Unfolding: Awakening

The universe is a place of creativity, becoming, and transformation because these are fundamental properties of the God who sustains it. All things are not only sustained by God; but all things are also being made new in Christ. All things are being liberated and restored—becoming more than they are, becoming all they were intended to be in their fullness in Christ.

The Spirit of God—the source of all generativity, all creativity, and all life—invites us to participate in the grand adventure of human becoming. Openness to becoming is openness to God. This is why the Christian mystics have so much to teach us. They show us that longing for the fullness of God demands openness to a radical form of transformation that we cannot control.

It is something we can neither engineer nor accomplish. But it is something we can experience. It is, however, alarmingly easy to fail to discern the ever-present nudges of the Spirit to become all we are meant to be. The culture of family and society and the rhythms of our lives lull us into a sleep of complacency within the small, safe places we have arranged for ourselves. Seekers settle for being finders, even when what is found is so much less than what their spirits call them toward.

Being and becoming are both routinely sacrificed on the altar of doing. The gentle but persistent heartbeat of our deep longings to find our true place in God is gradually drowned out by the cacophony of superficial desires, and we are left with a small ego-self rather than an awakening self that is ever becoming in the Spirit.

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There are many possible metaphors for this journey of becoming. I have already introduced the concepts of awakening, unfolding, and evolving. Other possible metaphors include rebirth from death to life , integration from fragmentation to wholeness , liberation from captivity to freedom , unification from separation to oneness , enlightenment from blindness to seeing , and homecoming returning from exile. All of these help us identify elements of the transformation of the self that are involved in this journey, and I will draw on each of them as we proceed.

Nevertheless, given how hard change of any sort is, we need to be realistic about these grand ideals of becoming, awakening, enlightenment, and transformation.

Becoming is a luxury that evades those whose lives are preoccupied with survival or basic coping. Until lower-level needs are dependably being met, talk of human unfolding remains nothing but meaningless chatter on the part of those who have the luxury of full bellies, a reasonable base of personal security, and idle time. I am also quite aware of how easy it is to be cynical about the possibilities of deep personal change. If such things as stopping smoking, eating less, or exercising more are as notoriously difficult as most of us recognize them to be, what hope could there ever be for the sort of quantum leap in change that is implied by the concept of transformation?

Recall the familiar story of the frog and the scorpion. One day a scorpion decided it wanted to cross a river. Seeing a frog sitting on the bank, he asked the frog to carry him across the river on his back. The scorpion had an answer for this question as well: He began swimming, gradually feeling safer and safer, and starting to even think that he had been foolish to have ever worried about the scorpion. But half way across the river, suddenly the scorpion stung the frog.

Why did you do that? It is in my nature to sting. Personality is, by definition, highly stable, and profound changes in the organization and orientation of the self are quite rare. Most alterations are cosmetic and contextual.

They are much more likely to involve dressing the scorpion up in some more fashionable clothes than changing its nature. Changes that we see are usually not much more than accommodations to tribal and cultural expectations, not radical reorganizations of the self from the inside out.

Although we can see evolution of human consciousness over large periods of human history, it is rarer to see genuine and significant changes in consciousness, identity, values, and ways of relating to self, others, and life after late adolescence or early adulthood. However, after three decades of providing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and one decade of working with people who seek personal transformation through spiritual openness, contemplative stillness, and awareness, I would have to say that while deep and really meaningful changes in people are relatively rare, they are very possible.

It is possible to experience a profound reorganization of the very foundations of our identity, values, meaning, and consciousness.

It is possible for our whole perspective on life—on our self, on others, on the world, and on God—to shift dramatically. It is possible to awaken and move from blindness to seeing, from captivity to freedom, and from separation to oneness. It is possible for us to experience the emergence of our larger, truer self that we in reality are. These sorts of quantum shifts in the organization of our being are never something that simply result from things that happen to us.

Nor are they simply the cumulative result of the small incremental steps of growth associated with our efforts at spiritual or psychological self-improvement. But when we respond to life and the continuous invitations of the Spirit to become more than we presently are, with consent and openness of heart and mind, it can be our experience— with or without external triggers. These sorts of changes are deeply spiritual. Our spirituality either keeps us safely immune to such changes or facilitates them. But genuine transformation never happens without profound spiritual implications.

Although personal transformation will be my primary focus, we will also see that ultimately transformation is not just a personal matter.

Genuine transformation occurs only within a communal and interpersonal context. Often those communal contexts inhibit transformation, but they can facilitate it and always mediate it. We either open each other up to the transformational possibilities that we encounter in life or close each other down. Sadly, it seems to me that much of the emphasis on spiritual formation and transformation that exists in Christianity does the latter, as do the ways we relate to each other in Christian communities and churches. But I am convinced that we can experience transformational awakenings much more frequently and fully if our families, churches, and communities can learn to support them rather than fear or resist them.

