OATH OF ALL US MILITARY SERVICEMEN AND SERVICEWOMAN:
I, [Name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
We have been programmed to be what we’re not.
John Randolph
Memorial Day (United States)
To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear.
—bell hooks, All About Love
Richard Rohr describes the temptation to hide and deny what we’ve been taught is unacceptable within us:
We identify with our persona/mask so strongly when we’re young that we become masters of denial and learn to eliminate or hide anything that doesn’t support it. Neither our persona nor our shadow is evil in itself; they just allow us to do evil without recognizing it. Our shadow self makes us all into hypocrites on some level. Hypocrite is a Greek word that simply means “actor,” someone playing a role rather than being “real.” We’re all in one kind of closet or another and are even encouraged by society to play such roles. Usually everybody else can see our shadow, so it’s crucial that we learn what everybody else knows about us—except us!
Holy or whole individuals, the ones we call “saints,” are precisely the ones who have no “I” to protect or project. Their “I” is in conscious union with the “I AM” of God, and that is more than enough. Divine union overrides any need for self-hatred or self-adoration. Love holds us tightly and safely and always. Such people have met the enemy and know that the major enemy is “me” (to borrow from the comic strip character Pogo). But they do not hate the “me” either; they just see through and beyond the little “me.”
The closer we get to the light, the more of our shadow we see. Thus, truly holy people are always humble people. Christians would have been done a great service if the shadow had been distinguished from sin. Sin and shadow are not the same! We were so encouraged to avoid sin that many of us avoided facing our shadow, and then we ended up “sinning” even worse—while unaware besides! As Paul taught, “The angels of darkness must disguise themselves as angels of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). The persona cannot bear to see evil in itself, so it always disguises it as good. The shadow self invariably presents itself as something like prudence, common sense, and justice. It says, “I’m doing this for your good,” when it actually manifests fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance. Isn’t it fascinating that the name Lucifer literally means “light bearer”? The evil one always makes darkness look like light—and makes light look like darkness.
The gift of shadowboxing is in recognizing the shadow and its games, which takes away most of the shadow’s hidden power. No wonder that Teresa of Ávila said that the mansion of true self-knowledge was the necessary first mansion on the spiritual journey. Socrates said the same thing, “Know yourself!”
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, rev. ed. (Jossey-Bass, 2024), 83–84, 85.
Image credit and inspiration: Flavie Martin, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. With cautious breath and glimmers of light, we step into the shadow—drawn by the gifts it holds—seeking the clarity and courage to name what hides.
An essential book by Author Philip Shepherd
The history of Western culture over the last eight thousand years follows a broad exponential curve—beginning with the Neolithic Revolution and accelerating precipitously into and through the twentieth century—in which man increasingly stepped back from the world of nature, acquired technological mastery over it, and gained specific
knowledge of it that enabled him to evict wonder and kinship from every pine needle and worm and drop of rain, until now he finally stands alone: a world unto himself, superior to all he surveys, without peer, he also finds himself lacking spiritual relevance, purpose and affinity for his world—lacking even the assuring sense that his own experience is real. Of course, reality is fulfilled only through relationship—and how can any of us relate to a world to which we believe our lives are fundamentally irrelevant? That is the problem we have created for ourselves.
The trajectory of the arc that brought us here has been driven by the urge within the male element to assert itself and refute its dependence on anything feminine. As we have seen, that urge has uprooted us from our own sensitivity, and our diminished sensitivity has in turn numbed us to the body, to the earth, to its wisdom, and to the guiding imagery and intuitions of conscious being. As the child individuates and separates from its mother, so too has modern man individuated and separated from maternal Being. Today we are witnessing a slow and reluctant awakening to the crisis to which our separation from Being has brought both us and our planet. As a species that prides itself on reason, you might think we could have anticipated that being without Being would be a problem.
~ Philip Shepherd, from the book New Self New World
#crisis #being #kinship #spirituality #earthwisdom
I've come to realize that my whole life has been a struggle against the societal norms that stifle human growth and potential.
The influence of parenting, media, schools, governments, religions, and cultures can be overwhelming, and it's clear their primary
goals are driven by greed and profit.
