Self-absorption diverts our gaze from the light of the world and mires us in our own crowded fantasies; and though those fantasies may proclaim our wealth, the soul—which belongs to the whole and yearns to know and be known through it—cannot be fooled: self-absorption is the truest form of poverty. How sobering, then, to recognize it as the tacit directive of our culture. In myriad ways, subtle and gross, our culture emphasizes ‘I’ rather than ‘we’; it foments an addiction to mere analysis, which sabotages relationship; it presents metaphors for the self that invoke perseity, machinery, cybernetics, discontinuity and entitlement; it instructs us to ‘keep our heads’ even as it demeans sensation; and it provides a background of distractions and anxieties and incessant white noise, ensuring that we are unlikely ever to come to rest in the whole of the wide world’s sensitivity. As a result, we are pretty much blind to our most fundamental relationship—our relationship to the mindful Thou; that blindness constitutes what we have called the “Mind-blindness” of our cultural autism. And our Mind-blindness supports the modus operandi of our self-absorption: we habitually seek to move forward by consulting our own abstractions rather than the stillness of the all-informing present. Only once you open to that stillness will you be able to feel the One Presence; and not until you can feel the One Presence will you have any compass to guide you other than the disembodied directives of the inner supervisor. As the Taoist mystic Chuang Tzu wrote, “I keep the One so as to remain in harmony.” Andrew Harvey commented that Chuang Tzu’s remark
is the essence of the path of the sacred feminine, the clue to the sacred marriage, the fusion of masculine and feminine in the dark silent depths of the psyche.365
The fundamental choice we all face all the time, the choice this entire book has been at pains to clarify, can be stated in very simple terms: you can keep the supervisor, or you can keep the One. The first four spheres of the mind’s sensitivity represent various efforts by the hetabrain to keep the supervisor: the authoritative thinker in the head who stands apart and ‘knows’. The four spheres of the felt self, by contrast, are an awakening to the voluble fluidity of the world, and they culminate in the eighth sphere: the Thou of the Present—the sphere in which the mind’s sensitivity thrives in an I-Thou relationship with the One.
The One, which is always here, cannot be recognized or kept by any who choose to segregate their thinking from the consciousness of Being. The “fusion of masculine and feminine,” as Harvey points out, happens within the “dark silent depths of the psyche”: thinking tumbles from the cranial brain and through the corridor within to ground itself in the pelvic intelligence, enabling it to unify with being and pass through the heart, joining the world in action. As we have said, that journey of unification expresses the journey of the ordinary hero. Campbell noted,
Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of causal deep and back … is the talent of the master.366
The “world division” is not germane to the world itself: it is a construct of our thought and flesh. What is germane to the world is the set of foundational, complementary opposites that hold between them an energetic potential for exchange; we have recognized that energetic potential as the entelechy that shapes all life, as the axes of our consciousness, and as the source from which the creative energy of organic growth springs. As Chuang Tzu observed, those opposites “produce each other, depend on each other, and complement each other.”367 The master who keeps the One yields without resistance to the interplay between those poles, for she recognizes it as the weaving of the whole: she keeps the still point, but holds nothing static—continuously integrating perspective and the “causal deep” of Being. The spacious, subtle, grounded corridor through which the poles of the self come into exchange is what enables the self to be felt as a unity; the spacious, subtle, corational corridor all around us through which the poles of self and world come into exchange is what enables the present to be felt as a unity. The crux of our interfusing axes is what enables us to keep the One.
No one can deny you the choice to ground yourself in stillness and awaken to the felt self; and that means no one can deny you the choice to be whole. But nor is your wholeness something you can keep for yourself or possess. In fact, it is clear by now that your wholeness is something you offer to the world, as a gift. Which is also to say that your freedom is something you offer to the world, as a gift. Whatever the world calls for, it is ultimately calling for the liberation of your desires, your energies, your caring and your heart’s compass. It is calling for you to live fully, skipping along the cusp of the unknown, continually discovering your truth by living it. It is calling for you to find the peace of mind that can only be felt when you trust in your personal path and feel it in everything you do—a path that yields to and celebrates whatever the moment brings; a path that is never taken alone, because it always unfolds in the presence of the Thou.
Why then do we so often opt for the only alternative—keeping the supervisor? I think it comes down to the unseen ‘normal’ that lives in our bodies and governs our habits of thinking and seeing. For instance, we habitually believe that thinking is a head-centric phenomenon, and that our best bet in any situation—including our attempts to keep the One—is to take charge: to analyze the task before us so we know what to do. But as long as we are ‘in charge’, however subtly, we will be spectators—guided by our ideas of ‘what is right’ rather than by the loving touch of the empty present. Unintegrated ideas always lead to supervision, and serve as distractions from the One.
Similarly, our habits of seeing discover a world full of inconveniences and setbacks—a view that diminishes our capacity for relationship and tends to return us to our culture’s belief that “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Often enough, that belief is proven to be true—but the way of the will is usually the dark opposite of the Way of the Tao or the Logos. When the world is understood to be alive and its sacredness is felt, there is but one Way and it belongs to no mortal; and any event within the world is understood as a revelation of the Way. When your seeing is liberated from the habits of self-tyranny, you understand that there are no obstacles; there is only guidance. The world doesn’t produce distractions from the One; it is the One. And the people and trials and frustrations around us are all agents of the One urging us towards wholeness, asking: Can you be whole in this conversation? Can you integrate this chaos? Can you keep the One in pain or injury or within the pressures of your work or your family? We would be nowhere without such trials: every new challenge you meet with wholeness deepens it.
Of course, it can be scary to sail into such encounters ‘unsupervised’, without the ‘thinker in the head’ taking care of you. The impulse to supervise is a reflex for most of us. The antidote, as the myths of the world teach us, is found in a self-achieved submission. Surrender, surrender, surrender. You spill the coffee? Surrender. You see your boss coming down the hall? Surrender. You turn a corner and a gust of cold rain hits you in the face? Surrender. The choice is always yours: supervise or surrender. And although stepping into the world ‘unsupervised’ is scary, stepping into the world in the tangible companionship of the One opens the heart and reveals what we call ‘reality’ to be an endless exchange of gifts.
