1 INNER GUIDANCE IN SPIRITUALITY AND ANALYSIS 1 Bryan Wittine Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you, just to you and for you, without any need for my words or anyone else's. You are we all are the beloved of the Beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is. Listen and you will discover it every passing moment. Listen, and your whole life will become a conversation in thought and act between you and Him, directly, wordlessly, now and always. It was to enjoy this conversation that you and I were created. Rumi Someone once told me walking the path of individuation was like walking a labyrinth. You start at the beginning and wind your way down various byways and 1 2012 by Bryan Wittine. All rights reserved. Paper presented to the Analyst- Members of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, January 5, 2012.
2 alleyways, and you seem to make lots of wrong turns, but God willing you still eventually end up in the center, in the sanctum sanctorum. You might even realize you are not only in the center. You are actually one with the deep center of Being. I was lost, but now I m found, the old song goes. Personally, I ve been found, then lost, then found, then lost and found again. But that s the way it goes. There is no final lost or found. No matter what truths we learn about ourselves, there is always a greater mystery. Paradoxically, we both find and ultimately lose ourselves in the absolute mystery. This talk is about inner guidance in the labyrinth and ways in which, as Rumi puts it, the Source is whispering to us at each and every moment. Lots of processes have helped me hear those whispers on my own labyrinthine journey: spiritual practice, psychoanalysis, intimate relationships. The guidance has appeared in many forms: a still small voice, moments of intuitive revelation, mind- stopping things people have said to me, books I ve read, dreams, and many other forms. As I look back on the whole journey I now realize a consciousness with intelligence, intentionality, and momentum greater than my own seems to have been guiding me, often reassuring me, but also at times chastising me. I think of this consciousness as a kind of psychic GPS system that tells me to turn left, now right, then backtrack and retrace certain steps again and again on my journey to the Self. I love the spiritual lore that speaks of this consciousness as friend and companion, as the archangel Gabriel who announced to Mary she was pregnant with God, as the Paraclete or Holy Spirit, as a man of light, and as an inner teacher Sufis call Khidr. Although this consciousness feels like something transcendent to my
3 feeling of I, I do not know whether the guidance comes from an entity outside of myself. Some Mediterranean mystical traditions, which I mention later, regard the guidance as a being of light that lives on its own plane of consciousness, while the contemporary Christian mystical text A Course in Miracles speaks of the Holy Spirit as the communication link between God and our separated egoic selves, which God placed in our minds at the time we separated from Him. What I can say is that the guidance is an aspect of the transpersonal dimension of the psyche and a facet of the Self, our deep center of Being. This facet seems to guide my life and insists on deeper realization. It teaches me about my complexes as well as my strengths and supports my relationship to the Divine. In psychological terms I call it simply the function of inner guidance. It seems to come into existence when I inquire into my psychic depths about the ultimate concerns of my life who and what am I? What is God? What is love? What are my barriers to inner realization and oneness with God? Questions such as these trigger a kind of psychospiritual search- and- discover function. I suggest great depth psychologists such as Freud and Jung, in their discovery of the value of free association and active imagination, have contributed much to our understanding of this function. So also have certain contemporary spiritual teachers. A. H. Almaas, originator of the Diamond Approach, has written extensively about this function in his book Spacecruiser Inquiry, while Adyashanti, a Zen teacher, describes his own approach to inner inquiry and guidance in True Meditation. Thus, the function of inner guidance appears to open us to both psychological and spiritual dimensions of
4 experience. Not only does it enable us to unfold, illumine, and transform our psychological issues, but it can also take us to the gates of the Absolute. Three streams of thought come together in this talk. Because I see the inner guidance as a facet of the Self, Jung s view of the Self (or at least my version of it) is central to my talk. So also are my years of training with existential- humanistic psychotherapist and author James F. T. Bugental. Finally, and of primary importance, this talk will include thoughts arising from my study of the world s wisdom traditions, particularly my practice of Sufism and Christian mysticism, along with ongoing sohbet (spiritual conversations) with my spiritual teacher. I ll also offer a few vignettes from my patients, and close with one suggestion that helped me appreciate the guidance in the practice of analysis. Jung s Concept of the Self For many of us, Jung s concept of the Self is one of his most important contributions to modern depth psychology. For me, it is also one of the most mysterious. This is partly because he used the word in various ways and gave it several meanings. British analyst Joseph Redfearn (1977, 1983) tells us Jung used the term to refer to 1. A primary cosmic unity, 2. The totality of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, 3. The experience of such a totality, an experience of wholeness, 4. The organizing center of the entire psyche, 5. A transpersonal identity,
