Moving on

"The most secure way is indeed the most insecure way. The way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way. To find the right
way is to follow your own bliss."
                                         -- Joseph Campbell

The path to bliss lies in inner peace—the peace that goes beyond understanding, known to the soul that transforms the ravening of the ego into a burning desire. The greatest constant in the universe is change. In this chapter, I shall show you a pattern to life’s changes that helps understand how we got to where we are and why the future will be so different. We shall come to understand how important it is that we take what we have learned about ourselves and use it to clarify an intention for our lives—today.

A process-pattern of life:

Did you ever wonder how you got from a fresh, single cell to a complex and beautifully organized multicellular adult human being? Gus Jaccaci, my gifted artist-friend, taught me to view this as a four-step process of gathering, repeating, sharing, and transforming.

First, though, I must point out a barrier between the repeating and the sharing that the developing life must pass or die. When you were first conceived, you actively gathered the nutrients you needed from the fluids around you in your mother’s Fallopian tube. Your inner, living processes made more of your inner stuff and you got bigger.

You repeated yourself! You then had to share yourself with your mother or pass on out through the cervix and die. You did it, my friend, you crossed that barrier between repeating and sharing … and only half of all conceptions make it past this barrier! Having successfully shared space with your mother, you rapidly transformed into an embryo for the purpose of making your organs.

You now grew at a tremendous rate by gathering and repeating in the sharing space of that womb. This "hooked up and working" state means that they were all sharing their functions for your continued life. If one of the organ systems wasn’t working, you would have died—your mother would have miscarried you … and one out of ten human pregnancies end this way. If you shared okay, then you transformed into a fetus.

You, you plucky, wonderful little fetus, you got it all right and you went back to gathering and repeating in the new sharing relationships for the next test of your sharing ability: your birth and the necessity of being able to share yourself with a totally new and different environment, the air. Welcome to the world, little infant!

The gather, repeat, share and transform didn’t stop here. This transformed you into an adolescent, and if you lived in a tribe with a strong wisdom tradition, you would have had a rite of passage into the life of collaboration of soul and ego—a new sharing that would transform you into an adult ready for your spiritual development.

All along this path of yours how many ceremonies welcomed you into the new world of each transformation? If there were as many as mine, there were but a few, and they were a bit distorted. Mine consisted of getting my driver’s license, graduating from high school, becoming old enough to get drunk, and, finally, graduating from college. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to have had ceremony with elders and peers at each of these times to welcome the new you who has just crossed the barrier? Perhaps you would like to design a ceremony with your SoulCircle to celebrate your recent transformation, for you know that it’s never too late to take the spiritual path. You have just demonstrated that to your Self and to other Selves. As a one-of-a-kind work of art, you are worthy of that ceremony. Enjoy it.

As you now move forward into the rest of your life, keep in mind that you have just had a good look at the effects of human beings sharing themselves with each other. How does it feel? Do you like it? Would you like others to feel as you do? If so, share what you have learned with us in HOPE let us work with you in the sharing space. Work with others to develop their move across the big "I" beam. Be a virus of health and healing. Help the epidemic grow.

Join us all in rewriting the Garden of Eden allegory.…