The direct, though unnerving, answer to the question, “How do we do it?” is “Yes.” Period. Full stop. Asking the question, “How do we do it?” seems like the first and most important question for us to ask. But asking, “How do we do it?” is actually a clever defense against taking any new actions. (This formula comes from Peter Block’s book The Answer to How Is Yes. See the Bibliography.)
The answer to the question, “How do I do it?” is to simply begin doing it. What kind of action do we take to open the floodgates of Archetypal Love? We have been told exactly what kind of action to take for a long time. This is one thing that we have already been given explicit instructions for, although, since we have been trained in school to act like sheep, we may not have thought that the instructions applied to us personally. The action to take is the action that is in front of us right now to take. We do not have to worry about taking actions that are not right in front of us to take, because we cannot take them. Just because we can imagine an action, or that we know a particular action must eventually be taken, does not mean that we need to try to take that action now. We cannot open a door downstairs if we are sitting upstairs. To open the door downstairs we must first stand up, then walk to the stairs, then walk down the stairs, then walk to the door that is to be opened. The only action we can take now is to stand up, and we can do that. Thinking that we must open the downstairs door now when that action is not in front of us right now, shows the delusion of thinking. This thinking error easily drives us crazy. For the most part, even with complex endeavors such as navigating space, your job is simple. Take the actions that are in front of you to take.
1. Consciously Declaring
One of the three great capabilities of human intelligence is the power to declare. To declare something is to say, “It is so,” or, “It is the way it is because I just said it is this way.” We unconsciously declare how things are all the time. “I’m fine,” we say. “The weather is terrible,” we say. “This is fun.” “That is wrong.” “James is a snitch.” “This job is impossible.” “That’s a great idea.” “This is bad.” “I like this.” On and on we go making declarations. Each declaration creates a reality. As soon as we declare a reality into existence, we walk into that reality and behave as if the reality were true, even though we just declared the reality ourselves, out of nothing!
Declarations are held together with a substance called “is-glue” (cheaper by the quart, invisible when dry). The concept “is” does not exist in nature. “Is” is a creation of the human mind. Is-glue includes the derivatives: is, am, are, was, were, has, have, had, do, does, did, may, might, must, can, could, should, shall, will, and would, and also the “not” forms of each: such as “is not,” “am not,” “are not.”
In general, we use is-glue with complete abandon and with complete unconsciousness. We can equally use is-glue consciously to create realities with other qualities. The closer our created reality approximates actual reality, the more precisely we will manipulate reality when we manipulate our model. Is-glue itself happens to be a model that approximates actual reality quite accurately. So, when we redeclare an is-glued reality, our new gestures reshape actual reality. The way to reestablish the flow of Archetypal Love in the spaces of your life is – you declare it so. You consciously declare the purpose of a space.
Recently, John and Sandy, a married couple, came to realize that the original reasons they had given to each other for being together at the time of their marriage were a sham, a total pretense. After many years of marriage, while in a Possibility Team session, they discovered that something more profound than personal preferences was actually substantiating their partnership. Realizing that Archetypal Love could live through them as a couple was a shock. Because they were prepared, the shock was well received. They used the energy of the shock to invite nearly a hundred friends, business associates and family members to a party. The purpose of the party was to start their partnership over. John and Sandy wanted to redeclare the basis and the commitment of their experiment in relationship. They asked me to give a short talk at the event. Given such a precious opportunity, I determined to try to “navigate space” to the Heart of the Labyrinth.
Since I know that human beings gather together for varied purposes, ranging from horse races, to stockholder meetings, to political rallies, I realized that the 100 people around me had consciously gathered together in the name of Archetypal Love. That is what I declared: “We are gathered together today in the name of Archetypal Love.”
Human beings are invocational creatures. We never go anywhere without naming the space. Consciously or unconsciously, we name and declare every space to serve our purposes. The quality of the space will determine what is possible in that space. For example, we do not fix cars in an ice cream parlor. We do not store horses in our mother’s living room. The police station is not for roller-skating. We do not yodel in church. Each thing happens in the space named for it to happen.
Through consciously declaring the purpose of a space, we establish and enhance the available features in that space. Without sounding schmaltzy, we have all heard the quote: “Wherever two or more are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” This declaration demystifies the mechanics of Archetypal Love. These are clear, specific instructions for how to call in Principles: It takes at least two people with a common purpose.
In the experiment noted above, we had men, women and children, singles, couples and families, old and young, friends and strangers, all gathered together in the name of Archetypal Love. I started off by declaring it to be so … hoping that the reality of Archetypal Love would then organize its own felt-presence in the space.
Was I scared when I did this? Yes! Was I sure it would work? No. Was I afraid of being seen as an embarrassing weirdo? Definitely yes. Has such an attempt failed before? Yes. Have I felt like dying after making mistakes like this before? Yes. Did making previous mistakes ever stop me from trying again? Yes, sometimes. But not this time.