5 6. The spark of divinity (or scintilla) at the heart of the personality, and finally 7. The spiritual guide or central guiding wisdom directing the psyche in its quest for wholeness and health. Jung speaks of a Spiritus Rector within the psyche, a power superior to the ego that rectifies or balances consciousness by bringing to its aid the needed compensation from the unconscious (John Dourley). We can divide this list into three clusters. Definitions in the first cluster, #1, #2, and #3, seem to be related to the universal ground, the boundless, all- inclusive totality of Being. In Vedanta, this is Brahman, the one supreme, universal Spirit, which is the origin and support of the phenomenal universe. Brahman is referred to as the absolute, the Godhead, the divine ground of all Being. Kabbalists speak of the Ain Soph; in Christian language, the Father principle; in Islam, Allah, the totality of Being and Nonbeing, and al- Haqq, or absolute truth; and in Tibetan Buddhism, rigpa, or enlightened mind, which is the opposite of sems, or neurotic mind. The second cluster, Redfearn s #4, #5, and #6, seems to point to the opposite of the totality, the indivisible point at the very center. This cluster of definitions parallels the Vedantist s Atman, the true self, which is identical with Brahman. Sufis speak of Hu, the complete human being, the human embodiment of the absolute (Allah) in the world (A. H. Almaas), first experienced by contemplative as a point of light. They also use the word soul or essential self to mean individualized spirit, the inner being and core of individuality, which is sustained by Spirit (Kabir Helminski, The Book of Language). Christian esotericism uses the image of the Son or inner Christ in a similar way, while Jewish mystics speak of the scintilla,
6 or the divine spark. According to Lama Palden Drolma, an American Buddhist teacher, the closest idea to this in Tibetan Buddhism is the stream of being. She writes, "Stream of Being" is a Tibetan term used in a way that is similar to how we use the word "soul," but there is a key difference between the two words. Soul implies a consistent entity a thingness but we are more like a stream than a thing, because we are consciousness itself, ever present and ever changing. 2 Finally we come to Redfearn s 7 th definition of the Self. Here is an aspect of the Self that mediates between the ego and the Brahman- Atman principle, between relative and absolute dimensions of reality. This aspect is the principle of inner guidance. The Indian yogic- sage Aurobindo (The Synthesis of Yoga) speaks of the supreme Teacher and Master of the Yoga ; Tibetan Buddhists practice techniques of guru yoga, in which they express devotion to their outer teacher, but teachers are ultimately important because they lead their students to their own inner wisdom, their own inner guru. This principle seems to be especially dominant in the mysticism of the Middle East. Jewish mystics speak of the prophet Elijah, who is also sometimes linked to the mediating intelligence on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In Christian esotericism, this is the Paraclete or Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Voice for God and the Mind of Christ. In A Course in Miracles, the person of Jesus is regarded as a 2 A renowned Sufi story told by Idries Shah captures this idea. In The Tale of the Sands a stream, from its source in far- off mountains, passes through the countryside but is unable to cross the desert. Its waters disappear every time it tries to journey across the sands. Finally the wind, a symbol for the inner guidance, whispers to the stream that if it will have to let go of its individual identity it will be carried aloft by the wind across the desert, where it will cohere once again, but as a new stream. The stream whispers back to the wind, Yes, now I have learned my true identity. (Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes, pp. 23-24)
7 manifestation of the Holy Spirit, much like Tibetan Buddhists regard the Dalai Lama as a manifestation of the archetypal figure of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Sufis invoke the principle of inner guidance in many forms, starting with al- Hadi, one of the 99 names of God found in the Qur an. Al- Hadi is the consciousness or intelligence that guides seekers to the Essence of Allah. Some Sufis, such as Llewellyn Vaughan- Lee, say the guidance parallels the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit. The poet Rumi sometimes characterizes the guidance as a divine physician, while Farid ud- Din Attar, the Persian storyteller and author of The Conference of the Birds, casts a hoopoe in the role of the guide. Her function is to help her fellow birds find their king, the Simurgh, the mythic bird who is essentially a symbol for Allah. In a number of Sufi teaching stories offered by Idries Shah, the principle of guidance is pictured as Khidr, who is said to live where two seas the sea of the absolute and the sea of the relative meet. I will discuss Khidr at length later in this paper. The Inner Guidance The inner guidance is the facet or quality of Being that some meditation paths regard as Being s greatest gift to humanity. This aspect of Being has one goal, which is clearly stated in the famous lines of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3 : Lead us, Oh Lord, from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality, from illusion to truth, from fragmentation to wholeness. To put it 3 I have taken liberties with this rendition of the Brihadatanyaka. The original states only Lead me, oh Lord, from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality.