Keeping the One is made more challenging, of course, by our culture’s chronic Mind-blindness: how can you keep the One if you cannot even feel the One? Nor is it surprising that a culture that cannot “feel the thing as a whole,” that is divorced from the body’s intelligence and devoted to abstraction should, in turn, deny that there is a whole to feel, deny the body’s analog genius, and abstract the One so fully with names and rules and institutions and an authoritarian insistence on mediating any experience of the One that it remains elusive and unreal for many. We are further confounded in our efforts to feel the One by the morass of our postmodern relativism—which claims that everything is relative, and denies the validity of any absolute. To say there is no absolute is to say there is no One. It is ironic that our outlook gained credibility from Einstein’s theory of relativity, which lays out a view of reality in which measurements of length, time and mass lose their fixed values and instead transform according to relative velocity: an increase in that velocity contracts the length of an object, slows down its time and increases its mass relative to an observer. The concept of reality as a reliable, fixed framework—a framework epitomized by the unmoving ether through which all things move—suddenly crumbled. Losing the presence of the ether was a little like losing the stable, reassuring presence of the personified Deity. As the shock of that loss seeped into our consciousness, the phrase “everything’s relative” gained currency and took on the patina of hard-won wisdom.
In fact, Einstein’s theory could as accurately have been called the “Theory of the Absolute”—for everything within it serves to maintain the speed of light as an absolute constant for all observers. There is an analogy to be drawn: the more concerned we are with measuring right and wrong according to human laws; the more intent we are on nailing down verities; the more steadfastly we cling to fundamental laws or ideas as though they were absolute measures of value or truth; the more all of that happens, the farther we stray from our relationship with the true Absolute—which is universally associated with light—even when such laws or ideas purport to strengthen that relationship. An absolute is something that is free from any qualification or restriction—which the living, infinitely interrelated One of the cosmos to which we belong certainly is: to qualify it even by naming it is to risk diminishing it. The word absolute comes from the Latin word absolvere, which means “to set free”—and that is exactly what our relationship with the One effects: that primary relationship holds all others in its bosom, and liberates us into the grace of Being.
Yet another hurdle we face in trying to keep the One is our inculcated tendency to separate God from Being, just as we have separated our thinking from our being—and so he remains somewhere else, usually on high seated on his throne. To imagine him sitting there is to harbor a perspective that invites compliance rather than sensation. All such fractured hierarchies set up huge expectations about how we should behave and feel, and many people strive valiantly to fulfill those expectations, feeling any failure to do so as a sin. The irony, of course, is that the whole is actually the least abstract, most real phenomenon there is: it is what imparts reality to its every particular. Every person, every tree, every flower, every pebble is a visible and transitory sublimation of its aliveness; just as you yourself are. And every such instance of sublimation can be understood as an instance of thinking by the whole—the Divine Mind. To understand that is to experience not a diminution of the self, but a dilation. In fact, to see the world’s aliveness sublimating through everything around you, and to feel it in yourself, is no less than to experience the sublime.
But the issue of keeping the One is actually even easier and more direct than that. Consider this: nothing exists outside of the present, nothing exists outside of the One; the present is all-aware, the One is all-aware; the present is the thinking of the whole, the One is the thinking of the whole. To come into an I-Thou relationship with the One, then, is to come into an I-Thou relationship with the present, for the present is what we feel as the living whole. It is what grants us the consciousness of being. If the One isn’t what we tangibly feel as ‘the present’, I don’t know what it is. The only thing abstract about the One is the names we accord it. So to someone who expresses difficulty feeling the Divine, or feeling the presence of God, I ask, “Can you feel the present?”; and when she stills herself enough to answer yes, I reply, “There, you are in touch with the Divine.” Feeling the One is that ordinary. It is that simple. It is that transformative. It is that real. The One does not exist outside of the present—although, like the present, it contains all the resonances of the past (quantum mechanics reminds us that information cannot be destroyed) and all the potential flowerings of the future. We might also note that the present is omnipotent, omniscient and, of course, omnipresent—the attributes traditionally attributed to the Divine. For the purposes of our understanding, then, I think we would not be far wrong if we were to say that the One is the Present; and the Present—the all-aware, all-creating, eternal, all-remembering, spacious, all-encompassing, ever-renewing, unknowable, unthinkably sensitive, ordinary Present—is the One. It is the Thou. To feel the loving, singular Present, perfectly at rest and in perfect transformation where you stand right now, is to feel the One. “Be still, and know that I am Present.” What all cultures have recognized as the Divine Presence might also be recognized as the Divine Present. The sense of that is beautifully captured by Wu-men, a thirteenth-century Chinese Zen master.
One instant is eternity;
eternity is the now.
When you see through this one instant,
you see through the one who sees.368
When you are continuous with the transforming Present, it lives within you. When the Present lives within you, the One lives within you. When the One lives within you, you are immutably bound cocreators—creating each other and being created in turn. By the same token, to turn away from the Present is to turn your back on the One.
Every culture feels and names the sublime, here-and-now One of the world differently. Discovering it for yourself, though, is something else: it is so much more subtle and vast than the ego that it can only be discovered with the meek willingness to be carried into a newness that is not of your doing: the newness of mutual awareness—I and Thou sensing each other here, now, uniquely; the newness of Being itself. What carries us into that mutual awareness is the grounded, loving gentleness of the logosmind, which acknowledges We Are. In the fluid coexistence of I and Thou, the logosmind offers itself to the Thou, like Odin crucified on the tree: “offered I was to Odin, myself to myself.” And in the way that “the overall number of minds is just one,” as Schrodinger observed, the overall number of stories is just one—a story that is infinitely richer than any fiction we might construct for ourselves. What the hero accomplishes in offering himself to the Present is the continuous creation of a new world, a revelation of its possibilities—even as his deeds recreate him. The Present is his shepherd, and everything he undertakes expresses that partnership, to which he contributes with his whole heart. And he understands that all the world is calling for his wholeness with every breeze and insult and drop of rain and twinkling star.
