appropriate and necessary for the current situation, especially when that has been foreign or alien to one’s historical sense of self.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day here in the United States.  My extended family will gather together for a Sunday dinner, and most likely, share stories that weave together the earlier times of our family life.  These days, my father, who is approaching his 90^th year, has grown quite frail.  Struggling with limited lung functioning from a his early years of smoking, and 35 years working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, his heart is now also giving him trouble.  He is physically weak, and on medications, for the first time in his life.   This fierce and fiery man has now become childlike and vulnerable. I am getting to know new things about him, through his story telling, that I never knew before.

I am surrendering to the fact that this could very well be our last father’s day with my father.   This awareness softens me into tender feelings, both as a son, and as father myself.   Confronting the finality of a loved one’s departure and death is like entering the belly of the beast called ‘time’, offering me another profound opportunity to reconcile with the ceaseless nature of impermanence.

I look towards what will be everlasting for him, which he says is the love of family.  I look towards what will live on everlastingly inside of me, which is what his presence has meant to me.  This for me is like approaching the threshold crossing into the shrine room, into holy ground.   I can sense the mystery of how ‘the belly of the beast’ is both fearsome and wondrous.  How surrendering to something larger pulls us towards the place where timelessness and time intersect.  This fills me with wistfulness, wonder, and somehow, peace.

These days, I have many memories of my own youth.  I remember my father’s involvement in my many sports activities; of how present and involved he was in the fabric of my sporting life from the age of five, well into my late twenties.  How his showing up for me, lives on in me.   I can feel how I am deeply motivated to do the same for the family and loved ones in my life that I have been committed to and responsible for, to this very day.  (Today, I taught my niece how to drive a car with a manual transmission.  Talk about facing the dragon!)

I am feeling the ways I am going back and forth between this time of Father’s Day, and the many memories of fatherhood that I have been having, my own and of my father’s, that live in me outside of time.   Today, I am walking in two worlds.

This weekend, through the hero archetype of the father, I am reflecting upon many things that matter:  How deeply love is rooted in the core our being; how we learn to survive loving and hating the same person, how we learn many essential lessons from those significant to us, beyond the disappointments and conflicts we encounter with them.

I am grateful for what lives on in me – born out of the belly of the beast of significant parental relationships – and for the meaning and gratitude and the peace that can only surface once we have ripened enough, and mature enough as human beings, to surrender into love, beyond all else.

- Michael Mervosh

The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house.   Therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear.

-       Joseph Campbell

This blog post is an essay that forms part of the material in a new Web Course from the Hero’s Journey Foundation, called Walking In Two Worlds.

Adventure – defined - an unusual and exciting (typically felt as dangerous) experience or activity; a daring activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm.

Ordeal – defined - a challenging or painful experience, especially a protracted one.
Something that has come forth that was not expected, asked for or wanted.

Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature,
Nor do the children of men
As a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer
In the long run
Than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure,
Or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and
Behave like free spirits
In the presence of fate
Is strength undefeatable.

- Helen Keller

It is important to feel secure.  To form meaningful attachments.  To feel loved, accepted and adequately regarded and cared for.  To feel safe and protected in this world.  We all need this important foundation of security woven into the fabric of our being, as this essential grounding gives us the internal stability and fortitude necessary to venture forth deep into the world.

That being said: security is, indeed, mostly a superstition.  Like a fairy tale, it speaks to a young and culturally reinforced place within us that wishes for something to be that cannot really be.  Or can only temporarily be.  Or needed to be, when we were young.  As children, we relied on the presence, care and support of others in order to feel secure.  We depended on these external resources to help us feel stable enough on the inside, allowing us to take meaningful risks and have life-giving explorations and adventures.

In our cultural milieus, we are shaped to seek security, sometimes above all else.  Our educational and career endeavors are often focused primarily around gaining an opportunity for economic security.  Getting married – “to have and to hold” – also contributes to the collective ideal of being provided for, of coming together to sustain and be sustained as a family throughout a lifetime.

Security is something we strive for, sometimes obtain, and often fail to retain.  In actuality, it is something that comes and goes from our lives, as life is to be lived on its own terms.   This being true, then we must be sobered by what Helen Keller says.  That in this way of living life on life’s terms, avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.

When we fail at the fundamental emotional and psychological developmental tasks of attachment and security in childhood, that which helps us to feel safe in the world, we can become overly focused on securing external measures as a substitute.  Things like finances become the primary means for obtaining our security, beyond adequate food, shelter and love.  Money, of course, is that singular external resource, necessary in almost all parts of the world for an exchange of basic goods, services and supplies for living.  But it is not a valid substitute for internal resourcefulness, which is cultivated by our capacity for self-activation, venturing forth, and being resilient in the face of failure – in our language – adventuring!

On the path of the soul’s heroic journey, saying yes to the way of adventure means also saying yes to the challenges of the ordeal, and vice versa.  You cannot have one without the other.  This becomes a fundamental truth once we cross the threshold, go beyond the familiar, and enter the realm of mythic adventure.

Paradoxically, in the realm of mythic adventure, safety becomes the final danger.