8 simply, the purpose of the inner guidance is to help us realize what contemporary teacher Eckhart Tolle calls our natural state of felt oneness with Being. This principle is also the central interior wisdom directing the psyche in its quest for wholeness and health. Images of the guide such as the angel of revelation, the wise old man and woman, and the Holy Spirit symbolize this intra- psychic function, the sole purpose of which is to guide us to truth, to our felt oneness with our ground, our nature, our source. 4 The guide is therefore called our true friend because its only concern is to help us realize who and what we essentially are. Existential and Jungian Perspectives One of my first understandings of this intra- psychic GPS system came from existential psychotherapist James F. T. Bugental. I never felt Jim was all that interested in religion or spirituality. He certainly never voiced his belief in an archetypal presence like the guide, but he was convinced there is something in the human being that searches for new life when we are blocked or in need. This searching process begins when we experience concern for our lives and ourselves. 4 A Course in Miracles, a self- study curriculum of spiritual development that offers in Christian language the perennial wisdom found at the core of the world s great wisdom traditions, uses the Paraclete or Holy Spirit to image the function of inner guidance. The Course reads, The Holy Spirit is evaluative, and must be. He sorts out the true from the false in your mind, and teaches you to judge every thought you allow to enter it in the light of what God put there. Whatever is in accord with this light He retains, to strengthen the Kingdom in you. What is partly in accord with it He accepts and purifies. But what is out of accord entirely He rejects by judging against. This is how He keeps the Kingdom perfectly consistent and perfectly unified. The Course also says the Kingdom is not within us; rather, the Kingdom is us.
9 Concern includes pain (I hurt about something), longing for life to be different, commitment to self- exploration, and hope that if we ourselves change we will realize our greater possibilities. To the degree that these four aspects of concern are alive within us the searching process gets going and will lead to existential moments, moments in which we experience the aha or eureka of intense and embodied intuition and see old problems in a new light. Bugental was particularly adept at guiding patients attention to the flow of their subjectivity and the intuitive responses that would arise by gazing into and experiencing that flow. At the start of analysis he would ask quite simply, Donna, tell me what are you experiencing within yourself as you tell me these things? Or, Donna, will you try something for me? Let s stop conversing for a moment so you can get in touch with what s happening inside of you right now. Take as much time as you need. Then come on back and see if you can t tell me a little about what you find. Later, when the therapy was moving along, he would pay close attention to the patient s process, to subtle shifts in vocal tones, repetitive uses of words or phrasings, and rapidity of breathing, to name but a few: Donna, you just changed keys as you told me about your son. What happened within you when you lowered your voice? Or, What is happening within you when you keep repeating I feel so tired today? Or, Your breathing just got much deeper. Can you say what is happening within you? His curiosity about such subtle shifts and changes would open clients to the flow of their subjectivity and would lead to something they hadn t seen before. Moments of intuitive discovery would arise for patients as they
10 directed the gaze of their attention to the flow of experience that might be going on in the background of their conscious awareness. He says, By cultivating this searching function the client gains in genuine inner vision [the inner guidance], in a self- knowing that is more than verbal or logical; it is truly organismic, an experience of the whole being. By engaging in a searching process, the client expands inner awareness, and that expanding awareness remains a lasting part of the person, enriching subsequent life in many subtle ways. This is a perfect description of the inner guidance at work. Through my work with Bugental, I began to think of the guidance as an internal divining rod. Picture a Bedouin whose well on a desert oasis dries up. The man has no choice: he must search for water. His divining rod guides him in doing so. Find water he thinks, and points his diving rod. That rod might lead him all over, but sooner or later it might lead to a spot in the desert where he can dig for the water table and eureka! he will find a new well. A psychotherapy