Let me give you some context first:
Exactly 6 weeks ago I traveled to Basel and my girl-friend (we were a couple for 7 years) had made me some slices of bread for on the road. When I opened the bread box in the train there, on top, was a letter that said, “Read only when in the train.” After reading the first paragraph or two my heart crumbled and broke: she finished our relationship. Sitting in first class I couldn’t really do what I felt like: cry, moan, freak out… (I would have suppressed moaning, crying and freaking out in a second class carriage as well.)
Pain, sadness and devastation
In the following days – I was in Basel and in London on business – we exchanged emails, and said we’ll be talking when I come back to Berlin. And we did talk. We arrived at a sense of real peace and that the end of our relationship was basically the right thing to do. That very evening she went to a party and hooked up again with a lover she was having some time back in our relationship (I wrote about it here), a person that expressed how much he despised me on more occasions than one. A week later, when I figured this out accidentally and she spent the night with him, I felt betrayed, to say the least. Devastated. (She said that, since we were now separated, it was none of my business.)
I was hurt by the way she broke up with me, I felt very deeply wounded by her betrayal, but what is hardest of all is how my mind and feelings time and again totally spin out of control.
What I’m writing about here is still under the stress of a ‘failed life-relationship’ and the demands that finding and moving to a new apartment make on me. Failed life-relationship is, of course, the title of a story that I am telling, both to myself and to others (her version obviously would be different). I could, if that were true to me, reframe it as “the end of being under a lid for a long time”, as a good friend of mine does, or as “the wonderful beginning of a new era in my life”, and so on. But reframing the story like that doesn’t sound true to me…. yet. Guess, I simply have to live with the fact, that I’ve suffered a heavy blow to my system that is quite painful, stressful and taxing. And allow the whole ecology of me to regain strength over time.
Contemplating these last few days on what all this means, on what I now want to take forward, what I want to focus on, I was reminded of what we sketched out a bit a while back in a conversation with my dear friend Helen, and which she blogged about here. In this conversation we focussed also on God’s longing and evolution, and what that entails.
Here I want to first talk about where God’s and human evolution takes place and then how this might help me, now that I’ve been battered and broken, and am loosing a partner that I’ve shared so much with these last 7 years. I also want to speak about the “where” first because much more than in the question, “Who am I?” I’ve been interested in “Where am I?”
Is this real?
I’ve come to the conviction that God and man, the entirety of nature and artifice, all beings and entities essentially have their being in the “Imaginal”, in the sense that James Hillman and Henry Corbin use that word (Note 1). The “Real” in this understanding is the outside, the skin, the surface of the Imaginal. A surface that has been studied in an increasingly sophisticated manner since a few hundred years, studies that have greatly improved our health, governance, wealth, to be sure. But surface it is, because, as we shall see, everything of true value resides in the Imaginal. (Note 2)
What we call physical reality, the Real, is not ‘independent’ and ‘out there’ but very much a co-creation between the ‘mystery out there’ (Note 3) and the ‘mystery in here’. The Real is surface because it is simply an implementation of this co-creation which, of course, is happening within the Imaginal. I surely agree that objects in the physical world really, really exist. They can, with all clarity be called “hard facts”. They truly exist. But there is an even harder fact: everything that really matters about the physical reality and how we are aware of it – symbols, images, visions, concepts, the mind, and so endless on – have their being in the Imaginal.
What’s more: in the Imaginal what we call spiritual, including non-physical entities and beings, what we call soul and what we call matter meet. The Imaginal is the meeting-place of being. In the realm of the Real things and people and plants and animals and so on exist, and their existence is, for instance, what science studies. Yet in the Imaginal all of these plus what’s spiritual, what is soulful and archetypal and all images and imaginations have their being which is what art celebrates, religion contemplates and meditates, psychology usually fails to understand and you and me intuit all the time. The Imaginal is where we are, the Real is where we exist.
Just as the Laws of Nature order and guide the existences and forces within the Real so there are ‘laws’ that guide the interaction between the beings and energies in the Imaginal. For now I would term these ‘laws’ Patterns of Being which I imagine to revolve around synchrony, attraction (self), awareness, memory, beauty, thrivability, embrace, spontaneity and others I can’t think of now. What is obvious to this flow of view (it’s definitely not a point of view!) is that everything of true value resides in the Imaginal, including the happiness that is the birthright of every being.
So what does all that have to do with breaking up, and breaking down and having suffered a blow to my system?
