The joy is our increased capacity for living and feeling at home within ourselves, and experiencing our wholeness

Once your ego-personality has exhausted itself [over lifetimes] and realizes the futility of finding any fulfillment, joy, abundance, or even growth via improving the small self, which most self-help programs and coaches focus on, then you are ready to truly individuate and embark on the Great Work.

This path and work are not about manifesting your desires, dreams, a partner, or making millions of $$ as an entrepreneur. It is not about physical security anymore, your family or legacy. It is not about self-actualization and perfecting or improving your personality [which you have mistaken for the true Self].

It requires a level of surrender and letting go, which the hardened ego-personality will resist because "it wants what it wants" with all its social/cultural conditioning, attachments, desires, identifications, demands, and entitlements. This process occurs over lifetimes as the soul ripens and is ready to answer the call.

But here's the tricky paradox; you can't skip any steps. You need to have gone through the full ego development of the small self and inevitable disillusionment before engaging in the Great Work of Individuation, laying the groundwork for Divine Union. Otherwise, there is the trap of spiritual bypassing and over-estimating your level of Being.

This process is different for each of us. Yet, more and more people are being called to individuate during this Time of Transition and the ongoing "split of humanity." And there are forces that try to interfere with this process [of individuation and soul embodiment]...especially through a certain new medical treatment which more than half of the population of the world has received over the past two years.

@timeoftransition

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“To begin with, individuation is not a self-improvement program. It is much more than firming up, losing weight, having more positive thoughts, or solving problems and getting on with your life. And, individuation is not self-actualization. The mythologist Joseph Campbell noted that self-actualization is for people with nothing better to do—people who don’t know their personal myth or deeper purpose in life.

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for security, prestige, self-development, and even personal relationships are not the primary values a person inspired by their deeper Self, or the thread of their individuation, lives for.

Simply put, individuation is about transformation. It means being willing to embrace a lifetime of full-fledged metamorphosis analogous to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly over and over again.

It means letting go of the defining characteristics that make up our identity for the sake of becoming something further enhanced by the Self, with a capital “S”, the Divine spark within us.

The pain in this process is the pain of breaking through our own limitations. The joy is our increased capacity for living and feeling at home within ourselves, and experiencing our wholeness.”

- Bud Harris, Becoming Whole - A Jungian Guide To Individuation

We can see this lack of substantial psychological awareness in many New Age writers and lecturers.

"James Hillman, whose works delve deeply in Jungian archetypes, sees most New Age therapeutic methods as failing to deal with the true complexities of the soul. We can see this lack of substantial psychological awareness in many New Age writers and lecturers. Though such spokespeople may specialize in Hindu and Buddhist terminology relating to the levels of consciousness, few speak with any background knowledge of Western art, literature, poetry, science, philosophy, and how these have contributed to highlighting the further heights and depths of the human situation today.

Many become popular because they speak and write with a reductionist style that brings the complex and disturbing down into canned formulas of what spiritual growth is supposedly all about. Dozens of such New Age authors could bring their works together into one large volume entitled, “How To Become Aware of the Depths of Your Being Without Disturbing the Routine of Your Comfortable Lifestyle.“”

~ Lew Paz

@timeoftransition

Holding The Tension Between Opposites

Reflections and Recommendations by Bernhard Guenther

There is something bigger happening way beyond what we see on a 3D level right now. The mind can't grasp it. There is a great opportunity right here and right now and this is a huge spiritual lesson more than anything else.

This IS an opportunity for alchemical transformation but it is also an internal job for the outside will always reflect the inside. The mud and forces of the unconscious and the underworld are rising up; all that you/I/we have suppressed (fears, wounds, and traumas) is coming to surface, begging to be integrated, healed, and transmuted so we can ascend to a higher state of Being while transforming the world as embodied frequency anchors.

In fact, the supramental consciousness of the Divine is also descending, stirring up the shadow of the collective to be transmuted into Light. This is a long process spanning over lifetimes but there are key "junctures" like what's happening now and each individual's choice determines the outcome. Disillusionment IS part of the process. As the Mother (and Sri Aurobindo) prophesized, we are approaching (or already in) the Dark Night of Civilization. The collective Dark Night of the Soul. A necessary process for the outer reflects the inner, as above, so below. The only way out is in and through.

