fbpx
The Essential Self

The Essential Self

by | May 23, 2021 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development | 0 comments

 

 

 

 

The exploration and mapping of the ‘self’ have been at the heart of psychological and spiritual inquiry. There is the  self we have access to in our day to day lives and a Self that is obscure and reveals itself primarily through peak experiences, as a much broader place of knowing and potential. The various manifest and unmanifest aspects of self, exist in dialogue and tension at the very edges of our growing.  

 

THE EGOIC SELF 

The part that is most accessible to us through everyday life is the egoic self. Here lies our centre of consciousness, holding the thread of continuity between past and present, through which we weave our sense of identity and belonging. The egoic self holds our life stories and becomes shaped through the ripples of cause and effect that these create. If we grew up with intrusive or aggressive parents, then our egoic self may become impermeable as a result of finding intimate relationships unpredictable, threatening or overwhelming. If we grew up in a family that consistently neglected our basic needs, then our egoic self may grow around a deep sense of worthlessness. If we have come from a family of ancestral riches and success, then our egoic self may constantly strive to maintain our belonging through following on our ancestors’ footsteps. What this means, is that while we tend to think of the egoic self as distinct and separate from others, it actually comes to exist through a web of fairly proximate relationships that come to shape its curves and edges. Everything we know so well about the impact of ancestral and early environments on later personality supports this. I like to think of the egoic self as a tree that is part of a much bigger forest, intimately bound and dependent on the overall health of the wider ecosystem its roots belong to. 

The egoic self that exists within the realm of everyday consciousness is destined to hold a narrower view into the deep complexities of life. Tightly bound with our early developmental needs and wounds, it can inflate everyday encounters to shapes of utmost and ultimate importance. At times it lands us in our well-developed abilities and resources and at times it pulls us through our early narcissistic wounds and primitive defences. And so, the egoic self can at times render us deeply vulnerable and tied to the mortal games of life, the frightful struggles for control and ultimately survival.

THE ESSENTIAL SELF

Behind the contours of the egoic self, hidden from view in our encounters with everyday life, lies the essential Self; eternal and expansive. This deep space of knowing exists through many names; some call it true nature, consciousness, spirit, soul, deep psyche, or wisdom. Firmly rooted within the greater picture of all things, it lends us a perspective that joins the dots between the minutia of life. The essential self operates from a deeper, wider and broader source of reality. Its knowing penetrates into the very heart of any matter, allowing us to stand in soulful truth. From here we become resourced to face the greater existential matters and explore the bigger answers life calls on us to draw from. The essential self can ease the tyrannical fears of the egoic self, giving us space to contemplate life’s challenges and resources from a place of deeper presence, authenticity, connection and compassion. It can help us reshape the stories of our egoic self and reframe how we relate to our lives.

The essential self is the bedrock of our highest values, integrity and truth. It discerns everything that ever happens as a micromovement, its outcomes vastly uncharted and unknown. How many times have we deeply grieved only to find new life emerging through the undergrowth of our pain and sorrow? How many times have we deeply craved for something only to find it unfolding into a different reality to what we dreamed of? Such movements through life’s twists and turns are supported by the essential self which is tightly bound to the ebb and flow of life, the deeper currents of death and rebirth, chaos and order, the coming apart in service of a renewed coming together, the interdependence of it all. From these deep roots all is ever growing, ever emerging, ever becoming. We can think of the essential self as the forest that surrounds and sustains the tree of the egoic self. The great mother that can nourish its frail vulnerabilities and temper its infantile struggles. While the egoic self is bound by the wounds of the past, the essential Self radiates the potential healing of the future. While ego struggles to be right, the essential self strives to be whole.  