In fact, for many of us in the cultured procurement of our current post-modern world, we have never had more abundant means.   Convenience, luxury, and ease are goals for the modern way of life.   Precisely because of this cultural backdrop, security in the end becomes our final danger.  By being overfed the substitutes for an actual life we can call our own, we are no longer clear or lean enough to realize what it takes to bring forth our own vitality, meaning and purpose.

The science fiction writer H.G. Wells spoke to this very thing about our modern ways of life, quite poignantly and dramatically:

“But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident.

Always before these times the bulk of the people did not overeat themselves because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger.  Now if only one pitch his or her standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess.

You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your death bed.”

Those who work in the field of hospice care have learned a deep wisdom teaching from listening to those who time on earth is about to end: When one looks back over the span of a life, one’s deepest regrets will most often be for the venture that failed to be undertaken, and not for the failed undertaking of the venture.

Those who cannot and do not say ‘yes’ to the adventure of living may also manage to avoid certain ordeals, creating other ordeals in the process of avoiding.  When one lives in this manner, one becomes left to live out the smallness of life, fated to ‘sameness’.  By playing it too safe, they are cast only for the management of the mundane, tending to the necessary daily chores and tasks of life that maintain and preserve a narrow, flattened existence.

This is why we need to able to understand the danger of playing it too safe.  By allowing our lives to be lived as a meaningful, yet uncertain journey, we create the potential for a vibrant life.  One filled with spontaneity, surprise and wonder, that can only be joined with, and not controlled.

The Adventure Brings Forth the Ordeal

So this is the deal, and we have say ‘yes’ to it.   The essential combining of an adventure with an ordeal is the very thing, which can bring forth the conditions by which we discover the unrealized potential in ourselves.  It creates a sense of largeness in life.

The excitement is in the fear, and the fear is in the excitement.

If we don’t see ourselves as a player in the mythological field of opportunity, we tend to project our vitality onto a real or imagined superhero – we perceive that they can do what we can’t and don’t want to do – so we project our own hero potential onto those larger-than-life figures.  Then we don’t have to do the hard work of realizing what we have been born for, and strive to contribute those essential capacities to the need of the world.

The Ordeal Brings Forth the Sense of Adventure

Subsequently, once we move past our initial emotional reactions to life circumstances and interactions that involve ordeals, we can begin to locate our authentic ‘hero response’ to the challenge that has been placed in front of us.   We must have an awakening to the realization that the exact conditions needed to elicit our true potential from within us have transpired, in ways that we may not yet be able to understand.  We have to say yes to the ordeal, to go with it. When we can do this, the sense of adventure returns to us, more internalized now.  Thus, we can become even more motivated and inspired, as we begin to follow the life force energy emerging from within.  This begins the opening to the profound ‘discovery of the boon’ within the hero, brought forth from the realm of mythic adventure found in the ordeals of daily life.

Joseph Campbell said that when we say yes to the ordeal, there is a deep sub-conscious recognition and acceptance that there is something about a proper ordeal, when taken up within the spirit of mythic adventure, that “drives the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those human fantasies that tend to tie it back”.

This is in essence an embodiment of the Buddhist sutra of one’s “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world”, where the modern day personality dies a little death, and the eternal shines through from within the trying circumstance of life’s vicissitudes, born anew, and giving new life to those who can partake of life in this way.

From the Ideal to the Real

We also cling to what therapists would say are our “infantile fantasy wishes’, these constructs of our own making that are full of idealized values, beliefs, and views of ourselves or others.   We tend use them, as Campbell says in the paragraph above, as something to tie us back to what is old and familiar.  They become used as defensive maneuvers away from the mess of really working something through a new experience that is raw and undeveloped, something that needs our attention, our back and forth-ness, trial and error, etc.  It is this mindfulness of attention, the new re-organizing of our thinking, and the courage to try new behaviors that forge new life, and move it forward through “the necessary passages of our adulthood’.

As uncomfortable and unmanageable as ordeals can be, they also offer us a chance to feel a certain kind of ‘realness’ within ourselves, and a sense that ‘this is it, this is my life, and it is happening right now’.   It shifts us from a sense that our lives being lived according to the construct of the ‘map’, and we now feel thrown into the actual ‘territory’.   Below is a beautiful passage from the eastern mystic from the 15^th century, Kabir.  He speaks with his usual passionate eloquence about this shift from conceptual thinking to the potency of lived experience:

“There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming there.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The sacred books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers sideways one day.
What Kabir speaks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something,
It is not true.”

From the Map To the Territory

Kabir encourages us to shift our devotion from the “infantile fantasy” of being rescued by heavenly forces from the trials of life on earth, to being strengthened by the adult ‘living through’ of life’s experiences.

We also cling to concepts in this very same way as well.  We can get caught up in the fascination with abstract and theoretical positions, which don’t allow us to enter into the uncertainty and complexity of a genuine adventure, where we are being carried upon the twists and turns of fate and destiny, in our actual lives.

Kabir is also saying that we will learn most when we enter the territory of real life, experience things for ourselves, have our own unique perspective, however limited they might be.  And ultimately, we must make our own choices, as only we can.  These choices, for better and for worse, shape our fate, and create our destiny.

We gain the most from life; we are most nourished and satisfied, when we learn from own lived experience, and not from our heads.

It is important not to confuse the menu with the meal.