I knew from previous experience that declaring the Principles of a space was not about being certain. Certainty is a rare luxury and mostly not necessary. What is necessary is paying the best attention that you can, keeping your center, and just going ahead and trying.
This time it worked. Archetypal Love showed up. Archetypal Love descended into the space like warm, radiant snowflakes. I invited people to risk letting down their defenses and to enjoy, feast, and unfold into the nurturing radiance among their friends. And they did. The party went on for six more hours. Archetypal Love was happening.
2. Becoming a Space Navigator
Archetypal Love provides your whole body with a distinct and distinguishable experience, like the smell of cedarwood smoke drifting from a chimney on a quiet wintry night, like taking a curve on your bicycle going a little too fast, like the mood in Beethoven’s Seventh symphony, like waking up after sleeping late on Sunday morning and starting to feel hungry. You can sense when Archetypal Love is happening by the feel of it. The sensation is palpable, unmistakable and objective, because everyone exposed to the radiance of Archetypal Love happening in a space has the same experience, although the experience may be too subtle to be consciously recognized.
Once you have experiential clarity about what it feels like when Archetypal Love enters a space, you can use the memory of that as a standard reference point to sense if Archetypal Love is ever happening in a space. You can also then detect if Archetypal Love is not happening. These whole-body sensations can serve as your steering wheel for navigating space.
Previously, such energetic sensations may have been known to you but had no particular importance, beyond being either pleasant or bothersome. Those sensations can now be neutrally decoded and put to use. They mean something specific. You can use the sensations to go up, go down, go right or left, to accelerate or decelerate, and go here and there while navigating space.
Subtle physical sensations inform you as to what space you are in, where you are i
n that space, what direction you are headed, what your purpose is, what other people’s purposes are, how fast you are moving, what is around you to avoid, what is around you that could be interesting or useful, what is the protocol for staying in and enhancing the present space, and what is the protocol for exiting to the next space. Your body is the transformer. Your body knows.
Three dynamic Archetypal forces let you interact with a space. The three forces function comparably to the three pedals that control a car. The three forces are the affirming forces (accelerator), the denying forces (brakes), and the sustaining forces (the clutch that connects or disconnects the engine with the wheels). The navigating is up to you. Consciously taking responsibility for “serving the space” puts you in the driver’s seat. Navigating space, like dance or martial arts, includes a complex set of sophisticated skills that you can continuously improve and develop over a lifetime.
A Map of the Great Labyrinth of Spaces is an energetic map that you discover by experience and memorize by heart. The map holds an infinite number of spaces, each with its own unique qualities, limitations and possibilities, each with its own purposes and uses. Every space is connected to every other space. This means that you can get to anywhere else from wherever you are.
Each space is presided over by an energetic “deity” who represents a unique set of Bright and Shadow Principles. In the very center of the Labyrinth there is a singular space that exists as the abode of the overriding Principle of Archetypal Love. This space is called the Heart of the Labyrinth.
In the Heart of the Labyrinth the air is refined, and hums with an electric clarity. Endless, impersonal, radiant, ecstatic, Archetypal Love floods every cubic inch of the space, and floods every cell and nerve in your body when you enter that space. The Heart of the Labyrinth has always been there. It never goes away.
The view from the Heart, in every direction, is more than spectacular. Nothing much exists in this space. There are no amenities or facilities, no nooks and crannies. The space is pure. You cannot live here. Being in the Heart of the Labyrinth is like being at the top of Mount Fuji. You cannot live there, but you can visit. The experiences that you acquire in one brief visit to the Heart of the Labyrinth can reorder your priorities for the rest of your life. After your visit, you hike back down off the mountain into the valley. In the valley there are shops and toilets. In the valley you can eat and sleep and work. But your life in the valley is changed because of your trip up the mountain. You live in the valley with your memories of what things look like from the top of the mountain. You now know that ordinary human relationship happens in the valley, but that the world is a much bigger place than you previously realized.
You retain the Map of the Great Labyrinth of Spaces in your body, and reserve the possibility of navigating the space of your immediate relationship, when appropriate, directly into the Heart of the Labyrinth. Such navigating can only occasionally be done, but keeping the option open is a practice worth developing, as is demonstrated in an old story. It begins with a doorway – one that leads directly into heaven. The legend about this door is that it opens from the inside, it opens only for a moment, and it opens randomly only once every hundred years. If the door opens in the middle of the night while you are sleeping, your chance to get into heaven is gone. One man made it into heaven and God was surprised. “How did you get in here?” God asked. The man replied, “I practiced only sleeping while leaning against the door. When the door opened, I fell into heaven and woke up.”
Once you possess the Map of the Great Labyrinth of Spaces, the world is not flat anymore; it has expanded into many additional dimensions. The once threatening and forbidden horizon – that dropped you into the void if you ever tried new ways of being, relating and acting – has vanished. You can now sail as far over the horizon as you want, and you can never fall off the map.
