Giving Birth to Your True Self
Most of us take three or four go’s before we finally land on a career path that allows us to offer our soul gifts out into the world as an expression of our true self. Until we begin to awaken it’s actually impossible to access our soul’s true calling, accept our destiny, and share our much needed medicine with others. That’s just the pattern of life — that our gold lies on the other side of both the joy and the pain of awakening. Until we surrender to our awakening we won’t know the work that is ours to do and we won’t know the gifts we came here to share. Our life’s work comes from the deepest part of our soul as an expression of our true self. When we allow it flow the magic of life also begins.
When I was 18 and studying law in University College Dublin, I was reading Carl Jung in my spare time. His ideas and writing captivated me even though I couldn’t really understand most of what I read. The mismatch between my chosen career path and my real interests was unfortunately lost on me but Jung thankfully won the day. My interest in his ideas has far outlived my interest in law. For the past few years I’ve also been listening to This Jungian Life podcast which is a wondrous resource for lay learners of Jungian ‘individuation’ which was Jung’s term for the path of inner transformation. For my MA thesis last year I explored medieval women’s mystical writing through the lens of Jungian symbols of transformation. All this is to say that I love Jung, and so much of his writing validates my intuition that the path of spiritual awakening is natural, necessary, and life critical if we are to live as life designed us to live.
“Concerning Rebirth”
One of the books I read in college included an essay on the mother archetype ;-) and recently I picked it up again and read the next essay that’s called, “Concerning Rebirth.” In it, Jung speaks of various entry points to inner transformation, often called rebirth, such as formal ritual and rites of passage, magic, cults, yoga, spiritual exercises and more. He discusses universal symbols of transformation and rebirth found in various myths and religious stories. One section that leapt off the page as I read is what he called, ‘Natural Transformation.’ He says:
‘There are natural transformation processes which simply happen to us, whether we like it or not, and whether we know it or not. These processes develop considerable psychic effects, which would be sufficient in themselves to make any thoughtful person ask himself what really happened to him. … Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams.’ (And I add, they also happen in all significant spiritual experiences).’ Four Archetypes, C.G. Jung.
There is more exciting material in the essay but the main reason this landed so deeply in me is that it affirmed my intuition that spiritual awakening is a natural human process that we are designed to experience in the ordinary course of life. Awakening isn’t something ‘extra’ in life, it’s not an optional ‘add-on’ but rather it is the whole point and purpose of life. It is the only pathway by which we can grow into our authentic self and find deep meaning and purpose in life at the level of the soul. To miss our awakening is to miss the very meaning of our life.
Transformation of Consciousness
Awakening transforms us at the level of our consciousness. It is a complete metamorphosis that reformulates the structure of our consciousness. In the same way that the caterpillar dissolves and its imaginal cells reconfigure as a butterfly, during our awakening human consciousness dissolves and re-configures as unitive and deified consciousness. This transformed consciousness affirms the oneness of all in love and allows us to live from the heart, in love and for love alone. To undergo this magnificent transformation is to grow into your true self, your authentic self, and to access your true soul gifts that the world needs you to share as medicine in these troubled times.
Transformed Consciousness
Many different terms are used to describe the transformed state - enlightenment, divine union, waking up, and my preferred term is ‘deification'.’ I truly believe that the whole point of life is to discover our always already existing inner divinity. We come from Love with an eternally burning spark of divinity at our core, and when the natural process of awakening happens, that spark ignites a fire of incandescent light and love in us and that is our rebirth. The nature of divine or pure consciousness is the recognition of everything and everyone as One, Whole, Complete, and everything belonging in harmonious peace and love. Our consciousness has joined to the Divine Consciousness and our ultimate return to Love begins here and now in this material world. The chaos of the world today is directly related to the ongoing and historic failure of people wake up.
Yet, I see a difference between Jung’s description of ‘natural transformation’ in his context of psychological individuation and my understanding of the dynamics of spiritual transformation. Whereas Jung says ‘[natural transformation] will happen to us whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not,’ my sense is that, for our spiritual awakening to succeed we must consciously and intentionally engage with the process and support its unfolding. Whilst I recognise that our awakening always initiates itself and is not something we can will into existence, I don’t believe the process will complete on its own. Even though it is fully natural, and constitutive of our humanity for us to awaken, the process will not reach completion unless we cooperate in its unfolding. So, the challenge, or the test, or the turning point for us, is that whilst our awakening may well begin spontaneously, and that graced spiritual and even mystical experiences may sweep us up into incandescent divine energies, that we must nonetheless consciously engage in our ‘rebirth’ for it to move towards completion. We must join with the divine energies of the awakening process and become both mother and midwife in the rebirth our true self. We ultimately rebirth ourselves in love and then begin to walk the earth out of an awakened consciousness that is closer to the divine than to the human.
Dr Jim Finley whom I greatly admire and who hosts my other favourite podcast, Turning to the Mystics, with Kirsten Oates, says that ‘Awakening asks of us nothing less than everything.’ And I like to add that, ‘It also offers us nothing less than everything.’
Scriptio Divina
The main practice that I use, and encourage others to use, to engage the process of your awakening, is spiritual journaling. Scriptio Divina, or sacred writing, is the embodied and grounding practice by which we record our spiritual life, (whether subtle or dramatic does not matter), to create a written record that allows for later reflection and integration. It could not be simpler to commit to a journaling practice after your morning sit and writing down some reflections that capture where you are on the path that is leading you to the rebirth of your true self.
Blessings.
Image, Hilma af Klint, The Dove.