The Adventure & Ordeal of the Ascent:

Cultivating the Masculine Principle Within

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If You Want to Ascend, You Must

Say ‘Yes’ to the Effort of the Climb

Opening to the thrust towards largeness, the vast and ascendant possibility of spirit within us, and connecting to that which is the universal connecting agent – requires effort and work, especially in the beginning.  It confronts the “infantile fantasy” that many of us cling to, that there can be reward without effort.   That new life can come, without having to contribute towards it.  There is no such thing.  Disappointing perhaps, but also grounding.

There is an old saying, that ‘children wish, but adults do’.  This is because only as young children do we have the right to be given to, without having to give.   It is natural for children to desire to be given to.  Then we have to grow up.  As we do, we grow a desire to give, and to give from our own sense of fullness.   Children benefit as a result of life happening.  Adults contribute to making life happen.  This is how it must be.

There always must be an exchange in life, for life to happen.   Avoiding the exchange of effort, while trying to receive the outcome or reward that comes by (someone’s) effort, conjures an unreality.    It also creates a sense of entitlement, and it unconscious demands things from others, who will eventually lose their desire to give, and will do so, primarily out of obligation.

We must be able to bear the effort it takes to grow upwards and to go outwards, and to thrust ourselves into life.  The motivation to make this effort must be born within us.  We need to have cultivated the necessary courage, the nerve and the sustaining focus to do so.   We must be self-activating.  As we do so, we face both our limits and our potential within the tangible world of space and time.

how to climb a mountain

Make no mistake. This will be an exercise in staying vertical.
Yes, there will be a view, later, a wide swath of open sky,
but in the meantime: tree and stone. If you’re lucky, a hawk will
coast overhead, scanning the forest floor. If you’re lucky,
a set of wildflowers will keep you cheerful. Mostly, though,
a steady sweat, your heart fluttering indelicately, a solid ache
perforating your calves. This is called work, what you will come to know,
eventually and simply, as movement, as all the evidence you need to make
your way. Forget where you were. That story is no longer true.
Level your gaze to the trail you’re on, and even the dark won’t stop you.

-Maya Stein

In this poem, Maya Stein tells of what it takes to climb, which is a metaphor for growing up.   This self-activating yang principle, in the form of outward effort, must be made, and cannot be short-changed.   Any short cut here, in the end, lengthens the distance towards the boon, the desired goal.

Their will be a view, she says.  You will be rewarded. But not immediately, later. There is no immediate gratification to be found on a soul’s journey.  In fact, this will take a lifetime.   She is pointing us to the task at hand.  Tree and stone. Groundedness.  Facing what is in front of you.  Occasionally, we are rewarded with surprise and wonder – the appearance of a hawk flying overhead.  We can’t feel entitled to this viewing.  We are graced with it.  It comes when it does, and when it does, hopefully we are not too self-absorbed, and can pay attention enough to see it.

Stein’s teaching is this:  Our own efforts create movement in life.  And it is what will move our lives forward.   And we are not doing it all by ourselves, and life doesn’t happen solely by our own efforts, on our own behalf.   The universe participates as well.   These efforts also help to dissolve what is old, and what is holding us back.

These lines are powerful:  Forget where you were. That story is no longer true.

I can remember the first time I did the climb on the Via Ferrate course that we use as part of our Hero’s Journey Intensives.   We were lead by our guide to the first pitch, and were able to climb without all the technical skill and gear required of typical mountain climbing.  Thus, we were granted access to vistas typically only experienced by seasoned climbers.

I remember the first time I turned my gaze away from the rock that was right in front of my face, and towards the view that was being offered to me, as a result of my initial ascent.  It was dizzying.   And wondrous.  To gaze upon and into a vista opened before me.   The perspective was far different here than the one I had on the ground.  It was a new story, as well as a new perspective, unfolding in me now.

It took a few years to integrate this realization, and to understand that this is what it takes to shape a new destiny for one’s self.  I had to stay grounded while on vast heights.  Consider new possibilities for my own life, that I could contain a feeling as similar taking in this new view.

Level your gaze to the trail you’re on, and even the dark won’t stop you. To manage the dizziness, I turn back to the effort at hand, to the climbing, one ladder rung at a time.  My footsteps, my trail being made.   It is a profoundly liberating feeling to feel the darkness of fear no longer stopping me.   The felt sense that I am moving upward, and forward, deep in my body, deep in my heart, stays with me to this very day, and even as I write this.

The Adventure & Ordeal of the Descent:

Cultivating the Feminine Principle Within

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If You Want Depth and Beauty,

You Must Say ‘Yes’ to the Dark Underground

Opening to the pull of inwardness, downwardness and life-giving descendent principle of soul within us – that which gives birth to the unique, individuated path; the one that can only be ours – requires yielding, softening, and surrendering.

We must be able to tolerate letting go into, and joining with, the sense of what is eternal and everlasting.  We yield and go into, then go beyond, any knowing – or even knowing how.  We let go of our own limits and bounds, and yield over and into the peace within the dark no-thing-ness, beyond all human understanding.

Paradoxically, only out of this depth of spaciousness and dark unknowing, can we come to know our unique sense of purpose and meaning.   Something becomes born anew out of the void.

We all seem to understand that we need to grow up, even if we don’t really want to.  There is some acceptance and comprehension that there is something to be obtained from this process, if we can endure the sense of loss of our child-like ways.