NAVIGATING BETWEEN THE TWO

But how does one move from ego-consciousness to the essential eco-consciousness? From the part to the whole? From what matters to us at any given moment in time to what matters in the greatest spread of things? How do we gestate something greater to emerge and become a reality through us? Such midwifing requires some kind of inner communion and connection. It doesn’t tend to happen while we are on autopilot, moving ahead from task to task, from day to day, deeply ingrained into the rustling humdrum of everyday life. Sometimes a wounding, a slippery time, open this entrance. Sometimes when the ego is overwhelmed and at a loss for answers, the essential self finds an opening to reach us. Rites of passage and initiations like the one we have collectively and unwittingly stepped into through Covid, myths, rituals and ceremonies, expanded states of consciousness, embodied practices, deeply reflective and contemplative practices can open the door to our path, our healing, our sense of purpose, our greater truth, our true belonging. They can bring the essential self in support and service to the egoic self.

There are times where moving from one to the other is immediate and seamless and other times where the egoic self can become overwhelmed by the realities and input of the essential self, requiring a long journey to support this integration. Such openings to something greater require a resilient enough ego-center that can withstand and sustain the contact between the egoic and the essential self. There is also a wider need for the containing power of community that can acknowledge the value and develop the trust required by such a process.

In the hands of some new age belief systems the essential self has been turned into an inner knowing God to whom we only need to surrender all of our life’s struggles and responsibilities. But in depth-psychology, these deeper archaic forces require our utmost presence and participation. We have to step into the hidden layers of our pain that this place opens us up to and the responsibility that comes with deeper knowing, if we are to receive the inner resourcing it can offer.  The essential self is a place we must always come to and then return from. The dangers of residing here are too grave. While we might wish to stay here to inflate or numb ourselves from life’s painful encounters, we risk bypassing reality and our human capacity for tension, pain and therefore growth. The dangers of residing only in the egoic self is to be continually re-wounded by our blind spots, risking burnout and depression. The egoic and the essential self are neither to be kept apart as separate nor may not choose one over the other. They are meant to be kept in constant connection, nourishing one another with their alternate and diverse realities. While we must never abandon the egoic self, we turn to the essential self for a deeper nourishing of our resources, preparing for our next steps, onto the ground of reality.  Indeed, our spiritual, psychic and emotional health depend on periodically coming to step into this greater re-source of things, this space of greater wholeness. 

OUR CURRENT TIMES

In our current collective times, on an egoic level, we are in crisis. On an essential level, the world is trying to speak to us and reach us. These are times that require our utmost inner and outer participation. Away from the polarities of catastrophe and divine intervention, in the midst of the greatest collective event we have encountered as a generation, lies a powerful archetypal territory taking us through the pivotal process of death and rebirth. Such challenges call on us to reach further within ourselves so we can grow to our collective and archetypal greatness and vastness, to our true essential nature, to nature herself.  

In this great initiation we are being called to our values and our integrity. To navigating our path with intention and purposefulness. To accessing the deepest strands of our humanity. There is a lot for all of us to grapple with; questions with answers, questions without answers, answers still waiting for the right questions. Our deeply ingrained collective ego structures are being challenged. If we can sit through this painful shedding process, we can access our deepest hidden wounds as they become available for healing.  In the words of Lynne Twist:

The primary battlefield of this century is with ourselves. It is the battle between the self and the Self: between our existing habituated self and our emerging future Self, both individually and collectively.

As we navigate through these times, the essential self is being called to bring its deep roots, its deep belonging to all things, in greater view. When we ground in this connection to the source of all things, we can return, re-sourced and connected, to the resilient centre of our egoic self, to meet the tasks we are faced with. Once we connect to the brightest possible light of knowing within ourselves, the animating force of the world, we can begin to recover a deep love and respect for all our mortal brokenness. With humility and courage we embark on the healing journey of slowly transforming our wounds into growthful potential.

 

The Arc of Initiation

The Arc of Initiation

by | Jun 6, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 2 comments

Art by Takato Yamamoto

Art by Takato Yamamoto

We are in the midst of a collective crisis and initiation, where peril and potential sit alongside each other. Humanity has always understood that change and transformation require sturdy containers to hold the fluid process of becoming. That all seeds of growth require a vessel in which to gestate. Alchemical stages, myths and fairy tales, initiatory rites and rituals are all such wombs, that birth the emergence of the new. Through their tasks and stages, they map out the timeless cycles of regeneration. And they all highlight the importance of intention that aligns such journeys with meaning and purpose, providing a necessary amulet for navigating these treacherous terrains.