Anyone who has influence over the lives of others is in a position to help make this happen—particularly those of us who are involved in any aspect of the nurture, care, formation, or reformation of others. Therapists, spiritual directors, clergy, religious workers and educators, parents, mentors, coaches, and others who are involved with the nurture of the inner life of persons—all these can do much more to help those they are encouraging to truly become all they can be. We can help people notice and respond to the moments in their journey that are pregnant with transformational possibilities.

And we can help them attend and respond to their deep spiritual longings, longings that always point us beyond the safe way stations where we settle, onward to those places and ways of being that hold genuinely transformational possibilities for us and for the world. This was the interest that originally led me into training in clinical psychology and later in spiritual direction. I wrote an outline of this book in , but I was far from ready to write it or, much more importantly, to experience it.

The ground on which I stood was too small—theologically, spiritually, and psychologically. Of course, it was me who was too small. I was far too invested in the life of the mind and soul to make the journey of spirit for which I longed. I flirted with ideas but was not ready to respond to the deep call of the Spirit to my spirit that drove my interest in human unfolding and awakening.

Over that time I wrote a number of books on psychology and spirituality in which transformation organized my approach to both but remained a secondary focus. In this book transformation moves from the background to the foreground. This book also moves something else from the back stage of recent books to center stage: This, I am convinced, is the branch of spirituality that has the most to contribute to an understanding and experience of transformation, awakening, and human becoming. All major religions have a mystical tradition, and if we are to experience the fullest unfolding of our self, it is essential that we learn to listen to what the mystics have to teach us.

Mysticism uniquely supports the integration of insights of psychology and spirituality into a framework for both understanding and nurturing the unfolding self. Without mysticism I am convinced that neither psychology nor spirituality have much worth saying about personal transformation or the further reaches of human becoming.

Psychology and spirituality are not, however, the only fields of study that offer important potential contributions to understanding human unfolding. In what follows, I will draw on insights from Perennial Philosophy; evolutionary theology; cultural anthropology; comparative spirituality; and clinical, developmental, and transpersonal psychology—placing all of this back within a Christian understanding. But before your eyes begin to glaze over, I should make clear that this will not be a dry academic exercise.

The map I will be sketching of the awakening self is complex, and the ideas are big, but I will be repeatedly pausing to step back from these ideas so we can examine the difference they actually make in real life. My primary interest is in the spirituality of this unfolding, not the theory of it. Although I will have to lay out a fairly complex conceptual foundation for us to understand that spirituality, we will keep returning to the lived difference it can actually make. It is the Christian mystics who will provide the overall framework for the synthesis I will offer and—although this might surprise you—it is they who will help us keep this practical.

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• Consequences.

Mystics are interested in experience, not in theories. They are aware of a profound truth that most of the rest of us fail to appreciate. Mystics know that all of life is flowing toward God, and they have learned how to open themselves to this flow and participate in it. Life has a direction. It is returning to its source. The outflowing vitality and love of God that is life itself leads back toward God. I did not seek him out and therefore I cannot ignore his need. It is part of The Great Work.

As you fear for me, I fear for her. When she lost her marriage, she was an emotional wreck. It was one of those experiences where you just have to watch and wonder what possible connection could be manifesting itself. Tyler, who I did not know at the time, was the one she eventually connected with. Through him she was able to put her life back in order, after a fashion at any rate. She did him no good and would have done the same to you if you had tried to help her.

The way events unfolded, I would have been Tyler. Andrea is alive and well today because of his actions. How can I not accept his request, even if it initially came via her? I started looking after he left. Do you know he has two daughters who he barely sees because he travels so much? Accepting what you say is true; I would still have had to agree to help. The difficulties I have seen him having these last few hours demonstrate how Tyler is currently at risk. Maybe half of all marriages fail.

I am not smart enough to know if monogamy is helping or hurting people who need more than one partner. What chance would the children have if he implodes? Let it play out awhile longer. Instead, you transferred his pain to yourself, letting him go freely to make the same blundering mistakes.

I converted his perceptions of uncertainty and fear into a state that allows him to continue exploring his new awareness. His family will not suffer any additional stigma after the affair is found out and will be allowed to get on with their lives. His home is more of an office and laundry service than a loving environment. They would adapt quickly. If he burns out, his life will most likely end in suicide. He has enough turmoil inside that it is a possibility. Without a firm commitment to work on repairing the damage in his relationships, it might be his best exit strategy.

The family has to have some healthy feelings towards him.

What about his wife? Her remoteness may have contributed to his affair. She appears to me only from the neck up. That would mean she is in her head, and not completely engaged with the family either. Maybe Carol can give you knowledge. I know better than to ask her.

I am too close to Andrea, and it would be impolite. Beginning with a small vibration, the plaque on the table changed before our eyes with the remaining images coming into focus. We felt and saw the energy in the dreamscape shift as the presence of another entity became manifest. It started as a twisting, growing amorphous shape, quickly becoming a humanoid form.