Knowing that we need to grow up is one thing.  Understanding that we also need to grow down is more difficult.  Accepting that we need to be taken down, and in, to give birth to new life.   To transform our being, we must learn how to go inside, stay there, and recognize, value and find meaning within the interior spaces of life.

On our Hero’s Journey Intensive, we use both the metaphor and the lived experience of the underground cave.   If you have never been under the earth in any natural or sustained way, the shift from one reality to another is dramatic, stark, and powerful.

You leave the world of light and color, where everything is in fluctuation, and has contrast.  As you bow down, and transition from light to dark, the shift is immediate, as the year-round temperature is in the mid-50 degrees Farenheit, and damp.   Color takes on only shades of grey, and the only sound to be heard, if there is any sound at all, is the hollow echoes of dripping or trickles of water.

Mostly, what one encounters in a natural, underground cave – when not moving about and navigating with a flashlight – is darkness, coolness, spaciousness, and silence.   One feels enveloped by a hollow, captivating sense of timelessness.   It can feel daunting to be thrusted inward in such a profound way.   The sense of emptiness and darkness can vascillate between tomblike and womblike.   It takes a little time to acclimate not only to the conditions of the cave, but also to the conditions of paying attention to one’s own interior in such a direct and undistracted way.

One can feel swallowed by the emptiness and darkness, even haunted by it.  One can feel enchanted by it, as well, and enthralled by an ever present sense of mystery and vastness, which is deeply internal, in an impersonal and personal way.

What one has to practice, from a soul journey perspective, is adapting to a sense of stillness as one descends, as opposed to the sense of movement encountered upon a climb.   T.S. Eliot understood the value and purpose of darkness, and the soul’s need to descend into the womb-like abyss of the dark void, which gives birth to all new life.   But first, we need to work through the tomb-like nature of this element, which detaches us from the world of light.

I said to my soul be still
And let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

Wait without hope,
For hope would be hope
For the wrong thing.

Wait without love,
For love would be love
for the wrong thing.

There is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope
Are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought,
For you are not ready for thought.

And so the darkness shall become the light,
And the stillness, the dancing.

-       T.S. Eliot

Here we make a transition from any defensive form of movement and activity, which takes us away from growing down.  The hero must develop his or her capacity to yield, in order to join with something larger than the self.   This kind of surrender is very different from, and often confused with, submission.   It is a deep giving over, not only to something larger than one’s self, but ultimately to something larger within one’s self as well.

This kind of surrender is like the giving over of a water drop to a larger pool of water.  As a water drop enters the pool, it joins with the pool, and appears to have disappeared from existence, from a tangible, material perspective.  However, from the mystical point of view, the water drop is now identified with the pool.  The water drop is now the pool. Rumi says that not only is the water drop now within the ocean, but the ocean is within the water drop, as well.

I remember how profoundly altered I can become inside of caves.  I used to visit unexplored parts of public caves as an adolescent and young adult, fascinated by what happened when I was swallowed by the dark, and out of the natural light.   Crawling, being on all fours, using arms and legs to traverse – this alters something in the brain chemistry, and activates the reptilian brain, from which we have evolved.

Then after being active, I would  rest in the darkness.  In this being with silence and stillness, I would begin to dissolve, like a water drop entering a vast pool.   No thoughts would come.  None at all.  Only my senses were active.  Sight, smell, taste, touch and sound engaged in the midst of the dark and silent stillness.  Forever was right there, outside of time, in a mind-blowing kind of way.

I  began to have vivid memories of early childhood life.  Feelings of grief and awe would spontaneously surface.   I would feel on the edge of my seat, wondering what would well up next into awareness from the dark well of my unconscious.  At times, a sense of the eternal would be almost unbearable.

Years later, while sitting alone in a dark cave, I remember the first time I understood the last lines of Eliot’s poem.  And so the darkness shall become the light.  And the stillness, the dancing. I put my hands in front of my face, feeling exquisitely the feeling of motion through my limbs, while rooted on a sitting pad.  Then I realized that I was also seeing my hands, in complete and total darkness!   They were darker in appearance than the total darkness of empty space.  It appeared that matter, being more dense, was darker than empty space.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I would move my arms around, and watch them move at the same time I could feel them move.  It was exhilarating to experience.  Then, I gradually realized I could begin sensing open space  in the cave, as opposed to the solidness of the ceiling, walls and floor.  I was not as blind in the dark as I thought.  New sensing awareness was taking place.  To this day, I marvel at this awareness of light and movement taking place in the darkness and silence of underground cave spaces.

But what I have come to appreciate far more than the literal experience of this, is its metaphorical significance.   As a continue to practice letting go into the unknown void of unconscious internal space, I am endlessly surprised by my recollections of dream states, spontaneous insights or memories of significance, and increasingly fascinated by the power of the mythic imagination.

Eternity, and All We Need, is in the Here and Now

Ultimately, embracing the Adventure and the Ordeal as being one, we enter the state of being in the Now point.   The eternal world, when one lives in the present moment, is born anew in each moment that consciousness is present.  By accepting that the universe has the potential to re-create itself in any given moment, or conscious encounter, we have more motivation and incentive to stay present to the here and now, and witness its unfolding.  Gradually, we come to see for ourselves that all we need can be found in the here and now – and in fact, will be found in no other place.

