No Other

 Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

                                                                                                Italian proverb

I first heard the word wholeness from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist.  His view of our humanity/our divinity resonated in me, especially his recognition of our innate wholeness.  

We are one, holy and wholly one.  We are all that is. 

Jung referred to our oneness as the Self.  The truth and beauty and undividedness of our essential being.  The Self, a representation of the wholeness/truth that we are.

Who am I?

I am that

I am all there is

What does it look like to remember and embody wholeness?  What does it feel like to know, deeply and viscerally know there is no other?

Remembering our full being, remembering and owning wholeness requires us to become conscious . . . in an unfolding and every widening/deepening way. 

We are privileged with a capacity for self-awareness.  

Jung found a calling within all of us to individuate . . . to remember our wholeness, the Self. Through self-inquiry, we, often, first become conscious of our distinct personalities.  We become self aware by exploring our interior and integrating all our energies, all our parts, our memories, and history . . . 

Jung intuited the fact that we all have the whole world within us.  The dictator’s impulse for complete power and control.  Mother Teresa’s calling to touch the untouchables.  The ancestor’s ethnic or cultural traditions, the push for achievement, the receptivity of being still.  The win at any cost; open hearted generosity, feeling frail and weak, loving no matter what, the capacity for arrogance and greed, and the fear of dying alone. His map of the psyche (soul) encouraged us to recognize and integrate all that is within us.  

Imagine being compassionate, empathetic and kind to every emotion you feel, to every thought you have, to every “mistake” you make; in fact, imagine being open to its energy, open and curious.

For the longest time I understood this map (and put it to good use) conceptually.  It helped me feel empathic towards myself, forgive and understand folks who had “wronged” me and gave me an expansive view of our humanity. By exploring my own deep emotions, no matter how “ugly” they might be by my standards I, non-judgmentally, learned to compassionately understand what was driving me and my fellow human as well.  

It simply made sense to me that as we, through making conscious what was unconscious, would be cooperating with an evolution of consciousness . . . an expansion that erases the illusion of there being an “other.” 

In our heart of hearts whether we are consciously aware or not (remember, have glimpses, ripening in the truth of it) we know there is no other.   

Instead, most often, we run from everything we cannot tolerate. We hate, disavow and often project out onto others what we refuse to own within ourselves. 

We, personally and culturally, are a tangle of defense mechanisms.  We try to suppress everything that’s not comfortable for us. We distance ourselves from our shadows (Jung’s term), all ugliness relegated to the basement or cut out of awareness.  We defend ourselves against what we don’t want to recognize, to know, to face or to accept. 

We deny our “negative” feelings, the parts of ourselves we consider abhorrent and undesirable and anything that appears contrary to how we see ourselves.  

And yet, there really is no human emotion or behavior that, if we are willing to kindly look, we cannot relate to, understand, accept, and be with in a constructive way. 

And when we do not look, when we stay asleep at the wheel?

What we do not bring to consciousness will be acted out, played out.  Period!  

Isn’t it agonizingly obvious that we act out against ourselves, against each other, against our best interests and against our environment over and over again?   

What does it mean to own our shit . . . stop blaming ourselves and others, end projections?

Give yourself the gift of sweet encounters that are judgment free, not filled with suspicion and assumptions.  Meet the toothless truck driver delivering wood and be available for a genuine connection.  Why not meet yourself in such a way, over and over again?

When you know, in your bones, there is nothing wrong or shameful with how you feel, or how you think, or . . . even yes . . . the hurtful and traumatic things you have experienced or done . . . when you are able to own your shadow, take back projection after projection, you are open to genuine transformation.  When you know you are not missing anything, there is nothing to gain or get, you are free to be authentic and fully alive.  When you know you are connected to every living being you are attuned to the truth of things. 

You know those films of an explosion in reverse?  How everything comes flying back together and the world is in one piece again?

Transforming our apparent brokenness, our fragmented psyches back into the eternal wholeness at the core of our being is like that.  Embodying the deepest being you know is like that. You are not your fears, your smallness, you are the graciousness, the dignity of all that is. You are not your psychological patterns, your conditioning; you are the consciousness from which that all comes. 

Bring back all your disowned pieces and discover for yourself that what you see, what you perceive, what you construct, even what you know is a small sliver, a minutiae form of consciousness.  Discover the humble truth; your perception of reality is incomplete, a mere tip of the iceberg.

There is hidden (in plain sight) vastness, infinite wholeness.  

You are all that.

Consciousness . . . life . . . is always dancing, moving, alive and fully present; permeating and animating everything that makes up our world, from the spec of sand on the beaches to the stars in the sky, from the rhinoceros to our morning tea, from the bruise on our shin to everything our hearts desire.

We are called to wake up to that oneness.  

Open your eyes, your hearts and your ears to your deepest vitality, allowing yourself to be a vehicle for consciousness to widen and deepen and flow without restriction. 

Waking up to knowing, viscerally knowing, that everything and everyone comes out of the same cloth. 

 There is no other.