As Within, So Without
I’m no astrologer or prophet, but I don’t need a map of the stars to know we’re in some funky waters. Do you feel it? Have your dreams of late been as epic as mine? Have you felt called back to the legendary stories like The Bhagavad Gita or The Lord of the Rings that pitted the forces of light against dark?
I’m reaching out to you—my fellow travelers—at this most remarkable time in earth school. The rate of change climatologically is hastening. The models responsible for the structures and systems we’ve only ever known are coming apart. These systems—which purported to be the most elegant expression of our intellect, creativity and progress, but that profited from the destruction of the earth, human suffering, and our separation from one another—are continuing to be exposed.
Some part of us understands that the collapse of these systems is inevitable. What‘s less clear in this moment is whether or not these forces will succeed in taking everything down with them. Bracing times indeed.
But here’s something I’d like to wonder about together here:
The ancient alchemists and mystics understood that systems and structures could not endure in the external world were they not also present in our internal worlds. As the ancient Hellenistic maxim goes: As within, so without. This is a tenet that’s been invaluable to me, a law so basic to being, we know it to be fundamentally true. How could it be otherwise?
If we want to change the clown show out there … a critical number of us must change the clown show in here.
Every minute, Dears, every second…we’re being initiated. Into what? Old way or new way? Fear or Love? Separation or Connection?
In the language of neuroplasticity, it means we can default to the well-worn adaptive neural pathways that were established long ago in our families of origin, via our imprints and traumas, and through no fault of our own. Pathways that may be riven with grievance and protection, isolation and defeat. Or we can wake up inside of these protective reenactments and—in Pema Chodron’s words—do something different. We can be more brave. We can walk towards what scares us instead of away from it. We can stop looking outside of ourselves for permission and approval. We can ask for and create the intimacy we needed and longed for in our most childlike hour … but like grown ups.
Trevor Noah once said of racism in America, “It’s as though you’ve mistaken cancer as a vital organ.” I would say the same about the central tenets of Western imperialism and the fundamentalisms that have arisen in its wake. But the stories they tell—of scarcity, of the denial of real culture or Self so that we might be an inoffensive cog in the system, of competing for resources and of the inevitable death cults that arise as a result—these are just stories that have been told over and over until we come to believe they’re vital to us. They are not.
Father Richard Rohr says, “what we don’t transmute, we transmit.” I think that’s an important one to hold close now. The young ones need us to hold it close, Friends. The new story is, as yet, unwritten, but we write it with every one of our minute by minute choices. There’s an invitation imprinted in the difficulty of this hour. The stories that we tell are the stories that will be born out in the world.