The recognition that our own capacity for being aware actually shapes the unfolding of reality around us is indeed a profound recognition.  It is the beginning of awakening to the realization that the ocean of Divinity is indeed active and present within the little water drop of humanity that I am.

Wendell Berry, the clear-eyed, plain speaking Kentucky tobacco farmer, thinker, essayist and poet, conveys this recognition.  As always, he gives us the experience of nature as a simple and profound reflecting mirror into our truest self:

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

When we awaken to the realization that we don’t need the world to change, but in fact can change within ourselves, we are entering the heroic realm of today’s modern and mythic spirit-adventurer.   What we need is already within us, waiting to be birthed.  The universe itself, Campbell said, is conspiring towards this very aim.  It needs and wants more soul to come forth on this planet, as it wants to know itself, here and now, on earth.

This is the evolutionary call to adventure that we must come to understand, appreciate and become actively involved in.

The adventure is in the ordeal, and the ordeal in is the adventure.  That’s the deal.

There is eternity to be discovered while we are here, on earth.  What we need to undertake is the journey that is waiting for us, which will take us to our Divinity within.   Let’s not have regret on our deathbeds.

What we need to take us towards the eternal is here, now, in this world.

Let us all keep walking in two worlds.

- Michael Mervosh

This blog post is an essay  that forms part of the material in a new Web Course from the Hero’s Journey Foundation, called Walking In Two Worlds.

“Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.”

-Meister Eckhart

Threshold: defined – the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.

“If the call is heeded, the individual is invoked to engage in a dangerous adventure.  It’s always a dangerous adventure because you’re moving out of the familiar sphere of your community…I call this crossing the threshold.  This is the crossing from the conscious into the unconscious world, but the unconscious world is represented in many, many different images…It may be a plunge into the ocean, it may be a passage into the desert, it may be getting lost in a dark forest, it may be finding yourself in a strange city…but this is the adventure – it’s always the path into the unknown, through the gateway or the cave or the clashing rocks…The idea in the hero adventure is to walk bodily through the door into the world where the dualistic rules don’t apply.”

-       Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces.

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

-       Rumi

Joseph Campbell’s engaging prose begins this essay for us, followed by Rumi’s invitation to go back and forth across the threshold where two worlds touch.  We start with a reflection on the opening lines of his poem.  A call to awakening is a call to pay close attention.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
don’t go back to sleep.

He tells us that if we can pay close attention to the breeze as it passes by us in the early morning hours, as the sun begins to bring forth the light of day – then we can pay attention in the same way to what is happening within the landscape of our own inner being.  If we can focus our senses on the subtle nuances of what is taking place in the natural world before us, during those hours when many of us are still asleep – then we can pay attention to what is moving through our psyches as well.

If we pay close attention, we can allow that which usually remains buried in the unconscious ground of our being  (what many never wake up to) to begin to slip forth into our awareness – like a light breeze brushing against our skin.

Don’t go back to sleep. Rumi implores us to stay attentive throughout his poem.  Don’t get too distracted.  Don’t become too sedated, or overflowing with anxiety.  Don’t get lost in aimlessness and rumination, or the endless details of mental thinking.  Come back to your senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.  Keep paying attention by sensing into what is really happening, right now, in this life.   Don’t be caught up in the illusions of the mind, mistaking it for what is real.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

The call to adventure is about listening for what we most desire in this life.  The call is towards that which we must do, or become.  We must have access to our sacred longing, so we can move towards what we really want, so we can take up the hero’s adventure.  We must ask for what we really want.

We self-activate by accessing the energy we have locked up in the core of our being; the activation is brought on by the asking.  We have to ask others for help. We petition the gods, our highest and best self, and divine intercessors.   We must petition our own soul’s desire for assistance – that which has brought us here, seeing to this very incarnation we have undertaken.   Our purpose and our fulfillment lie in knowing what we really value, what we can give our very lives to.   We must ask for this, even when  (or especially when) we don’t know what it is yet.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

For me, this is a powerful line in Rumi’s poem.  Those who are awakening are going back and forth across the threshold between the mundane tasks of this world, and the sacred encounters with what is eternal in the ‘other’ world, beyond this one.  People are walking in two worlds.

We are these people. This is what many of us really want.   We want to find that place where the world of spirit and the world of matter touch; we want more than anything to go back and forth from here to beyond here, then from that place, to here.

Many of us learned as young children that if we were good, we would one day go to heaven.  We also were taught that if we were bad, we would go to hell forever when we died.   Many of us have carried these deep-seated beliefs forward throughout our lives, even if as adults we became less convinced of a literal final Judgment Day event, where duality is the determinant for our final destination.

What many of us are awakening to today is the scientifically validated, cosmological reality that heaven and hell are not literal places we go to when we die.  For where in the literal cosmos are they actually located?  Rather, they are states of consciousness that are ever-present, right here in this world.   When we are in harmony with our true selves and with the world around us; when we experience the awe of unfolding mystery; when we encounter various and sublime states of love – we go the place in us that is heaven.