In tribal cultures, initiations and rites of passage were sacred portals. They moved the initiate from a state of being to a stage of becoming. These technologies of the soul would dissolve the initiate’s ego structures in order to support the unfolding of a deep psychic reorganisation. The metamorphosis would evolve in three stages. At first, the initiate would enter a stage of separation and isolation, followed by a period of ordeal, severance and symbolic death, culminating in ceremonial and communal rebirth. In this final stage, the initiate would re-enter the collective whole as a valued tribal member of greater maturity, self-awareness and spiritual connection.

The stage of isolation and separation from the community would sometimes last for months. In this space, the initiate was in a state of uncertainty, disorientation and confusion. As they came to meet themselves in solitude, away from everyday distractions as well as from the tribal guidance and support, they dived deeply within, forced to discover and rely on their own inner resources. Their psychic resources and the wider cosmological guidance they encountered in this liminal space would be their compass in the darkness. Their isolation (often in a cave-like structure) was a symbolic drawing back into the fertile darkness of the womb. In this deep incubating space, the seeds of their future self were sowed, as they began to engage with their psychological and spiritual work. Here, in the regenerative dark, they waited for the Great Vision that would bring them into alignment with their vocation, life-purpose, place in their community and spiritual path.

The incubation stage was followed by the ordeal stage. Their process here was deepening. The initiate was confronted by a painful symbolic encounter with loss, dismemberment and death. It was their encounter with their suffering that activated their inner healing capacities. They were in the field of transformation. They were coming into greater consciousness as they moved from the innocence and dependency of childhood into the maturity and self-sufficiency of adulthood. But the self-sufficiency of these cultures was a highly relational space, as opposed to what this term means to us today. What they gained in their process belonged as much to them as to their collective, and they were to bring the gifts of this liminal space in service for the wider whole.

The ordeal of severance, loss and symbolic death was followed by a collective ceremonial rebirth. The newly emerged adult was welcomed back into their tribe. They were now mature enough to be in service. Here is where their integration process would begin to unfold, as their glimpses of the deep self and soul would become owned, honed and embedded through their participation in the relational field of the collective, their tribe, as a fully-fledged adult.

The person that returns is no longer the same as the person that left the tribe behind. This soul-deep transformation takes place within a sacred space that supports a safe process of renewal. The initiate has moved through the cyclical journey of death and rebirth that all great transitions require. This is a passage that serves the death of something old and the birth of something new. We will all be tasked with encountering a series of death and rebirth cycles throughout our lifetimes that contain the potential of initiating us into greater alignment with a deeper sense of self.  

Initiation rites and rituals are no longer available to us in our so-called modern societies, but the soul that always remembers the journey it needs to undertake will find its process through seemingly-random acts of fate. But without the structured frameworks that would traditionally hold the arc of transformation and contain the necessary chaos that precedes all change, we are called to face them unresourced, come what may. To become initiated is to break in all the right ways and all the right places and through the cracks the possibility of something new may emerge. But not every break meets its mend. As James Hollis says:

There are wounds that crush the soul, distort and misdirect the energy of life, and those that prompt us to grow up.

In the fluid stages of becoming we open up to all possibilities; the integration of our wounds that will nourish our growth, or the disintegration from our wounds and the potential that they become infected and infect.

The path of change, transformation and initiation is paved with great uncertainty. We often do not know where it all leads or what it all means. As we walk away from the fragile edge of what we know and we can count on, we follow the unfolding mystery step by step, guided by our courage, curiosity and our commitment to draw our learning from our journey’s cycles. Such journeys are always purposeful. With intention and with the right containers, we can learn their language and support their creative process, until a deeper balance is restored.

