So, I've been reading a book called Emergence by Barbara Marx Hubbard. I am struck by how similar her concepts are to those in other spiritual discourse. She speaks of our wounded children or ego or the parts of life that are the common suffering of the human condition as our "local selves." She speaks of the higher power or our essence as "Essential Self." She goes one step beyond to what she calls the "Universal Human." She thinks we are, as a species, evolving towards this universal humanhood.
Our local selves are the many voices within us that speak from the locale and timeframe during which they dominated within us. For example, my teen-age local self burst out the other day when I was being pressured and corrected publicly by a peer in the name of spirituality. She said, "No! So, back off!" That outburst, while completely understandable given the circumstances, was not what my essential self might have said. My essential self might have said, "I don't choose to respond to that question." The little girl in me might have looked to the moderator of the session to protect me.
Interestingly, the other women in the spiritual circle, resonated with my teen-age voice and felt it spoke the truth. How hard it is to do spiritual work whether we couch it in Hubbard's terms, the terms of recovery groups, or the terms of organized religions! It's hard to discern when a local self speaking from the pain and challenges of teen years still is speaking a necessary truth in our adult life. This is where Hubbard is really helpful because she believes in the integration of all those inner truths and voices. She sees the Essential Self as shepherding our inner family towards the higher good. To do this, she must gain credibility with the unruly inner children or local selves.
How does this happen? Her truth, her loving kindness towards all those parts of the self must be so compelling that, over time, all the parts want to follow her, to be one with her. She becomes the loving mother that we may never have had. Hubbard asks us to journal about a time when our mother failed us significantly. She has us write what actually happened and then re-write the story imagining our mother as HER essential self, responding with loving kindness. We relive that moment with our essential mother and a couple of things happen: (1) we see the gap between what was and what could have been; we recognize what we missed and can assess the depth of our loss; and (2) we feel the moment reconfigured as a healing moment instead of a trauma. For example, I wrote a story of my essential mother, the evolved Lucille, as getting up in the morning happy. Just writing that line, I realized the depth of HER unhappiness and that I didn't know a happy mother. That realization settled within me in a different way than my intellectual knowing of that fact has in the past. Somehow, I FELT her essential goodness and love along with her failure to manifest that in my childhood presence. It felt better to know that she, too, had not evolved to her essential self yet. I felt re-mothered in a way.
Another thing that Hubbard presents us with as do 12-step recovery systems is the dysfunction of the evolving human condition. We are hurt and dysfunctional and imperfect in our physical selves because we live in a world-wide culture that is dysfunctional. The culture doesn't value love or kindness. It doesn't take care of the weak or the sick in systematic ways. It values a hierarchy of intellectual, financial, racial, gendered dominance and weakness. It's useful to imagine our culture reconfigured as one that honors each and all with the same respect and love. It's staggering to imagine this and to realize the depth of our cultural loss.
The hope is in the evolving. I think of de Chardin here and his sense that we are evolving as a species towards the Christ, evolving as a species into god. I think of the Buddhists who believe that no one person is fully enlightened until the species has achieved enlightenment. What does this all mean? On the one hand, each of us must work towards our personal evolution, enlightenment, recovery; at the same time, we must give a hand to others in their movement towards the same. Additionally, we can support cultural efforts that support the dignity and growth of all.
And so, I apologized to the fellow traveler who had attacked my local self from her local self. Loving my inner teen that defended herself, defended the current state of our evolution in a sense, I also reached beyond when I could to a higher state. Spiritual evolution is happening. We're in it. It's both hard, hard work and grace. Roxie
Our local selves are the many voices within us that speak from the locale and timeframe during which they dominated within us. For example, my teen-age local self burst out the other day when I was being pressured and corrected publicly by a peer in the name of spirituality. She said, "No! So, back off!" That outburst, while completely understandable given the circumstances, was not what my essential self might have said. My essential self might have said, "I don't choose to respond to that question." The little girl in me might have looked to the moderator of the session to protect me.
Interestingly, the other women in the spiritual circle, resonated with my teen-age voice and felt it spoke the truth. How hard it is to do spiritual work whether we couch it in Hubbard's terms, the terms of recovery groups, or the terms of organized religions! It's hard to discern when a local self speaking from the pain and challenges of teen years still is speaking a necessary truth in our adult life. This is where Hubbard is really helpful because she believes in the integration of all those inner truths and voices. She sees the Essential Self as shepherding our inner family towards the higher good. To do this, she must gain credibility with the unruly inner children or local selves.
How does this happen? Her truth, her loving kindness towards all those parts of the self must be so compelling that, over time, all the parts want to follow her, to be one with her. She becomes the loving mother that we may never have had. Hubbard asks us to journal about a time when our mother failed us significantly. She has us write what actually happened and then re-write the story imagining our mother as HER essential self, responding with loving kindness. We relive that moment with our essential mother and a couple of things happen: (1) we see the gap between what was and what could have been; we recognize what we missed and can assess the depth of our loss; and (2) we feel the moment reconfigured as a healing moment instead of a trauma. For example, I wrote a story of my essential mother, the evolved Lucille, as getting up in the morning happy. Just writing that line, I realized the depth of HER unhappiness and that I didn't know a happy mother. That realization settled within me in a different way than my intellectual knowing of that fact has in the past. Somehow, I FELT her essential goodness and love along with her failure to manifest that in my childhood presence. It felt better to know that she, too, had not evolved to her essential self yet. I felt re-mothered in a way.
Another thing that Hubbard presents us with as do 12-step recovery systems is the dysfunction of the evolving human condition. We are hurt and dysfunctional and imperfect in our physical selves because we live in a world-wide culture that is dysfunctional. The culture doesn't value love or kindness. It doesn't take care of the weak or the sick in systematic ways. It values a hierarchy of intellectual, financial, racial, gendered dominance and weakness. It's useful to imagine our culture reconfigured as one that honors each and all with the same respect and love. It's staggering to imagine this and to realize the depth of our cultural loss.
The hope is in the evolving. I think of de Chardin here and his sense that we are evolving as a species towards the Christ, evolving as a species into god. I think of the Buddhists who believe that no one person is fully enlightened until the species has achieved enlightenment. What does this all mean? On the one hand, each of us must work towards our personal evolution, enlightenment, recovery; at the same time, we must give a hand to others in their movement towards the same. Additionally, we can support cultural efforts that support the dignity and growth of all.
And so, I apologized to the fellow traveler who had attacked my local self from her local self. Loving my inner teen that defended herself, defended the current state of our evolution in a sense, I also reached beyond when I could to a higher state. Spiritual evolution is happening. We're in it. It's both hard, hard work and grace. Roxie
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