Conversely, when we are locked in anxious or depressive states, compulsive addictions or fear-based, hostile ruminations, we feel despairingly unable to access loving states of being.  We are in these ways cast out of God’s loving presence.  We feel unworthy of the love of others.  We are in hell.   (This reminds me of a popular aphorism I have often heard: religion helps those who are afraid of going to hell, and spirituality helps those who have already been there.)

When we feel imprisoned by what ails us, sense no way out, nor perceive any viable or meaningful future, we will not be able to see any open doors before us in this life.  This leaves us no other option than to hope for the attainment of heaven in the next life.  But here, Rumi tells us that there is a doorway in this world, and it leads to the one beyond this one, and it is round and open.  It is accessible to us, now, if we can learn how to cross the threshold.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

The big questions here, the ones that take us towards our essential ‘quest’ adventure, are the ones that causes us to search for the door that leads to the other world – while we are still in this one.  Where did I come from?  Where I am going? What am I supposed to do doing?

How do we find a threshold door between the worlds?  What makes the doorsill open for us, and what allows us to pass through and into what lies beyond it?

What if the door between this world and the other world, the one filled with wonder, mystery and adventure, is to be found right where our most troublesome obstacles, barriers and issues are located?

What makes a boundary shift from an obstruction to an opening?

Thresholds are important markers along the territories of our interior regions as well as our external landscapes.  They create distinct boundary delineations.  They create contrast; differentiating and distinguishing the territories on either side of the marking.  They also inform us that important is happening.  The crossing point is a ritual of recognition, an awareness that something is about to change.

Reminiscing back over my own travel history, I can recall some very distinct border crossing experiences, made especially noteworthy due the vast differences between the country of departure and the country of entry.  Going from the California border in the US, and crossing over into Mexico.  Going from Gibraltar into Morocco.   Crossing into (the former) Yugoslavia from Austria.

One distinct feature of border crossings such as these is that you pay more attention than you were paying before you approached the border.  There are armed guardians in the uniforms of military personnel; identity and passport checks; sometimes a thorough vehicle search.  There is a noteworthy change in mood, in language, in customs and social protocols, and perhaps even the literal terrain.

Let’s turn now to the poetry of David Whyte, as we return to one of the fundamental tasks required of the hero, the one who responds to the inner call to adventure.  We must let go of something very fundamental and familiar.  We must let go of that which we already know, and perhaps know too well, before we go any further.

In this high place
It is as simple as this,
Leave everything you know behind.

A ‘high place’ represents a place above and beyond where we typically go in our lives.   It is a metaphor for ascending to a heightened state of consciousness.   In order to arrive here, we have to take up a simple and sometimes very daunting task:  Leave everything you know behind. If you already know something (especially if you think you already know an outcome in advance), there is no adventure in that, and certainly no learning anything new.

Joseph Campbell often emphasized this fact.  He said, “One way to deprive yourself of an experience is indeed to expect it.  Another is to have a name for it before you have the experience.”

This devalues and distances us from lived experience, which is necessary for the humility, awe and respect to be had for the proper sense of adventure, and all that which is sacred.  Sacredness does not wish to be subject to our ego wishes, nor to our control.  Rilke says that ‘what is Eternal does not want to be bent by us’.   So, leaving something behind, particularly those things to which we have been attached and by which have been bound, is part of the entry fee into the realm of adventure.

Step toward the cold surface,
Say the old prayer of rough love
And open both arms.

We all know this distinct moment in time – the shivering chill of bodily sensation, standing before the cold surface of a body of water – right before we walk or plunge in.  Perhaps you can recall standing at the edge of a diving board at a swimming pool, or at the edge of the sandy beach, with the seawater moving in over your feet.  Time slows down for an instant; we may stand at this threshold for a while.  The ‘old prayer of rough love’ is the encouragement we say to ourselves, in order to go forth into the water, knowing how it will disrupt our kinesthetic comfort level.  We will abruptly feel sensation on our skin very different from our current state, once we enter the water.  But that is also the very reason why we want to enter the water, as well!   We go in to have a lived experience in our bodies, feeling the changing state of our being, as we do.  Some experience this as exhilaration.

In order to transit, to move into and through the water, we must know what we really want. We must open our arms to swim.  We must open our minds to change and grow.  We must open our hearts to love, and be loved, and do what we love.  We need a sense of buoyancy for both swimming and loving.

Those who come with empty hands
Will stare into the lake astonished,
There, in the cold light
Reflecting pure snow

The opportunity for the hero is to travel as lightly as possible as he or she crosses a threshold.   Empty hands are the metaphorical image for having to let go of something that has been held onto, or held back.  Letting go of fears, worries, and obsessive thinking.   Letting go of old habits, fixed ideas, broken ideals.   Letting go of expectations- another challenge for may of us.  There is something that I watch many people cling to for dear life, regardless of whether or not it serves their life – the challenge of letting go of sameness.

Those who find the courage to let go, when sameness no longer serves life, but instead constricts and confines it, requires us enter into a vulnerability that opens us.  One that allows for awe, even astonishment, to enter.  Something can suddenly penetrate into awareness – ‘clarity’ – an appropriate metaphor for ‘cold light’.   Something clean, clear and enlightening can now come in, like a refreshing swim in a saltwater ocean.   Newness, going beyond sameness, can feel just like that.

The true shape of your own face.