Any movement towards greater awareness and consciousness requires a degree of discomfort, as we peel back the layers to get through to our core. Our encounter with suffering ignites the forces of transmutation, but requires our full participation. By relinquishing our clinging to the illusion of an always happy, easy, perfect and unfettered life and by moving through the grief of our lost innocence and idealizations, we come to cultivate a relationship with the existential agonies of life. At the end of such a journey, we have come to know ourselves and our inner resources in a more intimate way.

Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine – a Vision of Wholeness

Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine – a Vision of Wholeness

by | Nov 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Defence Mechanisms, Depth Psychology, integration, Nature and Self, Political Psychology, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 0 comments


Caroline Manière Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine

Caroline Manière Psychedelic Myster

This book is a stitching process, trying to bring back into contact what has become separated and separate. Trying to reconnect us to a lost feminine wisdom and lineage and to its capacity to bring us back into a state of greater wholeness.  

We are living through times in which huge collective splits are becoming amplified on the wider world stage. We come to see clearly how the wound of separateness has become infected and oozes out of every societal pore. It seems that unless things become infected there is little hope of action. Like most patients that enter therapy, we tend to look inwards once our defenses have collapsed and our symptoms have become intolerable. Our collective defenses are certainly overstretched and we are standing on a dangerous edge, called to either integrate or demise.

This book, the restoration of the feminine, the psychedelic experience, are all deeply political matters. Max Dashu writes:

“The practice and ways of medicine have political ramifications because they represent direct spiritual power, energy that cannot be controlled by man-made hierarchies or systems of domination” ( p.60).

Separateness is systemic. It starts with the Other and it creeps into our most intimate connections including our relationship with Self. Likewise, oppression that arises out of the altar of separateness is also systemic. It is the feminine, it is the colonized nature, it is the underprivileged, the third world countries, the refugees, the homeless and displaced that are the weakest link in our society. In systemic thought they say a system is as strong as its weakest link. The weakest links are not negligible. They are where care and attention need to be directed at the most. Make no mistake, all these things are linked and our response to them is also linked. All these things are political and our response to them can be nothing less than a rebellious one. We have to face our current challenges with solid enough ethics, integrity and determination to survive the tension, or risk being ripped apart.

This collection of essays has come out of a deep sense in us as well as in what we are witnessing in the collective whole, of the need to re-member the feminine essence back into consciousness. The feminine we call on in this book is not confined to female bodies, it is part of every soul. Every collective energy belongs to all of us collectively.  Kathleen Harrison asks of us:

“It’s important to realize how we each hold within us the masculine and the feminine elements-these well-met opposites are swirling, dancing arm-in-arm, or sometimes in battle. But they are both always within every single one of us.” ( p. 146).

The feminine we call on in this book resides in women as well as men and needs to be nourished and strengthened in all of us, for all of us.

The feminine consciousness restores our awareness of our interconnectedness, with each other as a species, with all other species and nature, as part of a glorious, incredibly intelligent and purposeful, ecosystem. An ecosystem that is fully alive.  The feminine knowing of interconnectedness points us back to our shared source in the all emerging void. It reminds us that as we stand on the thresholds of life and death, we are all equal in our collective fate, whichever culture, class or creed we come from. In matters of life and death we return to our shared humanity and our true size. We are all but specs of dust in this magnificent tapestry of life. Our part and role here is to be of service to the life of what needs to live and to the death of what needs to die. To take our place fully in the responsibility and the consequence of it all. Humanity in its greed has become destructive and has aligned with the forces of death and disintegration. When disintegration is serving regeneration, like the death of winter that feeds the spring ahead, it is also in service to life. But the disintegration that humanity is engaged with at the moment is threatening life all around us.

This book aims to address the inequalities within psychedelic culture by bringing more feminine voices and matters to the surface. By bringing the unseen into greater view. This book does not address all the inequalities we are fostering in our community, it points to some and there are more to look at. The proportion of those that are well off in today’s world, with the proportion of women that have managed to lead safe lives, to the proportion of nature that is still vibrant, are sadly interlinked. One cannot be recovered without the other. We need a wide systemic lens to address what is infected in our world today. And most importantly, we need compassion, to make space for the dialogues that will bridge all the Otherness this world has fallen into.

