(Photo by Ursula Noboa. Colca Canyon, Arequipa, Perú)
How do I talk about fear? That which has been the second most important motivation in my life after love. How do I approach that which makes my mind become agitated and worried, my body shiver and my heart race? Ever since I can remember I have felt a very intense love for the world. My world when I was about four or five years old was the very traditional and catholic culture of Peru. I don’t know if what I have always felt as boiling love in my chest is something that I caught from my exposure to the teachings of Jesus as I read a Children’s Bible at home; or it was something that was there with me since the beginning and I just resonated so deeply with Jesus’ story that I didn’t feel alone in loving the world as I did. My closest guess would be that it’s definitely a mix of both, and that whatever the case, one without the other wouldn’t have led me to where I am now.
I remember vividly how I never doubted for a second that such a love was possible, for I felt it too. A love for the world that is born out of a knowing that spirit and matter are not two separate things, but different manifestations of the divine creative drive. Of course, in my mind back then I had a much simpler version of that explanation. Memories of how simple and beautiful Jesus’ teachings felt have stayed with me my whole life. They seemed to land easily and graciously on me, fitting like puzzle pieces on the mold of my soul. A peaceful joy would arise out of my relationship with Jesus back then, with no other ideas conflicting with the "coherence" of the message.
As time went by and I became slowly but surely exposed to the church’s interpretations of Jesus’ life and teachings, things started to change. Suddenly I found myself afraid and a feeling of separateness started to creep into my mind. I found myself judging myself, comparing myself to Jesus and fearing I would never be able to be like him. My mind would pick up ideas of him as a vengeful judge, as my soul held on to the certainty of him as my friend and loving guide. Being in this world didn’t make things easier, for I definitely felt like I was the only one of my friends who had these crazy ideas. The reality was probably a very different one, for in Peru, catholic religion is weaved into the very fabric of society; from education, politics (even if the state is supposed to be secular), to the very values that govern family life, interpersonal relations, expectations, moral rules, etc. This means that everybody, no matter who, would on some level have to deal with the assumptions and ideas of this particular containing myth.
I consider myself very lucky, because even if my mother’s family came from a very catholic tradition, it was in my parents that I first saw the rebellious stance of not accepting all dogma blindly and the curiosity for what lies outside of our own tradition. As I grew up, I saw the bookshelves of my house slowly beginning to fill with books on spirituality from many different traditions, which in some way made me feel like I also had the permission to look for answers outside of my own tradition. This is how in my life the difference between spirituality and religion became clear. I would go to church feeling a very intense discrepancy with the details and nuances of the catholic rituals and dogma, but at the same time a part of me was satisfied from being in communion with others who in their very particular ways looked for the divine for comfort, gratitude and celebration.
This part of me would easily and gladly bypass the contradictions and find joy in the simplicity of Jesus’ message that thankfully stayed with me throughout my whole life. When thinking about this, it occurs to me that in this moment of my journey, Jesus’ life and teachings were in tune with what I, as an individual soul, needed for continuing my development. Of course, there are tricky challenges that arise from contrasting an all-allowing and all-forgiving unconditional love with a world where everything is based on merit. As humans we tend to ascribe human qualities to the divine, which is understandable; but to me, the most fertile soils for self-discovery are in the contradictions, in the tension that is generated by the inevitable and beautiful (sometimes terrible) dance of opposites and all that lies in between. Interestingly, because there is an “in between”, there can never be a total opposition, but just a spectrum of possibility.
As I continued on my journey and began learning many new ideas mainly from eastern traditions, it felt as if they were landing on top of that first certainty of love as the motor of the universe that I had as a child. I don’t remember ever doubting the core of Jesus’ message, so my quest was one of making that more available and practical in my life, and not looking for something to replace it with. Catholic theology provides a very unique framework to understand the divine, and I think that since it was mostly developed in the west, it hasn’t been completely untouched by the philosophical currents of western thought. In this sense, catholic theology suffers from many of the same problems influencing our “western” containing myth.