Like the hero, then, your challenge is to learn how to offer up your full participation in the one story; by doing so, you keep the One, and you experience the One keeping you. Newly awakened to yourself, you feel your heart’s energy awakening to your necessity, your calling, your quest: a journey of ordinary, self-achieved submission to ‘what is’ that will not only ask for your fullest participation—it will give you the strength of heart and the joy to carry on long after your ego-strength would have flagged. In that journey—and only there—will you find the deepest harmony of your being: your passion, your intelligence, your sensitivity, your physical and psychic wakefulness to the world emerge as a single wakefulness, able to assimilate the Present and join it mindfully.
Harmony of the self is neither a possession to be attained nor a personal refuge to be created, any more than enlightenment is. Just as enlightenment belongs to the world, and you find it when you allow the light of the present to touch your core, so, too, you find harmony when you submit to the harmony that is. As Chuang Tzu wrote, “I keep the One so as to remain in harmony.” The work of the One is the work of harmonizing. To keep the One is to harmonize with the Present. The prairie dogs remind us that ‘harmonizing with the Present’ can be understood in two related but distinctly different ways. In the first sense, to harmonize with the Present means to receive its harmony into your emptiness and join it, yieldingly: to come into harmony with it. But remembering the prairie dogs that sustained the grasses, and Kukrit and Mati-i bringing rain to cool the jungle inferno, and Orpheus calling the world around him into harmony, we might begin to appreciate the second, more crucial sense. The wild peace of the Present is a ceaseless harmonizing which renews all that is; the Present does not exist apart from that harmonizing: that work of the Present is the Present. Its Being is its doing. You cannot truly join the Present by merely observing its work, however appreciative, however devoted your attention. You cannot truly join the harmonizing Present until you join it in its work—until you harmonize with it: I and Thou, together, deepening the harmony of the moment, carrying the world forward gently in both thought and deed. That, too, is the consciousness of Being.
As we have seen, whatever we do on this earth carries to the farthest shore of the universe, as a fish swimming in the sea sends its wake across oceans. You can move through your world in the ruinous disharmonies sown by the consciousness of tyranny, or you can join the harmonizing Present and help bring consciousness to its grace. You can insist that the guiding fulfillment of your life is to ‘get your way’ in all that you do, or you can join the Way and discover that your every faculty can contribute to the flowering of its revelatory love. You can hold on to your self, or you can open your heart to the possibility of deepening the harmony of the Present in all that you do. That’s what keeping the One comes down to: harmonizing with the Present. In that work, that dharma, that responsibility, lies the most profound partnership of your life: to feel the caring, wild peace all around you infusing every mote of existence with its harmony, and to join the Present in gladness, to partner your caring with its caring and join its deepest, birthing currents in gentleness and companionship. However that work might manifest itself in your life, wherever it might carry you, it is the work to which you are called; it is the sacred adventure to which we are all born.
Of course, if it were easy to embrace the wild, loving wholeness of our humanity, or to live beyond our self-made borders, we wouldn’t need the myths of the world to guide us. But we do: we need their vivid representations of the human adventure to countervail against our culture’s stifling obsessions with control. We need their help to clarify and encourage our work. And because the Present is always here, our work is always here. Join it. Harmonize with it. Anytime, anywhere. So it begins. And you will know beyond question that that work is truly underway—that you are truly keeping the One—when the question that our culture instructs you to voice to yourself, “What should I do?” is increasingly realized as “What shall we do?” We Are, indeed.
The choice between keeping the supervisor or keeping the One is something you face hundreds of times on any given day, even in the most mundane of events. On a larger scale, that choice sets the bearing for the adventure of your life. On a larger scale still, it is the choice that will determine the evolving consciousness of our culture. We have already framed that choice from a number of perspectives; it is a choice, for instance, between forgetfulness and remembrance, between willfulness and gentleness, between self-absorption and service. We might also add that it is a choice between allowing the mind’s sensitivity to accommodate the full reality of the self—in all its seeded entelechy and sacred responsibility—or retreating from that sensitivity into the havens of idea and hoarding. When we open the mind’s sensitivities, of course, we open to the female element of being, which lives within us, ‘massively connected’ to all that is: indeed, to the analog universe itself.
The universe, as we have said, resembles a hologram in that the whole lives in each part of it. By extension, the whole lives in each of us. So just as the present rests in eternity; just as there is a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence; just as the originating source of matter itself is the nothingness of the quantum vacuum—so, too, the felt self rests in eternity, rests in emptiness, rests in the nothingness that yields all. That is, when consciousness floods the deep within our core, we find there a stillness that is not self-achieved or peculiar to us or possessed by us; that eternal stillness abides there because it belongs to the nature of the world to which we belong.
Traditionally, the part of us that is rooted in the stillness of eternity is called the soul. Our head-centric culture views the soul as something that is trapped in the material body but remains properly detached from its senses. In fact, the opposite is true: our embodied sensitivities actually constitute our receptivity to the soul. When the body’s genius opens to the crux of our consciousness, it awakens to the consciousness of the world and recognizes that part of us that is eternally one with the felt, unknowable, unbroken whole. Our deepest cultural assumption—that perseity is the underlying principle of reality—insists that the body contains the soul; but a long alternate tradition contends that the soul is not in the body; rather the body is in the soul. The soul is not an animating energy we harbor within us, but a field in which we stand. And like any field—whether gravitational or electromagnetic or morphogenetic—it has no outer limit: the reach of your soul belongs not just to the world around you, but to the heavenly bodies of the universe.
Because keeping the One requires a wholly embodied consciousness, it must be recognized as soul-work. The soul doesn’t want to transcend flesh; it doesn’t want to escape the ‘temporary prison’ of the body and reunite with the Eternal. In truth the soul neither wants nor needs to ‘rejoin’ the eternal—it is born of and remains ineradicably part of that dimension. What it wants and needs is something else entirely: it wants to inhabit the body and live its fully sensational wakefulness to the Present. The dialogue we enter with the living Present is a dialogue of the soul—the soul knows only dialogue, never monologue—and is also the world’s window on itself. As Meister Eckhart put it, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”369 Through the dialogue of the soul we know the world that the world might know itself. Therein lies the true territory of the soul. The corational, present intelligence of the body is attuned to the subtlety of ‘what is’ with a five-dimensional sensitivity—and what the soul wants, what it hungers for, what it is spending time on this earth to achieve, is a fully conscious, bodily experience of the Present. It is through its hunger for, its love of, that bodily experience of ‘what is’ that the soul is most clearly felt: through the joy of being here, now, in the mutual awareness of the Present, and in love with the specifics of this ephemeral, sacred moment—which welcomes with a wide-open sensitivity all that courses through it. This is your life, and the eternity within you loves being present in all its sensational reality, whatever it brings, and however transient.
