As a child matures beyond infancy, it can no longer react in a totally self-centered way. It must learn to behave in the world, to follow its parents' and teachers' guidance. The young Universal Human does the same, but in the Emergence Process we learn that the parental authority is within us, as our essential divine Essence.
Until recently, the Beloved has remained aloof, signaling but not fully incarnating. The local selves were often left on their own, like latchkey children, trying to serve the higher purpose, but disconnected from their source of power, or acting without the intimate, felt presence of a loving parent. Now, as the process of incarnating continues, the Essential Self becomes proactive and is willing to be the genuine authority within the household of selves. This inner authority does not impose any form of punishment, guilt, or asceticism, for our local selves are becoming willing disciples of the Essential Self within.
The Story…
As I began to take authority as the Beloved, my local self let me know it didn't trust me to be fully present. In the past, I'd hovered and signaled from afar, leaving my local self on its own to complete the job without the advantage of my full presence and incarnation.
Local self had been put up to huge tasks through inspiring signals, such as “Go tell the story of the birth of a Universal Humanity,” or “Work for the transformation of the American presidency” (which I did in 1984 by running and succeeding to have my name placed in nomination for the vice president of the United States on the Democratic ticket).
But I, as the Beloved, had not been fully incarnated. I had left the local selves to carry the burden of my commands given from afar without the energy and love that I infuse in them with my full radiant presence. My local selves suffered from the illusion of separation from me, which was the source of their anxiety and driven behavior.
This acceptance of inner responsibility and authority on the part of the Essential Self was clearly the next part of my process to experience the full power that I am. As I entered this stage, I had shifted my identity from local to Essential Self and was ready to transfer authority from the local selves who prod and push to the Beloved who literally takes the “throne” in the kingdom of heaven within. I realized that my external work in the world must now spring from the internal seat of authority, from the power of the Essential Self.
However, in the process, I discovered I didn't have a strong internal authority. My own inner parents needed maturing. In life, I'd had an overly dominant, demanding, very competitive, and successful father and a beautiful but submissive mother, underdeveloped because she had died so young. Within me, these two archetypes, my masculine and feminine aspects, were divided and immature, undermining my internal authority.
My father was irritable and brilliant, shouting at his employees, frightening his children and wife. I can still feel his personality acting out through me whenever I am flooded with irritation. But I learned to hate authority because of how my father used it and as a result have always resisted becoming the head of anything, not wanting the responsibility.
To strengthen my inner masculine, I envisioned the father I wish I'd had as being within myself. He listens carefully to my fears and desires. He has worldly wisdom and can take my hand and show a better way to achieve my heart's desire. He is powerful, creative, and infuses me with the energy of the inner masculine.
My feminine aspect also began to take shape. My own mother had never had a chance to mature, dying at thirty-three of breast cancer. I remember her as exquisitely beautiful, smiling shyly while my father ranted and raged, often in jest or love, but like a great bear in contrast to a gazelle. When I asked her in my prayers many years later, “Why did you die?” the answer I received was “I was so angry at your father, but I couldn't express myself, so I died.”
My inner mother was arrested in her development and had never grown and matured. I in my own life had failed to be the nurturer to myself.
I started to bring forth the inner mother. I asked myself, Could I have a garden again? Could I open my recipe books, which I hadn't looked at for years? Could I simply enjoy myself in my home? Could I even have a home? I'd lost that side of my life.
I began to pay attention to the grieving girl within me who was motherless, always subtly seeking her mother in the most inappropriate people! I called her up unto me as the Divine Daughter. I embraced and nurtured her with all the mother love for which I had so yearned. I noticed that my chronic feeling of loneliness began to disappear.
When I returned home in the evening alone, instead of having that sinking feeling that harkened back to my feelings as a teenager, after my mother had died and I came home to an empty house, I actually looked forward to the time alone to be with my self! The sadness of loneliness became the pleasure of aloneness.
As I accepted the nurturing feminine side of myself, I began to experience the wise father, my masculine aspect, take firmer hold. I felt into the father's strength, creativity, entrepreneurial genius, buoyancy. I called the father to come home.
There was a new order in the household of wayward and lonely selves. The “locals” loved the presence of the matured mother/father and learned to “obey” with pleasure, for it truly felt better to be part of this orderly and loving inner home than wandering like lost children crying in the night. Mysteriously, when I honored and matured my inner parents rather than avoiding or escaping from them, they came together as one. When the mother and father are one, there the Essential Self is, and genuine Essential Self governance arises.
Now, I experience a joined masculine/feminine within me, and I draw on a fused Essence of mother/father as a co-creator. They no longer are jousting for control and domination but rest in true partnership within me. This is the “inner partnership” model. The gender differences have faded into wholeness. I am embodied as a woman, but when I am the Essential Self, I feel so complete that I don't actually notice feminine or masculine differences. The yin and the yang join to form a whole being.
I recorded the transition in my journal:
This morning I claimed inner authority and self-governance. I am the Beloved and speak with the authority as the Beloved, with the concerns of my local selves released and transformed into helpful signals about what needs to be done, with no negative charge within me. I can speak from my heart with the authority that is required as my work in the world unfolds.
It is vital in here that the local selves respond and adore the Beloved so that they can be absorbed, disappear and reappear as the Beloved on Earth calling forth the Essential Self in others.