It seems as if the idea from the book of Genesis about the universe as separate from God the creator has nicely fit within the dualistic Cartesian framework that has influenced western culture so much. In catholic religion, the approach to all things spiritual is mainly from an intellectual starting point, so faith and reason become the two vehicles for a relationship with God. This wasn't enough for me. Every cell of my body yearned to be soaked in that experience of the simplicity of unconditioned being that I felt as a child, and for that, the mind only tends to get in the way.
The fact that Jesus is understood as god-human, and that we —the rest— are naught but mortals in need of redemption is also in my opinion a grave misunderstanding of his core message. Didn’t he come here to remind us of our true divine nature? and to lift up our heads so that we embrace this universe as ours, and not as mere guests in a foreign land filled with booby traps around every corner? Didn’t he say we are able to do everything he did and more if only we can see god in all that is? Didn’t he die defending the truth that he proclaimed, challenging our own mortal and ephemeral assumptions of ourselves?
I’ve never heard of a father having children of a different nature than his, such as the church would have us think. Jesus the “only” Son, the Holy Spirit and the Father: three persons, one nature. If our nature is different than theirs, then we are the father’s adopted children, and our being here is not the product of god’s essential intention. If on the other hand, we are god’s children, then our fates are inevitably and forever intertwined and our every breath is proof of the divine will actualizing its creative potential. As we elevated Jesus into “the only son of god”, he was separated from us. We turned his humanity into a mere disguise of his divinity, so anything he achieved was obviously because he is god, and obviously from a different nature than ours. According to the church, his nature is uncorrupted by sin, and ours is forever stained by it. We are born corrupt, and we die corrupt, forever begging for mercy to a father who is incessantly obsessed with our every slip, adding and categorizing each fault to be counted at the time of our deaths, so we can receive an appropriate punishment…
As I write these lines, describing the ideas that influenced me when growing up, I am saddened. Generalization is even more destructive than ideas born out of fear. Not all Catholics believe these things; in fact, some of the most amazing people I’ve met in my life were priests, who saw through the dogma and lived a life of humble service to Jesus’ message of unconditional love. One of the main problems for me as I tried to be true to my inner call to love, was the thought that god expected me to “be like Jesus”. Since I never actually doubted that living like him was possible, I inevitably compared myself to him. This sort of thinking made me really anxious, for I was trying, and not succeeding, to be like Jesus. In the meantime, I was failing miserably at being myself.
After some time of exposing myself to ways of looking at the world from outside of my culture, something inside of me started loosening up. As I slowly began to experience myself as spirit (thanks mostly to eastern meditative practices), I started being able to recognize and differentiate external ideas from the song of my own heart. During this slow but steady process of shedding what was not mine, I experienced intermittent episodes of high anxiety, which were marked by a variety of physical symptoms like palpitations, chest pains, TMJ, muscle stiffness, headaches, panic attacks, etc. I remember that my attitude towards the images, thoughts and feelings arising from my unconscious was all but friendly. I would reject all uncomfortable, negative and “unwelcome” material, try to control it, bypass it with meditation or distractions, or I would simply feel guilty of having such thoughts or feelings. Looking back, and in light of Jung’s compensation theory, this was nothing but my unconscious giving me messages to be aware of my attitude of rejection towards wounded parts of myself while also trying to be somebody else (trying to fill the shoes of Jesus).
Even if I was consciously aware that there was some rebalancing and changing of perspectives that needed to be done, I was definitely being influenced by the collective idealization of Jesus and my own mythification of his story. These were certainly two themes which served, and still do, as kindling for my personal development. The more I came into contact with my own perceived vulnerability and the more I tried to embrace my ephemeral manifestation, the more I could acknowledge Jesus’ own humanity. This made his teachings even more appealing to me, for it helped me situate him in his own time and place, being influenced by the needs and culture of the particular world he lived in.
