thoughts on division & mystery in our times
It’s not as dark as it looks…
In the spiritual community there is a tendency to want to escape the physical realm. Using transcendent practices or substances, we desire to melt away into nature and become one with everything. This is a beautiful (and important) experience, that we all deserve to have access to.
BUT! This state of being is not the goal for humans, and it’s not the sole key to healing. The reality is that we all come from oneness. We already know that. We came here to experience division.
While this might sound rather hopeless at first, bear with me for a moment. The shamanic teachings from all over the world don’t teach us to become one, they teach us to step into relationship. At the core of every relationship is a connection and (ideally) an exchange that leads to balance. In order to survive and thrive, we need relationships. We need human connection, we need to understand the language of the wind, the animals and the fire, just to name a few.
We can only meet each other in right relationship if we’ve really understood that we are separate. We can only honour, respect and nurture beings appropriately if we don’t just blur the lines with oneness philosophies, but remember that a sunflower’s needs and purpose is different from that of a willow.
A dog’s language is different from that from a tiger, the waves of the Atlantic sing different songs than the clouds at the mountain tops, and you and me are forever separate and in our own bodies, minds and hearts.
Once we truly accept and even honour this fact, we can open our hearts to the magical portal that lies in division, and that’s sacred union. Sacred union is not just about sexuality, it’s much more about meeting another being at that sweet spot, where all parties involved can remain true to themselves while stepping onto communal ground in order to create something new. This type of union never asks us to melt into each other, but to let ourselves fall into a connection based in trust that opens our potential for growth.
In sacred geometry this is shown in the Merkabah, the Hexagram, the Vescia Piscis and many many more symbols. In the shamanic cosmology, it’s the meeting of the sky and the earth. In the sweet spot in the middle there is not a line - there is the tree of life, growing and expanding just like us. If we want a better world, we have to have the courage to be here and build it here.
We have to remember that we came here to be separate from everything because we want to experience expansive, loving union. This union, wether that’s between two people making love, a person touching a flower, a cat playing with a child, sugar being mixed with flour to bake cookies, is the foundation for peace.
On a large scale, the denial of separateness and the refusal to step into right relationship with other living beings leads to manipulation, violence, oppression and war. On a small scale, it leads to the overemphasis of opinions, labels, judgement and detachment. The result is isolation, loneliness, poverty and hopelessness, which then, at some point turns into desparation. Amplified, desparation calls for desparate measures, and the result is again is war.
So you see, the fact that we are all divided can go both ways, depending on which choices we make. The key here lies in holding yourself accountable for your own life and stepping out of the opinion-spectacle, as I like to call it. Other people’s lives are none of your business unless you are invited and ready to step into union with them. And also then your place is the sweet spot in which you can exchange in a way that restores balance, sparks growth and lays a foundation for peace.
At the very essence of all of this is humility. Even though we are all different, we are also all equal. Nobody is better than anybody else. We all know a lot of things, but we also all don’t know a lot of things, and everybody knows something that someone else doesn’t know. And then we have to accept the mystery. We will never understand it all, not the universe, not each other, not the dots of a ladybug or the speed of light. We will never arrive. We will never truly know. But that’s also what makes relationships, connections and this life in general so magical.
And right there, in the acceptance that we’re separate but equal and we will never really understand it all, lies the magical peaceful portal that we are all invited to step into.
And of course, we will overstep lines and bump our heads, but that’s part of the learning that we have to do on our journey to peace. And that’s also what makes this life so much more of an adventure than just escaping our bodies and melting away into everything. That’s what we can give our children and our children’s children, and that’s where hopelessness turns into hope, because we can remember that we’re here to build something new - together.