In the course of this book we have seen that the mind’s sensitivity is brought into full consciousness only once we ground ourselves in the stillness of the Present, a stillness that waits for us at the base of the embodied axis, within the pelvic triangle. We can now understand that by returning to the stillness of the Present, we return to the locus within us that knows eternity; and it is in and through eternity that the soul resides. To relax into that bottomless stillness, then, is to relax into the soul’s deep peace and into its hunger for the Present—its delight at all the world’s phenomena. An agent of the fathomless harmony of the One Mind in which it is rooted, the soul seeks to know the Present as a way of knowing itself; and it literally awakens to that task when the stillness within awakens us to the Present in which we stand—when we open our hearts to the unique, never-to-be-revisited moment and experience it bodily, and experience the harmony of it experiencing us. That is what feeds the soul, and feeds its love of the One. And that eternal love of the Present is ultimately a love of Being, which sings to us through all of its particulars. The soul’s love of the Present is the love that underpins all other loves that course through us and join us to the world. By that love the soul is nourished, and nourishes in turn all that falls within the compass of its awareness. Let the soul be hungry. Its hunger is the source of your love.
Soul awareness is as old as humanity itself, and crosses all cultural divides. In modern, postindustrial societies, though, the soul has become as estranged and distant from our lives as the remote, changeless God who dwells in heaven; as distant as the living Present from which our addiction to doing has exiled us. The soul, which longs to experience the Present in all its sensational specificity, is exiled from the body when consciousness is exiled from the body: until our consciousness deepens into our core of being, all of our pursuits will remain soulless.
The eternal Present, then, is what illuminates the transient moment and infuses it with meaning; and the soul provides our portal to the eternal Present. The soul connects to all that has been and all the potentialities to come: all information is shared information. To surrender to your soul’s undeliberated wisdom is to surrender to a vastly sensitive, interrelated awareness that reveals truth without logic. When I surrender to that sensitivity, for instance, I can feel in the room with me now the presence and love of my grandmothers guiding me; I can feel the playful, precise challenge of one of my closest friends, Gilda, recently deceased and yet warmly present with me; and I can feel the presence, too, of the old weeping willow tree in which I spent so many hours as a child. These are not flights of fancy; they are sources of wordless, invaluable guidance.
It is within the soul that our entelechy is seeded, and it is to the soul that the world calls, urging it to step forth and grow. As Eckhart said, God is delighted when your soul grows bigger and bigger.370 Naturally enough, for the embodied soul is our wakefulness to the mothering Present; and the soul grows bigger as its love opens it through the spheres of the mind’s sensitivity. As the soul grows, its natural love of the One enables it to read the energy of the One expressing itself through the infinite diversity of the world’s forms, and it cannot but answer. The soul finds joy in the particular smells of being here, now—in the particular colors of it, the taste of it, the passing music of it; it finds eternal kinship and eloquent wisdom in the transient beauty of blades of grass dancing in a breeze, in the tree’s embrace of the sky, in a child’s tears, in the easy, rhythmic surrendering of the sea along the shore.
Because the soul knows eternity, it knows such events for the miracles they are, and celebrates them—feels gratitude for being present with them in all their luminous specificity. The soul knows eternity, but we forget. We forget that transient marvels we so take for granted here on earth are likely unique in all the vast universe: our birdsong, our trickling brooks, the passage of clouds shaping and reshaping the day, our heaving seas, our quiet glades, our windswept mountaintops, our chirping insects, rainfall, conversation, the breeze stirring the leaves: we are surrounded by the celebratory transformations of a world that is attuned to the cosmos, and is attuned as well to each of us. But the miracle and the mystery of ‘what is’ won’t even exist for us until we have awakened to the soul’s hunger to be present in all the wild chaos and beauty and rich transience that our life on this earth affords. On the other hand, all of reality waits to sing to you if you can but allow what is eternal in you to rest in and be ravished by the passing moment.
Because the soul belongs irrevocably to the eternal dimension, it has no fear—it just has an infinite wonder and respect for life itself. Insofar as there is nothing in the Present that is not part of life’s abundance, there is no experience in the Present that the soul fears. All experience is life, and it all potentially nourishes. The stumbling block for us, of course, lies in the word “potentially.” As we have seen, although the hetabrain can’t access the corational thinking of the soul, it can disrupt it. The hetabrain’s stance is to say to the soul, “You can’t rest in the nourishment of the Present now—I’ve got things to do.” But any part of you that is not soul-suffused is uprooted from the eternal dimension—and without those roots, you are subject to all of Fear’s grim companions: anxiety, unsteadiness, self-consciousness, isolation, tension and fantasy. In such companionship, you cannot but be doubtful of the harmony in which everything participates.
Ironically, when we come to doubt that sustaining harmony, we invariably turn away from the needs of the soul to activities that deepen our self-absorption, activities that might be broadly characterized by the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” That phrase covers a host of sins. When we devote our lives to the task of securing happiness for ourselves, we are too often anaesthetizing ourselves to the soul’s true hunger for drinking in the specificity of the sensational, transforming Present; happiness is a dull stasis, a brief bulwark against transformation of any kind: either our own or that of the world through us. As such, it is pretty close to what Joseph Campbell called the unpardonable sin of being vaguely present. The idea that we somehow have an obligation to be happy, should expect happiness, or even have a right to be happy creates an invidious phantasm that people chase numbly through all their years, feeling cheated in the end not to have found it. The soul neither wants nor asks for you to be happy: the soul wants you to live—fully, bodily, open to passion and heartbreak and love and awakened to living vibrations of the One. The pursuit of happiness is a soulless enterprise.