When the local selves are in communion with me, experiencing their own absorption into me, I protect them from their tendency to separate from me. Just as worshippers in a church need to be protected in a sacred space from their own daily mundane concerns, so the worshipping local selves need to be protected by me from their mundane concerns. The local selves do not leave the sacred space to go “back” into the so-called real world. They are one with me, and together we go forward as the Universal Human.
Once I claimed authority within myself, the work of inner observation, of dialoguing between the local selves and the Beloved, became an active, continuous process. My walks in the morning after meditation and journal writing became a time of active inner dialogue. I invited a troubling local self to speak out loud, to say “I'm really upset about so-and-so.” Then Beloved would respond with wisdom and love.
Whatever comes up, from a trivial irritation to a major crisis such as ill health, loss of a loved one, financial insecurity, natural disasters, is grist for the mill. If you have a true evolutionary perspective and you see that crises precede transformation, that problems are evolutionary drivers, then no matter what the challenge you are facing, you look first for what may be emerging, what more is being called forth from you. It is essential in these times to develop the inner authority such that you can turn inward for guidance and strength and become a wise and loving authority in dealing with the problem.
I have found that the joy of my life now is the unfolding of myself and others as that Essential Self, in a continuous process of self-discovery, self-observation, and communion with others doing the same.
In that context, I offer some points of guidance for this stage of development.
The Guidance…
We are now ready, as the new integrated identity, the young Universal Human, to accept full authority within ourselves. (The root of the word authority is the Latin auctor, meaning creator). We have been used to exerting external power over others as an egoic self or submitting to some external authority for direction in life. But at this step, we move toward what Gary Zukav, in his book The Seat of the Soul (1990), calls “authentic power,” by which he means a power that flows from the Essential Self and leads to power from within—true empowerment of self and others.
At this step, the process of Emergence is comparable to the path of an astronaut. To be selected as an astronaut, one has to display qualities of excellence in all domains—temperament, intelligence, health, and relationships.
The same demands hold true of our Emergence as Universal Humans at this stage of our process. But unlike the astronauts, we have no external mission control, no external authority we can follow and depend upon. We have the control or guidance from within ourselves, as well as from wise and beloved others.
We may also draw upon the collective experience of a community of peers undergoing the same process as ourselves, but at the heart of it, there is no substitute for cultivating deep inner authority at the level of our own Essential Self.
In order for the transfer of power to take place, both the Essential Self and local selves must accept a deeper level of responsibility and discipline than ever before. The Essential Self needs to be present and responsible, and the local selves need to give up any remaining desire to act as separated selves. Without this, local selves will infuse the body/ mind with their anxiety and prevent the Essential Self from operating.
This is yet another step in the process of the descent of the Beloved and ascent of the local self to join as one, coming into expression as the Universal Human. The local self must come to believe in the Essential Self's reality and must trust that self to be the source of all it seeks in the world. Almaas points out in Essence that ego won't let go until it is assured that everything is in place:
Personality is not going to clear the space completely before it is sure that everything is covered. On the surface it appears that personality wants to displace essence. This is partially true, but on the deeper levels, it was formed and developed ultimately for protection. As essence is discovered, it is easier to let the personality go.
To go the whole way in the Emergence Process, the Essential Self within each of us must gain the trust of the local selves by agreeing to take full responsibility for their behavior and attitudes. This is not power over, but power from within.
As the Essential Self gains authority within the household, it learns to give loving, firm guidance and takes full dominion. The local selves begin to look up to Essential Self for guidance, like children look to the mother when they are confused or angry. Why would they want to follow anyone but her? She has the wisdom, she has the guidance, she offers the love that “passeth all understanding.”
As the Essential Self assumes operational authority within the household of local selves, we are naturally led to mature our own inner parents, the often undeveloped masculine and feminine aspects of ourselves. The local selves look to the Beloved to have the qualities that ideally our real parents might have had but rarely did.
So many of us came from families that were dysfunctional, headed by parents who did not have a clue about their own or their children's self-development. Now, with the transfer of authority, we are becoming parents to ourselves at a deeper level, actually self-parenting ourselves from within. We must learn to do this job maturely, or there will be rebellion in the inner family, and the local selves will refuse to obey.
In this process of mature self-parenting, addictions and unresolved habitual patterns will come up and must be dealt with. These patterns are often deep and require power and understanding on the part of the inner authority to release them from their self-destructive behavior (as well as help from professional therapists where necessary).
Journal
Examine and write about your attitude toward authority in your life. Have you resented it in others? Have you exerted it over others? Do you approve of the way you handle authority now? Is your sense of internal authority weak or firm?
Review your attitude toward your mother and father, and imagine them matured, as you would like them to be. Then internalize these evolved parental figures, making them your own. Imagine them as being within yourself. Write as the matured, ideal parents you didn't have and begin to re-parent your wounded children, your local selves.
How does this bring into a new balance the masculine and feminine aspects of your being? How do you experience the transfer of authority to your Essential Self? Are there ways in which you have gained greater “authentic power”? Are there troubling patterns that arise? As your own Inner Authority, how can you reassure your local selves and gain their trust? You will learn more about how to deal with persistently troubled local selves in the next step.