This is what awaits us as we successfully cross a long-bound limit, or a threatening threshold.  It puts us in touch with an essential sense of true-ness, of right relationship, where we feel like we are becoming ourselves again (or like never before). We become something beyond the society’s expectation and demand of us.

Before we can arrive at the true shape of our essential nature, we have to learn how to recognize, face and cross over many threshold points, over and over again, finding a way to move beyond thresholds that have previously been only obstacles to us.

*  Facing Our Threshold Guardians *

Crossing the threshold always involves going from the conscious world to the unconscious world; going from what you know, to what you don’t (yet) know. This inevitably requires us to confront the deep-seated fears and lifelong belief systems that have both contained and confined us.  It is often our fate to face the fears we are most strongly identified with, and thus most strongly bound by.

Our most natural instinct is to be physically or emotionally contained when we are afraid – we look to be held, literally or psychically, by another.  We seek out security, something or someone to stabilize us when we are shaken by life.  Fears that linger and lurk over time work their way down into our unconscious terrain, and disappear from our awareness.  From deep down below, they control us in such a way that we become willing to be confined, constricted and even imprisoned by them, sometimes in the most peculiar and irrational ways.

In the realm of myths, we encounter ‘Threshold Guardians’.  They are the watchers and keepers of the established bounds. These creatures are personifications and representations that stand for the limits of our old fears, wounds, belief systems, and worldviews.  Joseph Campbell said it like this: “The powers of the psyche that keep watch at the boundary are seen as dangerous, and to confront them feels risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”

Campbell went on to say that they show us “the ambiguities of this perplexing passage”; the fears will “recede before a genuine psychological readiness; the over-confident adventurer  (in over his or her head) may be shamelessly undone.”

The hero task is to go inward, to find and face the specific psychic powers that holds one back from venturing.  There is an emblematic scene that personifies and plays out this task in the Star Wars trilogy: Luke has to confront his fears of becoming a Jedi Knight.  He enters into the dark passage of a cave, not knowing the way through, or even the way out.  He is then confronted by the image of Darth Vader, his ‘dark father’.

Vader represents all the soul-killing expectations and requirements of society upon each of us: participation in activities that offer rewards of success, prestige and promotion, but they cost us our souls, rendering us into darkness.  Luke has to fight with this dark internalized aspect of himself – the aspect that fights against his own nature – in order to pass through the threshold limits within, before he can fulfill the destiny that was meant for him.

Another way to understand the threshold guardians of mythic adventure is to recognize them as gatekeepers for our integrity and authenticity.   No one gets a ‘free ride’ when it comes to journeying into soul consciousness.   We all must be willing to face what hold us back honestly, and even be willing to bring the fears with us, once we are conscious of them.  In this way, our fears can eventually become our allies, giving us the needed motivation and energy to move forward towards our most sought after pursuits with humility, and respect for our humanity.

What is the primary ‘threshold guardian’ in your present life?  What is the fear that keeps you bound beyond good and healthy containment for you?   What keeps you bound to your same-ness and small-ness?   Can you risk confronting the internal aspect of yourself that obstructs your path?

Let’s return to more of Rumi’s teaching to learn about another essential hero task for crossing the threshold into the soul’s adventure: the willingness to become whole-hearted in our efforts.  Here, Rumi offers us his version of a threshold guardian: fierceness of heart.

Gamble everything for love,
If you’re a true human being.
If not, leave this gathering.

Meaningful adventure cannot be entered with one’s head.  Those who try to approach a soul journey with their reason fail miserably, and soon.  The gamble Rumi speaks of is really no gamble at all, but it does involve a sense of risk.  Security seeking, in the end, becomes the final danger for the hero.  It is on the low end of the evolutionary scale, and it is can be a contrary aim for a heroic endeavor.  There is a definite time and place for playing it safe, and for being reasonable.  But it will not be found in the mythic realm of adventure.

So the next toll to be paid to the gatekeeper, in order to cross the threshold, is a wholehearted, fiercely loving presence.   Those without it turn back in the face of threat, danger or intensity.  The fierce looking guardian says to us – ‘get behind your heart, get real, be a vital human being living from your own experience, or go back from where you came – go back home’.   If you are caught up in abstractions, conceptualizations, or mental gymnastics, you can’t pass through.   You are simply someone confusing the menu with the meal.

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.

This is one of Rumi’s lines that I read long ago, and have remembered ever since. Much of the tiredness and exhaustion we see in people today have to do with the very matter of half-heartedness.   It is often not only due to overwork, it has more to do with a lack of heart in one’s efforts.  Half-hearted efforts are often more fatiguing than no effort at all.  It is like driving a car with a bad fuel mix in the engine.

We also have to look deeply at the oppositional and life-negating forces at work deep within us. We must examine more closely our inner contradictions, seeing how one half of our heart works against the other half.  We have to work this through inside ourselves, and find a bridge across these contradictions.  Otherwise, we will not have the energy necessary to move through the buffeting cross currents and tension-filled challenges brought forth in our external world.   This is an internal dynamic we must all wrestle and reconcile with on the hero’s path to adventure.

You set out to find God,
But then you keep stopping for long periods
At mean-spirited roadhouses.