The only true enterprise of the soul is in being ravished by the Present and answering its call. In doing so, though, we have to understand that our emotions are not somehow outside of the Present or irrelevant to it, or in some way an impediment to experiencing it; they are an integral part of the soul’s “fully conscious, bodily experience of the Present.” If you are not present with your emotions, you cannot be present. It’s that simple. Emotions are the energy that connects your humanity to the Present. Of course, they can also take you the other way when they are feared and unintegrated. But when you are present with your emotions, they bring the moment and all its particulars into vivid focus. To feel the subtlety of your being is to feel what is present in your exchange with the world; more than that, it is to be fully present in that exchange, which is the ultimate affirmation of life. If you are able to be present with whatever emotion courses through you, a part of the soul will rejoice in the experience of being so feelingly alive to ‘what is’. To open to your own emotions, to be at peace with them, subtle and wild though they are, is to open to your life and, by extension, to the energy of the Present; to open to your own emotions, then, is to feed the soul.
Of course, we can open to our emotions only when we are secure in the eternity at our center. Without that stability, the currents of the feeling Present tug us off balance and into abstraction. The queasy unsteadiness of that state persuades us to avoid certain feelings, or to hold on to others. The wiser course is to ground our hearts in the soul’s bottomless serenity, which welcomes all life without fear. When the soul lives the emotions, it processes the Present. It is on the mutual awareness of the luminous ordinary that the soul feeds, and to which its true hunger returns us. In the kinship of that energy, the awakened soul can only grow in compassion and sensitivity and love. Eventually, a soul that is nourished day by day grows so great that it is beyond our control—it is beyond any kind of control. It is simply present.
Keeping the supervisor binds your consciousness in rules; keeping the One opens your consciousness to the principled unruliness of life. Our transition from a supervised consciousness to one that enters the living awareness of the world doesn’t happen merely because we want it to—that transition is your work, and that work depends on two primary skills: the skill of paying close attention in a manner that is fully embodied, which engages our female sensitivities; and the skill of discerning and refining and understanding principles, which engages our male sensitivities. Principles, as we said earlier, illuminate the dynamic at the heart of a harmonious relationship, and so open a door that helps bring us into harmonious relationship. In the course of this book we have drawn attention to some of the assumptions of our culture that live, often unnoticed, within the patterns of our responsiveness to the world; we have drawn attention to the elemental sensitivity of the body, which connects us to the world’s; and we have also uncovered principles that shed light on the dynamic whole that is our intelligence, revealing possibilities by which it can enter more fully into its natural spaciousness. We might summarize those principles as follows:
• What you experience as the body’s energies is an experience of mind. To experience the body as matter is to endarken those energies. An experience of the mind’s sensitivities as a whole is the experience of the felt self, and can only occur through an abandoned passivity to them.
• Your mind’s sensitivities are also the sensitivities of the world, and the mind’s thinking is corational.
• The receptivity of gentleness reveals reciprocity in all you do, and so opens your sensitivities to corational thinking.
• The marriage within you of the male and female is made possible by a ceaseless surrendering of perspectives and will by the male to the integrating genius of the female. In other words, that marriage relies on the principle, “First being; then doing.”
• The marriage ceremony takes place within the corridor of the embodied axis which, when emptied of its consolidations, allows you to rest in the pelvis and act from the heart.
• The analog axis is activated by the soul’s hunger for a fully embodied experience of the Present, and it reveals to our mind’s sensitivity the corational corridor in which we stand, and which consists of all that is. The soul’s love in discerning the One through all the world’s particulars is the source of all the love you experience.
• The more deeply you relax into the stillness of the body, the more spaciously your mind’s sensitivity can open to and accommodate the Present.
• As you increasingly live in the Present, the Present increasingly lives in you. A true submission to the Present allows it to permeate your core.
• When the Present permeates your core, it initiates the dialogue of mutual awareness. To be in dialogue with Being is to join it in its work.
• The work of Being is to harmonize: changing, it rests. To join it in its work is to be called to rest and transform with it, deepening its harmony even as it deepens yours.
• The call of Being, once it is heard, births in you a necessity, a responsibility that brings your whole life into focus, even as it imperils your life by calling you into service on a journey into the unknown, in the companionship of the One.
It was pointed out in Chapter Five that the simpler a principle is, the more helpful it is likely to be. Only a principle you have sensationally integrated is able to open doors: to hold onto a principle without integrating it is to stare at the doorway, oblivious to the vista beyond. Any idea, once integrated, converts into a sensitivity; and of course, the simpler a principle is, the easier it is to integrate. It would help us, then, if we could distill the foregoing principles into their simplest expression—if we could articulate the inner dynamic “at the heart of a harmonious relationship”: in this case, the relationship between the self and its wholeness.
It should be clear by now that there is nothing inert about the wholeness of the self, nor is it any sort of fenced-in haven. When the world calls for you to be whole, it is calling you to be activated: engaged, porous, cocreative, free, playful and present. If we try to activate ourselves, though, our cultural context, upbringing and patterns of thinking will all tend to lead us into mistaking ‘action’ for ‘activation’—and that slight error will put the male element in charge. When we activate ourselves, we activate our power, our strength, our cleverness, our will and our solutions. By contrast, when the Present activates you, when it calls you and summons you into wholeness, it is activating you into your full sensitivity. That activation is your wholeness: it is what the soul hungers for; it is what liberates the exchanges of your deeply encoded entelechy; it is what illuminates and makes tangible the relationships that support the reality of your being; and it is what marries your being to your doing. If you are doing any task in the absence of your full sensitivity, however active you may be, you are not truly activated—because you will be active in the divided, enclosed and willful fashion typical of a unipolar consciousness. Only when the stuttering commands of the hetabrain fall silent and its unintegrated perspectives are brought home; only when our unintegrated emotions are acknowledged and lived and liberated—only then can we enter the clarity of being that is sensationally recognized as our experience of wholeness.