Peaceful
Recently in a conversation with Jean Russell we were talking about the nature of relationship and as I started to grope for what I truly want, given my recent catastrophe and all the other relation-ships that got grounded in my life, I could name what feels truly good to me: A Total Embrace of who I am, how I am, where I am, what I am – an embrace of my very being down to its very core. Such an embrace brings out the best in me. And likewise, when I totally embrace an other, the being I’m with locally or non-locally , it feels really very, very good. But to top both these goodnesses: there is a Total Mutual Embrace of each other’s being. (Note 4)
Obviously, to expect to be able to totally embrace someone all of the time would be a bit over the top. Sure, in meditation or similar non-personal ways we can do that most of the time, given a certain personal development. But a total embrace of a particular living being, a living and breathing other, will most likely be reserved for certain periods – maybe even daily periods – of life. What these periods of total embrace can eventually lead to, though, is a shift of identification from the individuality to the We that comes into being in any Total Mutual Embrace that is somewhat sustained. If then one allows oneself to be informed by this We, a new kind of relationship starts…
This, I’ve decided, is the basis of ‘my’ relationship(s) to be.
And I now realise that the Imaginal is already totally embracing you and me, any and all of us! This is probably why totally embracing someone’s being feels so good: it’s synced with one of the most basic patterns of the Imaginal: Its total embrace!
And now to totally embracing the Imaginal…
________
Note 1: The Imaginal is much, much more than the imagination – matter of fact we could regard our individual imagination as a persons interface and interaction-space to the Imaginal. Our imagination is co-creatively participating in the Imaginal all the time.
Note 2: If you’re versed in Ken Wilber’s 4 Quadrants than I challenge you to not regard the Imaginal as the left quadrants and the Real as the right quadrants in that system, as you might be tempted to do. In this view the whole AQAL-view of reality is within the Imaginal, as is every other perspective as well.
Note 3: We cannot know anything about independent things and matters because the very instrument which we use to know, awareness, already doesn’t belong to it, the thing in itself, the independent thing, but to the aware one, the person knowing it or trying to know it; the Kantian “Ding an sich” cannot be known and will therefor remain a mystery.
Note 4: I know this state very well. Whenever this occurs I experience a ‘silver energy’ all around the edges of the experience. There is a deep sense of inspiration, as if a divine breeze blows and ruffles our angels’ feathers. I’ve called it ‘we-fullness’ for some time now.
– when this will be incorporated into human developmental views, like Spral Dynamics, for instance.
. That book gave me a deep insight into the historical dimensions of cyberspace, how we came here, if you like. It’s deep and clear thinking has helped me much in developing my own understanding of how we are embedded in a larger wave of development and what is possible. But since the book was published 1997 a lot has happened, so I was happy that my friend 
In my second posting (
This is the conviction my father died with in January this year. But spontaneously, at the ceremony before his cremation, I said, “He’ll be surprised that death is not the end. Actually, they’ve got specialists in the next dimension for souls who were sure that there was nothing after death, to help them overcome the shock of post-mortem existence.” I don’t know where that came from, but I do tend to trust such matters. So I guess that was the beginning of opening up to the possibility of – at the very least – ‘surviving’ death in some way or other.
After this ground work on why reincarnation is obviously real I can come to my first question, “What is it that becomes – or is embedded in – flesh?”
Both these metaphors illustrate two aspects of reincarnation and a Soul’s Way – we cannot hear a symphony or polyphony without voices and instruments embodying it, and neither can we read a story or poem without the use of letters or ideograms. I’ve used both metaphors as if the embodied music or poetry pre-exists, but that doesn’t need to be so. Not being a composer I just know a bit about writing. Writing, in my case at least, develops as I’m writing and re-reading what I’ve written. And so our metaphors do not only answer what it is that incarnates but also if there needs to be a pre-existing fate or destiny. Does the end of the story already exist when we start with the first lines? It depends on the writer. In reincarnation it might depend on the maturity and artfulness of the Soul that composes the life; maybe it is already quite accomplished and has composed enough previous lives to be confident enough to ‘free-style’ in this life. Maybe it already knows the plot, and maybe not. I think we’ll know in the very end…
This is the very first installment of what I hope will become a Body, Soul and Spirit series of posts that will meander around most of the topics that keep fascinating me since a while.
Certainly, when in a deeply enlightened mode of awareness, everything can be done or not done – but then there is no witness, no anyone, and, really it is so beyond anything that means something to me as human that I’m not really interested in ‘getting there’ again. Also, those that are supposed to be there – claiming it for themselves or others claiming it on their behalf, the followers or disciples – do not have any characteristics that seems truly valuable; on the contrary, there seems to be an atmosphere of megalomania around them, an air of absolute altitude, an assumed divinity that unpacks as utterly undesirable social context. The unresolved power-issues around that mode of aliveness in our day and age – enlightened teachers abusing their students – are such that however true and beautiful that mode is from the inside of it, it is best left alone.
Back to the main dish. As we do not eat hors d’oevre, main dish and dessert all at once, as that would maybe not taste so great, or at least very different from tasting them separately, so this goes for the modes of being alive. The “
” (Ken Wilber’s diary-like book on being in non-dual mode most of the time) is really a “special taste”, a “particular taste” that some people like and evangelize about; but it is neither superior to other tastes, unless you like it, of course, nor is it the basic essence of all other dishes. The commonality is that it’s all food, but that doesn’t make it one, dish.