But l've been fortunate enough to discover the truth through music and medicine, like ketamine, which have given me the existential experience of Presence.
It's heartbreaking to realize that our birthright has been exploited, and that we've been conditioned to live in a way that's not true to our innate nature.
Now, at 74, I'm conscious of the difference between my true self and the person I was conditioned to be. It's a bittersweet realization, especially when I think about the state of the world today.
I'm grateful for the awakening, and it's also painful to see how far we've strayed from our true nature.
God bless.
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The journey of healing and spiritual realization will by its nature feel lonely at times. Even though we’re interconnected with others and with all of life, there is a solitary aspect to the path.
No one can truly know what it’s like for us - for our hearts to break, what keeps us up at night, what is meaningful for us, what it feels like, for us, to fall in and out of love; or to be sad, ashamed, scared, or joyful.
It’s not easy to make this journey on our own. As open, sensitive relational human beings, we’re wired to connect, to love and to be loved, and to support one another as we open into the mysteries.
Whether our primary interest is in tending the wounds around love – attachment, trauma, narcissism, betrayal in soul – or in exploring within the experiential depths of the transpersonal (communion, union, Oneness, Unity with the divine ground), we do so by way of an unknown and mysterious relational field, through the dance and play of love in form.
I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, confronting feelings of groundlessness and uncertainty.
In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the unlived within us. To provide a temple where the shattered pieces of the heart can come to reassemble.
Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum.
The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.
It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears.
There’s a certain longing that appears in the middle of the process of death and rebirth, but the object of that longing is not always clear and is of the mystery. The vastness of the Other looms in personal and collective networks.
All the old reference points are washed away, dissolved, and made to dust. A cleansing deep in the subtle body. Emptied out, with nothing yet to take its place. Just a shimmering, and a periodic glimpse of the scintilla, the pieces of light.
And so it goes on the path of the heart…
Of course, it’s natural to want to escape the shakiness, claustrophobia, and not-knowing. It aches there, as it is the ground of the unlived life.
At the same time, another potential pathway appears: to stay with the uncertainty, turn all the way into the tenderness, attune to the imaginal, and to the wisdom of the feeling body. There is data and information here that is only available in times when the psychic quo is being tenderized and dismantled.
A door swings open that is usually closed or hidden behind the veil. There are letters and engravings on that door that can only be deciphered by you. It’s not a collective door, but one that has emerged unique to your own soul print. The script on that door is written in the letters of grief.
The passing of an old dream – me and my life and how it was all going to turn out, supposed to turn out.
There is no rebirth without an embodied tending to the unlived, the ancestral, and the figures of grief who dance and spin and twirl within us, come not to harm or take us down – not as an obstacle on our path, but as the very path itself.
When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, restless, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that our role is to act urgently to fix them.
And to engage in techniques, theories, and ideas to help them replace the actuality of their experience with what we believe they should be having instead.
It’s totally natural to want relief for those we care about and we want to do whatever we can to help; we don’t need to pretend this isn’t the case. We can hold that larger intention that they feel better, while simultaneously staying open to a call emerging in the field between us into deeper territory.
Perhaps it is something more subtle, more nuanced, more meaningful than relief that they are most longing for. For the Friend, for a companion who will go with them into the dimly lit, endarkened landscape of the soul.
From an alchemical perspective, there is wisdom and guidance in the images, emotions, and somatic data arising into the relational field between you, vital communication from the soul serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive.
We don’t want to short-circuit that, especially as a result of our own anxiety and discomfort.
If we slow down and reflect, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity, the movement toward relief, arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with our own darkness, with our own historic core vulnerabilities and untended complexes, and from the spinning and twirling of the ghosts of our own unlived lives.
It is possible that the most skillful and kind thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, bearing witness to pure feeling together, in that claustrophobic or restless space, and stay near; to remove the burden that they come out of their experience, “feel better,” or heal in order for us to stay close.
Perhaps they don’t need to be healed, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds.
Where, together, we weave a safe home, a sanctuary, a wholeness-temple where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.