Clarity of being is not merely the polar opposite of self-absorption: it is the state that grants us our fullest sensitivity, and the state towards which all the great spiritual traditions guide us. It is also a state we recognize in ourselves and others by the quality of grace it gives rise to, imparting as it does a felt harmony to every action. We might speak of the grace of someone’s gesture, or their grace of being, or of a state of grace that suddenly opens before us and brings peace and wonder to our hearts. We feel the whole through such grace because, like gentleness, it is fully at one with and informed by the Present; it rests in and arises from our clarity of being. In seeking to articulate a principle of wholeness for ourselves, then, we might appreciate our goal as clarity of being; and we might understand that what would help us towards it is a tangible, bodily Principle of Grace.
Our unipolar consciousness lacks grace because it intentionally dampens our sensitivity and our bodily experience of the world. The tyrant’s belief is that the less activated your sensitivity, the less likely you are to feel pain. On the face of it, the assessment seems fair enough—but it neglects to take into account the pain of self-division, the pain of unintegrated emotions lived over and over, the pain of self-consciousness, the pain of a soul alienated from Being in all its comfort and sensational specificity, and the pain of an existence that can never know true peace. A fully awakened sensitivity, on the other hand, alerts your very core to the Present and rests on the foundation of Being itself; and that grants it a profound groundedness that is able to receive and integrate the hardships that inevitably greet any life that is fully expressed.
If to be whole is to be activated into the clarity of your full, vibrational sensitivity, and that sensitivity involves not just the outer senses, but your very core; and if the essential sensitivity of the core is an attunement to what we have called Being, the One or the Present—then bringing the self and its wholeness into a harmonious relationship would require that our core be sensitized to Being. The true goal, which is also the true starting point, is to realize the clarity of being that belongs not to the self, but to the moment. Understanding that dynamic is enough to suggest a Principle of Grace, a starting point for doing the work that will carry you into the state of grace we call wholeness: allow the Present to live in your core. What enables you to put that principle into practice is the heroic submission by which the thinking self comes to recognize its identity as the felt whole. We might further note that what signals that the principle has opened a doorway for you is the sense of relaxing into the whole that guides you and joining it in its work of harmonizing—the source of all true grace. If that principle represents the simplest expression of this book’s central concern—the point to which its trail of perspectives and arguments has led us—then it might be useful to consider its effect.
Above all, the effect is one that switches what is normally the background of your field of experience to the foreground, and vice versa. That is, your ideas about the world recede to the background, and what comes to the fore is your embodied experience of the Present, in all its companionship. In that regard, the Principle of Grace prioritizes the analog sensitivities of being—when the Present lives in your core, so does its vibratory intelligence: the great wave phenomenon, singing through the cello string. The effect is tangible: it changes how the body pays attention, how it feels itself in the world, and how it feels the world in itself. To allow the Present to live in your core is at one and the same time a surrender, a softening, an abandonment of consolidations, a homecoming, an activation of the soul, an opening of the heart, a dilation of sensitivity, a marriage of male and female, a journey into the vibrant, felt unknown, a coming to rest in the moment, and a yielding to the One Harmony. “What is rooted is easy to nourish,”371 Lao-tzu commented—and so it is with your being. When it is grounded in the fluid, vibrant Present within, and your male center of conscious thinking submits in passive, attentive receptivity to ‘what is’, your being is nourished by Being; and your pelvic intelligence acquires the foundation of stability that enables it to submit to the subtle, all-informing flux that is life.
The surrender that allows the Present to live in your core is as central to the harmony between the self and its wholeness as is the Golden Rule to the harmony of human relationships. If fact, we can understand its centrality to our wholeness by looking more specifically at its effect: the Principle of Grace returns the self to the living relationships of its immediate reality and activates our core into the sensitivity and purpose of its foremost role, which is to attend to and integrate and clarify the mindful Present to which it belongs. Once our core is activated into its true role, the self is activated into its living truth, and then all facets of the self naturally come into relationship with that truth—opening the analog axis to the coursing dialogue between self and world and birthing a necessity that summons each into newness.
The more spaciously the transient Present lives within your core, the more your soul’s love will be liberated. As the fences of the hetabrain fall away and the fantasies that oxygenate the authoritative supervisor are left behind, the grace of the Present is revealed in every particular, and your eyes look upon the One. Recognizing the light of the Present, the soul’s love dilates through the heart and into the world, where you discover the self. And therein lies a wondrous, golden and paradoxical truth that cannot really be understood, but only lived: you don’t open your heart to the Present so much as the Present opens your heart to yourself. And when that occurs, you cannot but join the Present in the harmonizing that is its love and its work.
If “allowing the Present to live in your core” is the central principle by which the self ventures into its wholeness, we need to appreciate that the skill of putting that principle into practice—though supported by the sensitivities with which you were born, and by the soul’s hunger that lives in you, and by the Present that calls to you—nonetheless constitutes a personal stand against the forces in our culture that espouse self-tyranny, deny the reality of mutual awareness, and shape our lives around a phenomenon that doesn’t even exist: the phantasm of perseity. Enacting that personal revolution for yourself requires practice—as much as playing the cello or performing surgery or hitting a tennis ball requires practice. That is why I regularly sit and return to my elemental sensitivity: I ease into my breath, release my body into fluidity, and ground, burning away the baffles and consolidations that block up the interfusing axes. By doing so I find I can recover my clarity of being, that my sensitivity might never lose sight of the guidance of the whole, or of its own corational nature. Of course, like all true principles, this Principle of Grace is only a beginning; but it is a beginning that deflates all fantasies bred of the tyrant’s isolation, unseats the tenacious supervisor, and brings you home to the fluid harmony of your true calling.
It helps to recognize that when you allow the Present to live in your core, the quality of grace you experience is your strength, your guide and your wholeness. Of course, human nature being what it is, we occasionally need help to find our way back to it. In the course of this book we have met three qualities of female Being, three Graces, we might call them, who are ready to uphold you in your wholeness and facilitate the clarity of being that evinces it. Those three Graces are love, ignorance and balance.