MAP OF THE GREAT LABYRINTH OF SPACES
There are unlimited numbers of spaces into which you can navigate. Each space is presided over by a deity representing a unique set of conscious and unconscious Principles. We enter a space when two or more gather in the name of the Principles of that space. We voyage from space to space unconsciously in ordinary human relationship and consciously in Archetypal relationship. Every space is connected to every other space. You can get to anywhere from here. You can voyage into the Heart of the Labyrinth, but you cannot live there.
“We gather together in the name of Archetypal Love.” “This meeting is called to order under the auspices of Archetypal Love.” These are doorways in, produced through declaration: “I am the space through which Archetypal Love can do its work.”
You have the inherent ability to voyage into very interesting new lands – the domains of Archetypal Love. The remainder of this book looks in these directions.
3. Recapitulating Your Story
Entering either extraordinary human relationship or Archetypal Love and Relationship requires you to have your own power. Your power includes your abilities to consciously choose, to create, to declare, to commit, to not act, to act for, to act against, to speak, to listen, to promise, to ask, etc. You reclaim your power through the process of “recapitulating” what actually happened to you, and reassessing the editorial spin placed on your experiences by the stories that you made about them.
Growing your being to the level of maturity where it has an authentic appetite for radiant joy and brilliant Love is an involved process that includes considerable time and a multiplicity of experiences. Not a few of these experiences may originally be, and may still be, interpreted as “unfortunate.” You might remember these experiences as negative. You might be coloring their memory with labels like “evil,” “stupid,” “bad,” “unfair,” “wrong,” and certainly “unnecessary.” I am asking you to bring your old labels into question.
Experience comes bereft of meaning, completely neutral. There is no story about an experience until you make up the story. The world is rich in evidence, so you will find plenty of reasons to make up any story you want about any experience. Moreover, every story that you create has a purpose. You are either aware of the purpose that you serve in making any particular story, or not. Ignorance of your purpose, however, does not protect you from its consequences.
The result of creating a story about an experience that labels the experience as “bad” or “evil” has the consequence of placing you into the victim position of a low drama. By feigning victimhood toward your circumstances, you assume that you can avoid responsibility. Getting to be irresponsible is tremendously rewarding for the Gremlin part of your Box. But the reward of avoiding responsibility comes at quite a cost. The cost of having no responsibility is also having no power.
To recapitulate means that you recall a specific story and ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this story? Is the purpose of my story to expand consciousness or to avoid consciousness? Is the purpose of my story to take responsibility or to avoid responsibility?” You will find that your story about any experience is not necessarily the experience itself, although it seems to come together with the experience just like a banana peel seems to come together with a banana. “My father did not love me because I screamed for help during a nightmare and he did not come to help me.”
Start distinguishing your story about the experience from the experience. Peel away your dramatics, in the same way that you would peel a banana: First, break the stem at the top to reveal that there is both a banana and a banana peel, an experience with feelings and a meaning-making story about the experience and feelings. Then, peel away the story from what happened, just like you pull the peel away from a banana. “I had a nightmare and felt scared. I screamed for help. Nobody came to help me. That is what happened. My story about what happened is that my father did not love me because he did not come when I called for him. He let me be terrified and I hate him for it.”
Peel one side of the banana down, to reveal a sweet soft “being” inside of you that has been isolated from humanity by
the existence of your story. “In this nightmare as a child I felt terribly scared. I can still feel that level of trembling panic deep in my bones. My nerves are edgy. The scream is still in the back of my throat.”
Then, peel the other side of the banana down to stand alone, now completely exposed without any protection at all. “If I remove my story about what happened, I am left with only a raw memory of the experience that I had. When I was a child, this raw experience was too intense for me to endure. As a child, I needed the story to buffer me from the intensity of my feelings. I made it someone else’s fault. Now, as an adult, I am able to fully endure the intensity of these feelings with absolutely no story attached, no one else to blame, and, I must admit, that even in the fury of this experience-storm I am still okay.”
Standing as a peeled banana in the center of the experience-storm of thoughts, memories, sensations and feelings brings you to recognize your true condition. You come to realize that you are not perfect as you have been taught to imagine that you should be. You are not perfect as you might imagine that you wish to be. You are not perfect. You are wounded. Through mature, responsible recapitulation, you can come to realize that you are not perfect; you are wounded, and, the wounding is perfect.
4. Cultivating the Broken Heart
In one way or another each of us has been wounded. In order to develop the matrix of consciousness upon which our being can grow, our childhood innocence must, in some manner and at some point in time, be taken away from us. Whether the destruction of our innocence was brutal and extended, or precise and swift, does not so much matter. What matters is that, at some point, like now, we gain the clarity about what happened to us from the perspective of a bigger picture about the process we are involved in. What is important is that we come to understand the necessity, value and use of shattered innocence.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 41