Re-membering the vitality of feminine consciousness, her lost lineage and practices, her deeply embodied intuitive wisdom, will be a much-needed resource for our challenges ahead. Chiara Baldini tells us that:

“Women played a fundamental role in the administration of these rites and altered states of consciousness were a “spiritual technology” used to attain mystical knowledge about the paradoxical nature of reality and human’s places within the natural world”. (p. 78).

In this book we are calling on the Feminine that resides within us all, alongside nature, and her regenerative capacities for integration. In order for humanity to move forward it is essential that we recall and integrate whatever human capacity has remained underdeveloped and delegated to our collective shadow. Instead of consistently relying on an overdeveloped one-sidedness, we need to look for the feminine qualities, that are dormant potential in all of us, and here we will find treasures long lost and forgotten, the secret medicines we all long for whichever side of the divides we fall on.

“In times when the patriarchal excesses of modernity seem to be bringing us closer and closer to planetary collapse, psychedelic and plant medicine seem to be potentially powerful tools and allies in our quest to shake off the grip of those systems from our individual and collective consciousness. This is an essential step towards a more conscious paradigm of integrated and mature masculine-feminine synergy and a better integration between rational and erotic medicine.” (Adam Andros, p. 252). 

Psychedelic and altered states allow us a unique access into our personal and collective shadow. They unearth what has been lost or hidden in this space that holds peril alongside potential, and can return us to a wisdom that we deeply thirst for. In the realms of feminine consciousness, we will retrieve the medicines of interconnectedness, fertility, regeneration, compassion, embodied wisdom, feeling, kinship and belonging. If all these forces returned to our world a deep restructuring would take place.

Humanity has fallen captive to a “great forgetting”. We go through cycles of collective events that don’t get assimilated and we find ourselves compelled to compulsively repeat the trauma. We have come up against immense resistance from the ossified status quo towards the inevitable collective changes we are being called to navigate. As we stand before the thresholds of sociopolitical and environmental breakdown we will need all the resources we can master. We will need to transcend our structural and self-imposed limitations of Otherness, separateness and isolation.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

“In intercultural inquiries, I have been impressed with groups that are pushed out of the mainstream, and who yet retain and strengthen their integrity even so. It is fascinating to see that time after time, the disenfranchised group that maintains its dignity is often eventually admired and sought out by the very mainstream that once ousted it”.(p. 490, note 13)

I am glad someone has put this process into words. It lays bare our responsibilities and the consequences of how we attend to our wider psychedelic culture. It is inevitable that psychedelic culture will leak into the wider culture once again, we are already seeing clear aspects of that. I am not here to declare this as a victory or a foe, I think it is a fragile process that will unearth a lot of shadow on the way, but it is essential that we maintain awareness of our values as a community throughout it all. We have to tend to our internal dynamics, knowing that we are caring for a baby that will grow into adulthood and enter society at large. Do we want that offspring to bring something of value to the world? Do we want it to carry something vibrant, integral and potent within its soul? Do we want it to carry the seeds of change forward? If so we have to disentangle our community, movement, whatever you wish to call it, from its embrace with the oppressive discriminatory dynamics of wider culture. We don’t want that child going back and carrying more of the same. If we want it to make a real difference we have to make sure we cultivate its capacity to integrate division and its ability to stand in the potent, fertile wisdom of greater wholeness, where everything has its place and is strengthened by respectful collaboration.

This book aims to bring back the feminine in its many forms and guises into clearer view, for the psychedelic culture to be fed, inspired, touched, and mobilized by. The wider psychedelic community, resourced by the vision of feminine and altered states must meet our current challenges from the forefront of inclusivity, matching visionary poetics with decisive action.