The first of these Graces, love, has been recognized as our supreme intelligence, and is sustained by the soul’s hunger to live every particular of our sensational, mundane existence. Aquinas said that the first effect of love is melting. Love literally delivers us from the frozen structures of the hetabrain into the sensational fluidity of Being. Its supreme intelligence, resting in stillness, welcomes the Present, and enables us to discover ourselves there. Given that thought is corational, it is not surprising to find that love suffuses all the traits of mutual awareness: gentleness, gratitude, fluidity, surrender, spaciousness, ease, playfulness, groundedness, our wakefulness to the ordinary, our sense of place, and the kinship of We Are: all are underpinned by love.
When the soul’s love is liberated, it drinks in every detail of the manifest Present. That love allows your heart to flower, and it welcomes the vibratory world with grace, integrating whatever it may bring. That love grants you the sensitivity to stand gently, walk gently, sit gently, speak gently and harmonize gently, aware of the reciprocity of all relationships. That love dilates your awareness into the Present with devotion, and deepens it into the body. It restores consciousness to the world and enables it to talk to you. Rumi referred to the One Presence as The Beloved, and all the world spoke to him in ecstatic eloquence. If the One Presence is not beloved, it will remain mute. As the writer of the great medieval work The Cloud of Unknowing made clear in “The Epistle of Discretion,” God is neither silence nor speaking, neither fasting nor eating, neither loneliness nor company, “nor yet any of all the other two contraries. He is hid between them, and may not be found by any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be known by reason, He may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by understanding.”372 Similarly, the Present is hid between contrary poles, and cannot be known, gotten, concluded or found, but only loved. In loving the Present you offer it a gift that reveals its gifts. As we noted earlier, “If you don’t love being here now, you will resist it—and such resistance is always successful.” If you don’t love being here now, you cannot root yourself in its eternal stillness, and your abstractions will tip the world into the coarseness of the ‘known’.
Coming into partnership with the Present relies on love, but it also means giving up every temptation towards what is “fixed, solid and eternal”—the bastions of bound energy; and that means dispossessing your body of everything that does not belong to the Present, of everything that keeps it from fluidity, of everything that stifles its analog intelligence. As we have come to understand, that entails letting go of all your unintegrated perspectives and emotions and allowing them to join Being. And that means letting go of everything that is deliberately forgetful of the Present. Everything from which the fantasies of the hetabrain are constructed. Everything we have termed ‘endarkenment’. Every anxiety-induced construct of the past or the future. Every duplicate of ‘what is’. Every shadow in the body that obscures its subtlety with neglect. It entails a deliberate surrender of any thinking that might cut itself off from the grace of Being, and of any wish for such thinking. In short, living in partnership with the Present requires the fluid emptiness and honesty and courage of the second of our three Graces: self-confessed ignorance. Only ignorance enables you to say, “Guide me”: when there is no knowing, there is simply nothing to talk to yourself about; there is just an energized clarity that lies open to the riches of the all-aware, vibratory Present and its tangible companionship. As Kakuzo Okakura wrote of the great masters in The Book of Tea, “Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown.”373
Self-confessed ignorance is a vulnerable state: it topples the aegis of the supervisor and leaves you exposed to the world; but by making peace with your own ignorance you open to the fluid intelligence of Being. Indeed, as helpful as your ideas about what Being is and how to lean on it might seem, the unity of Being is of such paradoxical subtlety that any authoritative idea about it has the immediate effect of rendering it undetectable—staring at the doorway, you miss the world. But when the authority of the supervisor topples, so does the need for compliance—and you are left with the opportunity to grow into your kinship with the Mindful Present. If you enter the dialogue that constitutes Being, and heed its guidance, you risk the caring that will amplify that guidance; you risk discovering what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the loving obligations of the moment.” For just as love and ignorance carry you into the Present, they carry you into responsibility. Life confronts life. You confront Thou. And in the exchange that passes between you, you will be summoned towards what the Book of John calls having life, and having it more abundantly. The felt Present calls for all the energies that the gift of your freedom liberates. As Frederick Buechner said, “God calls you to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”374
And so we come to a question, born of self-confessed ignorance, that never elicits an answer but always elicits a response; one that welcomes the Living Thou in the fullness of its ability to guide us. It is a question that is grounded in the wild peace of the Present and is offered to the felt whole of its manifest grace: “What do you ask of me?” If you can let the supervisor fall like a painted backdrop and allow that question to permeate the roots of your core, the Present will answer you by moving you. If you offer no resistance to that movement, you will join the Present, join the flow and the certainty and the newness of it, exchanging gifts with every breath—keeping the One. Deepening the harmony of what is here, now.
The Master is her own physician.
She has healed herself of all knowing.
Thus she is truly whole.375
To ‘love’ and ‘self-confessed ignorance’ we can add the third Grace that helps us harmonize with the Present: balance. Balance is fundamentally a relationship of harmony between a felt whole and its still point. The still point is not a static or fixed phenomenon, but a bottomless, dynamic place of rest that always answers to the whole. The more sensitively you balance yourself within it, the more sensitively you can “feel the thing as a whole”. Maintaining that balance means you can’t afford to hold on to anything else—not to an emotion, a preconception, or your own tiredness. The felt whole revealed by a still point might be the one that helps you balance on a tightrope, sing a song, play a tennis game, or pray; it is what sustains both the grace of the dancer and the grace of the moment. Relaxing into that whole and balancing within its specificity enables you to move with it and harmonize with it as no abstract idea ever could. Think of balancing on a bicycle: it requires above all a sensitivity to ‘what is’, which you can only achieve by dropping out of the tyranny of the head and into the subtle relationship between the whole of you on the bicycle and the whole of the earth on which you are poised. The relationship of your center to the whole is always changing—yet balance maintains that relationship, for balance is a process of continuous integration. In general, we might say you are brought into balance—into the still point—by a remembrance of the whole, and are thrown off balance by the deliberate forgetfulness of neglect.
Of course, if you rely on ideas to foster remembrance, you will only strengthen the stuttering chatter of the monologue. Ideas render the world static; they render the Present as a destination, as though we could arrive in it. As soon as we feel we’ve arrived in the Present, it passes us by. We don’t arrive in the coursing intelligence of the Present—we balance there and feel it also balanced within us. That is, when the still, transforming grace of the Present touches your core, and you welcome its living companionship, you allow the stillness of the world to live within you and speak to what is most personal in you; and that stillness will show up the swarming, luminous specificity of the world around you in the way that a silence sensitizes you to a whisper, or a moonless night opens your eyes to the faintest starlight, or a fresh snowfall alerts you to the merest splash of color.
