In the beginning there is no sense of a ‘me’ – we are joined to our mother, joined to our environment. As we grow up through the stages of child development, we begin to individuate and develop a sense of self. That sense of self exists through separation, through differentiation from others. We encourage our children to ‘find yourself’, ‘be yourself’, ‘go your own way’. While achieving a certain level of autonomy this sense of a separate self, plus the inevitable bruises and wounds we receive on the way, can bring intense feelings of loneliness, broken-ness, or even alienation.
If you choose for a spiritual life or what we call an evolutionary life – and if you are reading this that possibility must be on your radar – there are two paths you need to take:
• Growing up: this means the sufficient healing of the wounds that this historical self has accrued over the years, moving through various stages of consciousness development
• Waking up: uniting with what Buddhists call the true self, the One, the divine, the Dao that cannot be named
As these two strands gradually evolve and interweave, we begin to experience our unique self. It was always there in the background, but we weren’t conscious of it, often conflating it with our separate self. As unique self, we are like a wave in the ocean: we experience our singularity, yet we don’t feel separate from the whole ocean.
Then we are ready to ‘show up’ in all our glory, ready to give our unique gift to the world. The divine working through me is a wondrous formula! Evolution at work… And when we come together with fellow unique selves pointed in the same benevolent direction, we become unique self symphonies…
Of course progress is never linear, and at any moment our unique self can burst through. The Crossing is our laboratory!