For me, this is an important part in my path towards individuation (becoming fully myself). Understanding that my personal story is unique and situated in a particular time and space, makes it special in that it is unrepeatable, and the same applies to Jesus’s story. Integrating all levels of being, including my own shadow, into my consciousness and coming into contact with the sacred individuality of my Self is in itself a beautiful and engaging task. In denying myself and trying to emulate Jesus, I was blocking whatever form of manifestation that wanted to be projected through me.
If I look at my path with the lens of Hillman’s Acorn Theory and Jung’s archetypes, it seems like both explanations would fit in nicely. I see my life so far as definitely influenced by a very particular myth, one that seems to be similar to what must have influenced Jesus’ life. It would make sense to say that qualities such as great sensitivity towards the suffering of others, a visceral desire to help those in need and unconditional love and feelings of compassion towards all people, are all contained in potential form in the collective unconscious in archetypal form. There, they would be waiting to manifest through the individual who consciously or unconsciously desires to embody them.
Since the whole spectrum of possibility is contained within the collective (that which provides the raw material for the One to manifest as many), the idea that the individual souls in their paths of spiritual evolution chose to be more drawn to certain archetypes based on their particular needs for the next stage of development is not that crazy. This is where the Acorn Theory would play a very interesting role in explaining that choicelesness some feel in knowing there’s a role to be played. Whether we chose “positive” or “negative” qualities to embody, a path of light or one of darkness, a life in tune with the soul’s inherent desire for union or a life in complete disharmony with the song of the universe, I think it is important to remark that all manifestations are equally necessary and neither is “better” than the other.
As Advaita Vedanta points out, there are two orders of reality: satyam (pure consciousness or brahman), and mithyā (all objectifiable experience/its existence depends entirely on something else). For pure non-dual, undifferentiated consciousness (brahman) to actually manifest into the dual (mithyā) level, all polarities are needed. In order for movement, change and transformation (all essential qualities of our universe) to exist, there has to be an imperfect state of tension, an eternally unfinished state of infinite possibility. The good can be good because there is bad; the high can be high because there is low. A state of perfection is more akin to a finished work of art than to this creation.
Under this light, looking at my life and the role that Jesus has played so far, it is fair to say that my relationship with him could very accurately be described as him being my daimon, or tutelary spirit. Rather than representing an unreachable state of perfection, his image in my life has morphed into one of a teacher and loving guide. I have allowed myself to not feel the pressure of god expecting anything in particular of me, and to have Jesus as a reminder of what the human spirit is inherently capable of. In this, I am allowing myself to be constantly shaped by the ebb and flow of life’s circumstances and present tasks, with an underlying joy that sprouts from knowing that whatever simplicity I knew when I was a child has never left me.
I can’t help but be in awe at the power of intention in one’s life and I feel so blessed and grateful to be able to walk my present path. There’s definitely a magic that starts becoming palpable when one starts timidly releasing the grip of control and opens oneself up to the vast world of spirit. It is for sure a scary thing, for even if the soul knows what’s going on, our humanness is certainly uncharted, unfamiliar terrain. I now know it’s ok to be scared and let the fear be there, as a reminder of the exciting quality of our human lives. I don’t want to be completely free of fear — at least for now — for I think it is an engrained part of our present evolutionary state of development as conscious beings. After having ran away from fear for so long, now I can say that it felt more like running away from my reality, my gifts and the particular way in which creation was choosing to manifest through me.
Of course, I wouldn’t be able to say any of this if I hadn’t experienced it first, so it is also fair to say that fear has been one of my greatest teachers and motivators. The quest to reconcile love and fear as integral and necessary parts of my life is certainly an ongoing, challenging and exciting project, so I don’t see myself being bored any time soon. The internal process of this I can describe as holding space for the tension that arises from a complete surrender to a universe that has love as its primary drive, while at the same time welcoming my very human experience of fear, which gives me the opportunity to be humble and open to something bigger than myself, and to trust in it.