Our sense of balance gives us stability without fixity. It is a form of remembrance that rests in stillness, orients us to the One, and feels the birthing and dying of all that is as an inexhaustible dance coursing through your very bones. Once you partner the Present with the light-heartedness of the hero, the still point becomes the pivot that enables you to turn into the whirl and the ease of its wild peace, helping to usher the world forever into newness. To live that dance, grounded within it, is to become a conscious cocreator of it. Your soul’s path—the one that is seeded in your heart—reciprocates the world’s caring with caring of your own, and liberates your deep compassion as it unfolds. It is a path that twists and turns as it bends to each moment, balanced within love, balanced within the fluid honesty of ignorance, balanced within the stillness that is balanced within the swirl; and balanced ultimately in the grace of Being. The gifts that are exchanged along the way cannot be anticipated or planned, but only celebrated with an open heart.
Naturally, when you are off balance, you will tend to hold on to things to keep from falling—you hold on to what you ‘know’: to perspectives, ideas and ‘shoulds’, to structure, to status, to what is ‘right’, to the vanities and judgments of the ego, to past hurts and the armored tensions of your body. You bind up not just your energy, but the world’s. Therein lies the seed of the tyrant in each of us. The inner supervisor.
If “allowing the Present to live in your core” is the Principle of Grace—the submission by which we relax into the guidance of the whole and discover our soul’s work—then we might look again at the qualities of female being that, as they bless us, facilitate that submission: love, ignorance and balance, or the mnemonic LIB. It is worth noting that each of those Graces expresses a clarity of being and rests in grounded gentleness—the medium by which we open to the five-dimensional subtleties of the Present and remain in service to it. We could summarize those Graces as follows:
Love of ‘what is’, which supports the world in consciousness and enables it to talk to us, even as it carries us into responsibility.
Self-confessed ignorance, which topples all duplicates and the inner Authority who supervises them. In the absence of that supervisor, we enter the loving partnership of the sacred Present.
Balance, which actively integrates the whole even as it centers us within its dance—summoning us along the path of our soul’s eternal, wakeful hunger.
As the gentle Graces guide our surrender to the all-aware Present, its stillness descends more deeply into its our consciousness, and our mind’s sensitivity opens more fully to the mutual awareness of its reality. In our partnership with the Present, our souls grow into the world, deepening its harmony: we deepen it in love, deepen it in ignorance, deepen it in balance. That is the beginning of the hero’s journey: venturing into the unknown, you enter the subtle logosmind, even as the Logos enters you. The seed of the ordinary hero lies in each of us.
The historic journey our culture has made over the millennia from hub to head has been examined from many perspectives over the course of this book, as has the next journey that faces us: from the head through the inner corridor to open our axial consciousness, and on through the summoning necessity of the analog axis into the mutual awareness of the living Present. On a cosmic scale, it almost seems that humankind was charged with one task of heroic sacrifice, and now faces another of heroic integration. On the one hand, we have over the past millennia sacrificed our own wholeness that we might go forth and gather light-filled perspectives on every conceivable facet of the cosmic body—from the mathematics of the Big Bang to the double helix in our cells, to the six different flavors of quarks. Our achievements in that regard have been commensurate with our heroic sacrifice. But we are charged now with a second task: enfolding those hard-won perspectives back into wholeness and achieving insight on ourselves. A failure to do so will mean that our species might never find its way home from this particular journey.
We cannot turn the laden ship of our culture around for the homecoming without taking stock of the ‘normal’ that currently sets its course. The word normal comes from the Latin word norma, which means “rule, pattern” (reminding us that ‘normal’ is never ‘principled’); and norma itself is related to a Greek word that literally means “one who knows.” The ‘normal’ we have defined for ourselves makes it natural to inhabit the willful tensions of rules and knowing rather than lean on the companionship of the Unknown Present; it tells us to trust more in the empty promise of self-centeredness than in the living guidance of the One; it trains us to trust analysis, and neglect sensitivity.
Our ‘normal’ is the consciousness of the tyrant. Changing our course and setting a bearing for home—home to the Present that waits to greet us and guide us—is a kind of revolution that begins not on some grand scale, but on a deeply personal one. Quite simply, when you join the Present in its work of harmonizing—when you feel that work as a whole, in all its coursing specificity, and deepen it, and deepen with it—the ripple effect makes it easier for all those around you to recognize the grace of Being and join in as well. That personal work, as we have seen, begins with a loosening of the habits of seeing, judging, thinking and feeling that determinedly fracture your life, and it leads you on an ordinary, elemental, disorienting journey of submission that teaches you by degrees to relax into the infinitely subtle guidance of the whole. When you discover the stillness of the Present within you, feeling you even as you feel it, the spark of mutual awareness is ignited. Blazing in the tinder of your soul, it will activate your adventure and leave you fully sensitized to the mystery and corational grace of ‘what is’. Wherever that adventure might lead, it will inevitably carry you into the wonder and wounding and serenity of belonging more and more deeply to this world—of living in it more fully even as it lives more fully in you. The alternative is clear. If we carry on with business as usual, hoarding ourselves within the painted scrim of our normality, life will suffer: our life, the life of those around us, and the life of the world on which we depend.
Whenever self-tyranny takes hold, the mystery that sustains our own wholeness starts to vanish from our sight—just as Eurydice did—and we are left with the ‘known’. The known, of course, is abstract; it is therefore forgetful; it can therefore be turned into an object. That is what happens to the self. It becomes bound, like an object, in its fixed idea of itself. But the ‘known self’ is never here. Only the felt Present is here, and you a part of it. It holds who you are like a secret, ready to be discovered and burned away again. That’s life. That’s aliveness. That’s the wondrous freedom of Being. Discovering it doesn’t happen once, like finding your lost keys; your freedom is something you find anew each time you offer it to the Present. And doing so is as easy as forgetting who you know yourself to be, and remembering the world that holds your very life in its lap.