The Janus Model

The new stories we tell about our past, the new choices we make about our futures—these are always made in the present field of awareness and identity, the present life-world. The “now” is the place of choice, of responsibility, of power and of freedom. What we sow (now) is what we shall reap (future). The bed we’re sleeping in (now) is the bed we have made for ourselves (past). In the Indian and Buddhist worldview this is the principle of karma—that all our actions have consequences. We cannot erase, avoid, or circumvent the karmic consequences of the choices we have made. We can, however, by becoming conscious of the choices we are making in the present, help bring about consequences that are more in line with our highest aspirations and spiritual intentions.

Mapping Our Present Life-World of Relations

The central field of present awareness and identity, on the cusp between past and future, but encompassing our memories and our anticipatory visions, is what may be called our “world.” Each of us knows, perceives, and lives in a private world, part of a greater world that lies beyond the horizons of our awareness. It is this private, individual world that we refer to when we use the identifying pronouns “me” and “I.” An expansion of consciousness or awakening occurs when the boundaries of our individual life-world are enlarged. In the words of Heraclitus, “When we are asleep, we each live in our own world, and when we are awake, we all live in the one great world.”

The concept of “life-world” (Lebenswelt) was formulated by philosophers of the European phenomenological school. It includes both the Mitwelt (“with-world”) of relations and the Umwelt (“around-world”) or environment. This life-world is what we are presently aware of and identified with—and is the starting and ending point of all the divinations, whether we are doing them for ourselves or for others. In the alchemical divination work it is always useful and valuable to begin by describing and drawing a map of this personal life-world.

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has often emphasized that the notion of interbeing, a relational concept, is preferable to the more abstract concept of “being.” As is well known, one of the central tenets of Buddhism is the notion of “no self,” that there is no such thing as a self. Similarly, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that no matter how hard and carefully he searched, he could find no “self” in his introspections. What Hume and the Buddhists are pointing to is that the concept of “self,” which looms so large in modern Western psychological thought, is basically an abstraction, not some kind of an entity. It is an example of what linguists call reification (“thing-making”), where an abstract concept becomes concretized as an entity with a name.

Some traditional indigenous languages don’t even have the possibility of saying someone is—only the relational belongingness defines us.

Tzutujil was a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being…With no verb “to be,” permanence becomes a comic hypothesis for most Mayans, who don’t believe anything will last on its own…“Belonging to” is as close to “being” as Tzutujil thinking gets. There are no generic nouns for people or things; all words have to belong to someone (Prechtel, 1993, p. 211).

The philosophical and psychological conundrums associated with the concept of “self” can best be avoided, I have come to think, if we combine the indigenous and phenomenological notion of “life-world” with a systems view: the self is a system of relations that we can also call the life-world. Systems thinkers, especially those with a feminist orientation, have pointed out that all relations are “essentially constitutive.” We are relational beings in our essence. Relations are not some kind of add-on to a basic core self. For example, every one of us is the son or daughter of a man and woman—we could not be a “self” apart from who we are in that web of relations we call “family.” Family systems therapists have long insisted that we should treat an individual’s problems only within the network of family relations. So let us begin the process of tuning in to and mapping the self-system or life-world of relations.

Draw a blank circle on a large piece of paper and indicate on it, by name, symbol, color, or shape, the core family relations—parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses or partners, children and grandchildren, children of siblings, that constitute your world.

Besides our genetic family of origin, we also are participants in a web or network of chosen affinities, human beings who are friends, colleagues, collaborators, teachers, mentors, allies—all those human beings whom we know and relate with by name, and who know and relate with us by name. The name defines the boundary of the circle of identification. The circle is not closed; in the course of daily life, we may encounter other human beings we don’t know by name (the waitress in the restaurant, the driver of the bus), whom we treat with the respect due any being, and who may or may not become part of our world. There are also other human beings whom we know of indirectly (the mayor of our city, the actress we admire), but we don’t have a personal naming relationship with them.

Indicate on the map of your life-world all the other named human beings with whom you are related by friendship and affinity of interest.

It is important to remember that our web of human relations, both those of family and the elective affinities, includes not only the living, but also the dead, the souls dwelling in the spirit world, with whom we communicate and commune in our dreams and visions and memories. We may speak of deceased relatives or friends as “lost,” but it is we who are truly lost if we do not continue to cultivate the bond with loved ones, regardless of whether they are alive or dead. Bert Hellinger, the very influential German former priest and therapist, who has been one of my main teachers, greatly extended and deepened the method of setting up family constellations by including not only the living but also the dead, and considering the web of relations as a kind of “family soul.”

Include in the map of your life-world some representation of the souls and spirits of deceased ancestors and family members, as well as your friends, allies, teachers, and guides dwelling in the spirit world.

Nonhuman beings. For many people, the emotional bonds we have with a pet or other animal—the dog, the cat, the horse—can be at least as close and meaningful as human relations. For gardeners, growers, herbalists, and those with the legendary “green thumb,” an affinity for and love of plants may also be a significant part of their self-system. For those working consciously with shamanic healing and divination, the spirits of wild animals and plants are important allies, guides, and helpers. The emerging paradigms of deep ecology and ecopsychology encourage us to regard the ecosystems in which we live with respect and conscious intentionality.