Rumi gives us more of his fierce guardian’s message.  We set out on the adventure many times without a strong and grounded foundation, a clear intention, and the necessary inner resources to propel us forward – essential in order to tolerate the forests of what is unknown.  We get diverted by continuous distractions; get caught up in endless roadhouses of trivial self-concerns.  They pre-occupy us at best, and consume us at worst.

We become mean-spirited due to our passive dependency on the familiar: the people, places and things in our lives that we over-depend on to bring forth life force energy, which can ultimately only come from within, and which will only come from a certain whole-hearted tenacity and fierceness.

Up until this point, we are still in charge of the journey, still in control of the outcome.   You can still say yes or no to proceeding.   But there is a certain internal compass point one feels when one crosses a threshold.  Something inside says ‘this is the point of no return’. After crossing over this point, whoever goes forward from here, will not be coming back.

Of course, I may return, but no longer as the ‘I’ that I have known, or that others have known.  The hero somehow senses he or she will becomes more aligned with something larger than one’s self, and ‘other than’ one’s self – the one that has not yet come into being.  That unknown and unknowing ‘I’ will be more and more the driver of our future existence.

Juan Jimenez, the Spanish a sailor and poet, speaks of this soul aspect of self in a most worthy way.   This is the one we take the adventure with, who accompanies us into the mythic realms, and will return with us when the time comes.  This is the part of the self that is identified with soul:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I speak,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk
when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing
when I die.

The Journey Now Takes You

Until we have faced our buried fears and beliefs about the reality that confines us to a stifling sameness and smallness; until we have aligned with a fierce, wholehearted effort-making that is more than just willful determination; and until we have surrendered into a open-armed posture of “Yes” to life as it unfolds – we are not yet ready to fully answer the call to adventure.   But if we can respond with a joyful heart, with a certain humility, and with a willingness to embrace the ambiguous and mysterious nature of a ‘zone unknown to us’, we are ready to commit ourselves to the adventure journey.

Once we make a true commitment to the journey, we can surrender ourselves over to it.  The journey now takes us. Our task will be to yield, to go for the ride, to be pulled into the adventure – sometimes triumphantly, sometimes failing miserably.  We just need to remember that it is not how we fall; it is about how we get back up.   Either way, we will now be taken by the journey.  As Campbell said, ‘you only have to say yes, and doors will begin to open, that would not open before, and in fact, will not open for anyone else’.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius,
Power and magic in it.

-        Goethe

Once we have given ourselves over fully to the adventure, we begin to enter the realm of myth, where metaphor and ambiguity rule the terrain, and simplistic black and white thinking falls away, is of no use.

We now approach interior spaces that are symbolically represented by dark forests, wide-open desert plains, vast mountain regions, deep ocean waters and dark underground caves.  By moving beyond judging states (either towards one’s self or towards the world around us) we return to a child’s heart, capable of wonder, surprise and delight.

Here, we are be moved by things, caught up in raptures, enter into full participation with whatever is taking place in front of us.  The German sage and poet Rilke reminds us of this early childhood capacity.  He encourages us to make use of it now, as we move out beyond the boundaries of the familiar, and open up to not knowing what lies ahead.

We come to accept that we cannot predict nor control what comes next for us on our adventure, any more than we could predict what dream we will have tonight.  But we can begin to imagine possibilities where they did not exist before, and we can move beyond our own familiar bounds, building the great arch of previously unimagined bridges, beyond opposing forces, sides, and polarities.

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Once we begin to come into an awareness that goes past duality, we find ourselves on solid ground somewhere in between and beyond the pairs of opposites. Here we are susceptible to various states of wonder, curiosity, and intrigue.  This is the pathway towards bliss.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

It is a remarkable achievement indeed to move beyond over-simplification, our reactionary judgments and oppositional, contentious attitudes, now instead being able to explore what our truly lived experiences and authentic responses are towards the life happenings taking place all around us.  

To work with things when building the association
beyond words is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

To understand the inner realms of vitality and mystery is to move beyond associations with words.  We don’t become mesmerized by the menu, and confuse it with the meal.  We can enter the fullness and satisfaction of mysteries that lead us to ecstatic states, where ‘words turn back’.   We no longer wish to be swept along by events that happen in our lives.  We instead want to help shape the tides, influence others in positive ways, leave our mark upon the adventure, contribute something that matters, and shift the bounds of fate towards a realizable destiny.

But we have to be willing to live with complexity and paradox in order to do so.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the abyss between two
opposing poles.  Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

As we pass the threshold crossing of our limited ego identifications and polarizing states of duality, and practice the power of such a spanning, we begin to rise above the abyss of ignorance, contention and shortsightedness.  We span limitations that have kept us bound to the same issues, the same patterns, in the same way, over and over again.

It is here that we discover that our by facing our obstructions we are actually creating the means for our personal transformation – and this is how you know you have made the passage through the threshold.

This bridging happens within us, and we are carried to new states of consciousness, new energy sources within, new insights that reveal a personal insight and universal connection.  We have entered the realm of adventure.

We begin to do exactly what we would be doing, if we felt most secure.

Living the adventure of our life’s time, and riding wave after wave of unfolding realizations, living more and more into the privilege of being who we truly are.  Up ahead lie challenging ordeals.  Soon we will need to understand how our Allies and Synchronicity work with us, in order to do so.

For now, we experience the wonder of moving past obstacles, and crossing over thresholds.

- Michael Mervosh