Again, this is an amazing opportunity for the ones answering the call seeing through the veil of reality and what lays ahead.

This alchemical transformation will also give birth to new opportunities, creativity, and abundance but it must be rooted in integrity and sincerity, and ultimately a spiritual foundation and aspiration embodied and grounded in the body as conscious transducers of the Divine Force. It's not about trying to escape anything. No place in the world is "safe" from what is happening.

One thing that is fascinating to observe on the sidelines (without identifying with any side) whenever I was checking-in recently on social media is the increasing posts of projections towards Trump.

On the one side, you have all the negative shadow projections towards the man, blaming him for everything up to mass murder because of "negligence", desperately trying to "get him out of power". On the other side, you have all the positive shadow projections (what Jung called "golden shadow") towards Trump, hailing him as the savior/lightworker who is going to take down the cabal, desperately trying to "keep him in power".

And it is starting to get extreme. In the view of the one side (mostly people self-identified as "the left"), Trump cannot possibly do anything right and is being demonized. In the view of the other side (mostly people self-identified as "the right"...now intermixed with New Age Types and Christians too), Trump cannot do possibly wrong to the point of being worshipped.

As Robert Bly wrote in "A Little Book on the Human Shadow": "The issue is not so much that we do project but how long we keep the projections out there. Projection without personal contact is dangerous."

And then both sides (pro/anti-Trump) hate on each other too. What a "loosh" fest, especially on social media, getting trapped in the duality of left/right...and we know who feeds off of all that.

Trump has to carry a LOT of psychic pressure due to these negative/positive projections of the masses. Bly wrote about the danger of that as well when projected on one single person.

Here's something to self-reflect on, even beyond Trump but in your everyday life, especially during these times for there is something much bigger at works on unseen levels:

Are you able to hold the tension between opposites without identifying with either side, without any preferences of outcome, without likes or dislikes, without desire? Are you able to go beyond Hope or Fear, Attraction or Repulsion? Are you able to withdraw all projections (positive and negative) and stay with that friction internally in your body without externalizing - without blame or savior projections - without rationalizing or analyzing?

That's where the rubber hits the road when it comes to the Great Work to transmute Lead into Gold, connecting you to Truth, the Divine within and without which will eventually transmute the world. Shadow work and Inner Alchemy. It's not an easy process as I experience in myself, for a lot of "shit" does and will come up which you can't blame on anything or anyone externally anymore.

This alchemical inner process of not attaching to either side has also nothing to do with being "neutral" or "apathy" as some people seem to mistake it. The former is mostly a disassociative state, trapped in the mind, the latter based on "inverted" negative emotions. It's not an intellectual or philosophical exercise. In fact, the more head-centric you are - the more intellectually driven you are - the harder it will be for you to drop down and into the body and connect with the Truth of your Being.

This process has also nothing to do with non-action or just being passive. Quite the contrary, right conscious action (that is unique to YOU) in alignment with the Divine arises out of this process, less distorted through our ignorance, projections, and conditioning (including wounds and trauma).

But we have a long way to go. This is just a beginning.

None the less, the opportunity is here, right now and it doesn't depend on anything or anyone out there but on YOU.

So, as a suggestion, use the self-isolating time wisely. Don't waste it on relentless media news consumption.

As Gurdjieff said, the moment we're born, we live on borrowed time. You could extend that exercise to meditate/contemplate on Death as well. It will lead you to the cure out of this collective Death/Fear Anxiety (which is what this virus scare triggers, ultimately), holding the tension between the seeming opposites of Birth and Death....and witness what comes up within, the thrid Firce....or the opposition between life and death....or is it an opposite? ;-)

Warmly,
Bernhard Guenther

Holding certain views which others find inadmissible

“Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my relationship to the world. Basically, that relationship was the same in my childhood as it is to this day.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious.

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.

But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.”

– Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”

loneliness on the path