Indicate symbolically on the map the important relations with nonhuman beings and the natural ecosystems of your life–world.

The relationship we have with our physical body is clearly of central importance in our life-world and self-system. Issues of physical wellness and illness are central concerns and preoccupations for most of us. Philosophically, there are many different views and opinions about the nature of the relationship between mind and body. Psychologically, issues of body image and self-esteem are entangled in the many psychosomatic problems that plague civilized humans. For athletes and other performers, the functional capabilities of the body are the foundation of their chosen life-work.

For bringing clarity and balance into the relationship with body in the context of spiritual practice, I especially appreciate Gurdjieff’s teaching: he recommended we relate to our body the way we would relate to a loyal servant. Obviously, we would treat him or her with respect and without abuse; we would take care of real needs, including needs for food, exercise, rest, and recreation, while not indulging spurious distractions and addictions. Saint Francis of Assisi made use of a similar metaphor when he admonished his disciples to take care of “Brother Donkey.”

Indicate symbolically on the map of your life-world your relationship with your body—body image, attitude, and your feelings toward your physical vehicle or vessel.

We have relations not only with individual beings, but also with collectives of beings. Our relationship with family and community is the core of our belonging and our primary support system. The clan, the neighborhood, the village, the group of friends, the team or band or tribe, the professional association, the club of shared interest, the company, the organization, the religious congregation, the political party—our participation in these human collectives are core defining features of our self-system. The nation-state to which we belong is also such a collective, although a relative newcomer on the world-historical stage, being at most 200 years old. Complex concepts and feelings of patriotism and nationalism—often ambivalent mixtures of pride, embarrassment, and prejudice—cluster around our national identification.

In this age of globalization—primarily driven by the market forces of industrial capitalism—a sense of belonging to a common humanity, the “family of man,” a multicultural, pluralistic planet-wide collective sense of identity is growing. In the final chorale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the words Seid umschlungen Millionen (“I’m embracing you, oh millions”) express this globalizing circle of caring and compassion. I believe that the extension of compassionate care to all human and all nonhuman beings on Earth is the key to resolving the evolutionary challenges of war and planetary habitat destruction that will make or break our civilization.

Indicate on your life-world map your relationship with the collective soul-fields of family, community, and society with which you are involved, as well as our common humanity on planet Earth.

Our life-world or self-system also comprises relations with particular regions or places on Earth that may be charged with intense emotional attachments. Ancient peoples believed that places themselves have a particular spirit—the genius loci—and many mythic stories were told about places and their spirits. Prime among the places of significance for each of us is the place we call “home”—both the home in which we grew up and the place in which we presently live with our network of human relations. Our sense of identity and attitudes toward one another are strongly affected by our place of origin. Among indigenous people around the world, great importance is attached to the relatedness of a person to a particular place. Someone may introduce himself or herself by saying, “I am from this place, and my father’s family comes from these mountains, and my mother’s from this river.”

In the complex urbanizing and globalizing civilization of our time, our ancestral place of origin may be associated (as it is in my case) with traumatic and challenging stories of dislocation by migration, refugee flight, war, or economic hardship. On the other hand, we may be fortunate to know and live in places of safety and beauty, where we truly feel “at home.” There may also be important places in our life-world where we go for rest and recreation, and wild places (like mountains, deserts, oceans) where we go to nourish our indigenous soul and seek visions.

Indicate on the map of your life-world, the significant places of your life and the quality of your relationship with them.

“I live my life in widening circles,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Our life-world of relations with beings and places expands throughout our formative years of growing and learning, and through subsequent experiences of expanded awareness. The child of a family living in a house becomes the man or woman of a community living in a town or village, and then a member of a society occupying one of the continents of planet Earth. Personally, I identify myself as a Native European (the word “native” refers to birth) and American by choice of land and culture. Eventually, we may develop a worldview, a Weltanschauung, a conception of the greater cosmos we live in. Albert Einstein reportedly said that one of the most important questions any of us can ask ourselves as individuals is, “whether the universe is safe for us.” We are beings, not only of planet Earth, but also of the Solar System, and the galaxy called Milky Way, and a universe of countless billions of other galaxies. For each of us, our story is intimately involved in a universe story, an evolutionary cosmology of inconceivable magnificence (Swimme and Berry, 1992).

Mainstream science tells us that we are the sole intelligent species on Earth, on the sole inhabited planet in our solar system and, “as far as we know,” in the galaxy and beyond. However, a moment’s reflection on the sheer numbers calculated by astronomers makes such assumptions absurdly unlikely and simplistic. Visionary cosmologists and the reports of ET communications from thousands of contactees converge in bringing us a picture of a universe whose infinite and diverse worlds are likely inhabited by countless civilizations at varying levels of evolution. Numerous observers agree that alien civilizations of vastly advanced science and technology may have been and probably are visiting Earth: we know they have far advanced technology by the fact that they have mastered space travel. Based on our education and our personal experiences, we can ask ourselves what our conceptions and feelings are about this universe in which we live.

Find a way to indicate on the map of your life-world your conception or view of the greater cosmos, the universe as a whole, in both its material and spiritual dimensions.