In closing I will leave you with the words of Anna Luke:

“This is a call to the dark tides of menstruation rather than the clinical exactness of mensuration; a call to the slippery, elliptical, wet, delicious, beating heart of the darkness. This darkness is not of the grave, but of the regenerative darkness of the womb”. (p. 166)

Art by Autumn Skye

Art by Autumn Skye

Rites and Rituals

Rites and Rituals

by | Oct 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Systemic Family Constellations | 0 comments

Art by Stuart Griggs

Art by Stuart Griggs

Intentional rites and rituals are meaning carriers of great spiritual and psychological importance. They bring us back into belonging with the wider whole we are part of. As we call on the unseen to meet the seen, the higher and the lower worlds to meet us in the middle, we re-animate the world around us. We call everything back into life, into relationship and into co-creation.

For our early ancestors, ritual was the language for communing with the unseen. It held their prayers and offerings that appeased the Gods and Goddesses of disaster and called on the powers of protection. Ritual acts supported a complex emotional connection with the wider energies of life outside Self and community. They also weaved individual and tribal identities tightly together through their intrinsic meaning making process. Indigenous cultures and communities that have retained their links to the tribal soul keep their rites and rituals richly preserved and embedded into their social fabric of life. In the western world, ritual lineages have either been isolated from their spiritual and instinctive dimensions or have been completely forgotten and long-lost. Severed from our mythological and mystical roots, our spiritual capacity has been displaced from its rightful expressions.

Rituals are usually held by the wider container of ceremony or initiations and rites of passage. Our tribal ancestors knew that during transitions from one threshold to another, in order to preserve one from psychic injury, adequate containers are essential. Rites and rituals held the crucial tensions that underlie significant developmental transitions. They safeguarded a sacred and meaning-full space that supported the adult to emerge from the child, peeling back the layers of the Self into greater truth and maturity.

These rites are not to be romanticized in our yearnings for what we have lost. These initiations are bruising and painful transitions that require the shattering of what once was in order to re-assemble us into what will be. But the act of ceremony and ritual would render these spaces safe for surrendering one’s innocence and the community would be there to tend to the open wounds and transmit generational wisdom that would restore a new and yet ancient order of being. Rituals guarded the threshold between one way of being and another, one way of seeing and another, one way of living and another, holding the space sacred while a deep transformation was under way.

Our secular modern western culture has retained very little of our ceremonial past. What still remains has been mostly locked within the remits of organized religion, devoid of its once serving truth and purpose.  In the absence of collective initiation rites that mark the developmental transitions of life, young men and women seek these thresholds unconsciously through dangerous and self-destructive thrills, guided by a soul that seeks the next stage in its journey. The soul always remembers what we seem to have forgotten. But with no adequate internal or external guidance, these attempts remain incomplete and can fragment instead of deepening the Self.

Our Great Forgetting has left these forces to reach us only through fate, accidents, love and grief. These come complete with inner rituals and initiations that we tend to fear and medicalize, as we lack safe containers that can support us in offering ourselves to their transformative intentions. These archetypes of initiation unfold into inner rites of passage that can lead us into a greater knowing of ourselves and the world around us. Not always easy or palatable, they are tasked with ensuring we travel where we need to.

A ritual act is a form of soul prayer that ignites from the farthest, faintest recognition of Self deeply within and moves towards the greater collective soul of the entire universe. During inner work, ritual acts invite the wider forces to witness our journey and gift us something of the collective wisdom. They align our psychic energies with our intentions and amplify the potency of our work. They penetrate our ego structures and guide us through the liminal spaces between the worlds of reason, heart and soul, summoning buried layers of Self into action. These symbolic realms nourish our hidden depths and offer a safe container for opening up soulfully.

As we stand collectively at this point in time before the threshold of radical change on so many levels, the timeless wisdom of rites of passage can be a significant resource.  What we are collectively tasked with ahead is as old as earth herself. It rests on the elemental wisdom of ritual initiation spaces that restores our connection with the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Unless we recover conscious rituals around the cycles of renewal we will lose our direction in our experience of the visceral flow of life. Restoring our ritual connection to the thresholds of death and rebirth opens us up to receiving the gift of life.