patient s own internal divining rod are his moods and affects, his bodily felt- senses, a kind of internal sense that might be likened to a bloodhound seeking the bone he buried days earlier. When he listens to his inner feeling- sense and allows his awareness to unfold from there, the patient s desire to find love, or find truth, or find freedom from my rigidities takes him to intuitive moments of discovery. By feeling pain and longing for love, truth, or liberation, by listening within himself, and by following his internal divining rod through the currents of his subjective experiencing, he will in time discover far more about his situation, a more that at some level he already knew but is now discovering as if for the first time. Figures of inner guidance have appeared regularly in the writings of Jungian psychanalysts. Jung himself came upon the guide through his meetings with his
11 inner figures, especially Philemon, who for Jung was an inner guru. It seems that so much of his psychology came from his dialogues with this mysterious figure. He said, There are things in the psyche that I did not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things that I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Under the name of Basilides, the inner guide wrote Seven Sermons to the Dead through Jung. In a similar vein, the angel Gabriel is said to have revealed the Qur an to Muhammad. Finally, it appears that Jesus himself wrote A Course in Miracles, asking a hostile research psychologist from Columbia University to act as his scribe. Dreams, meditation, visions, and active imagination are effective ways of contacting the inner guidance and can frequently function as starting points for its unfolding. Writing on active imagination ( The Transcendent Function, CW8:166-168) Jung offers much on how we might evoke and engage the inner guidance: In the intensity of the emotional disturbance itself lies the value, the energy which [the patient] should have at his disposal in order to remedy the state of reduced adaptation. Nothing is achieved by repressing this state or devaluing it rationally. In order, therefore, to gain possession of the energy that is in the wrong place, he must make the emotional state the basis or starting point of the procedure. He must make himself as conscious as possible of the mood he is in, sinking himself in it without reserve and noting all the fantasies and other associations that come up. Fantasy must be allowed the freest possible play, yet not n such a manner that it leaves the orbit of its object, namely the affect, by setting off on a kind of chain- reaction association process. Although there are many differences in their technique, both Bugental and Jung agree on one important detail: they both believe affect is central to evoking the
12 guidance. The guidance is set into motion through affect (whether through pain or a mood). By opening to the felt- sense of our situation and allowing our thoughts and fantasies to develop from there the guidance begins to operate and we are gradually (or perhaps quite immediately) rewarded with insight into our situation. Dreams, of course, are an especially important form of inner guidance. Jungian analyst Jeffrey Raff has already done some very useful work on this. In his books he calls the inner guidance the ally. For Raff, the ally is a divine being a face of God. Paradoxically it is unique to every person. Increasingly, Raff says, people are reporting experiences of coming into contact in dreams, meditations, and visions with a being that seems to exist independently in a realm beyond the psyche. (I would say the ally is a psychospirituial function that links the ego and the Self, or consciousness and our wisdom mind.) In the imaginal realm it appears to partner with a specific person; but it has to wait for its human partner to seek it. This is an important point. The guidance does not usually come of its own accord. Although there are exceptions to the rule, it seems to require us to reach for it. We find one example of this in a dream of my patient Jenna. About four months into the therapy, she had the following dream: I am flying in outer space. I see ahead of me the City of God, all golden and shimmering in the distance. I am so excited. I want it so much. Then I discover that, despite its beauty, it is an uninhabited golden shell. God doesn't live in this shell. I think, "I have to keep going; this isn't It!" Then in the distance I see the Milky Way galaxy with the Eye of God enclosed in a triangle at its center. I gently enter the Eye and dissolve into boundless emptiness, absolute love, and perfect peace. I'm finally home! Then I hear a stern but loving voice that says, 'You can't stay here. It isn't time yet. You have to go back.' I'm sad and start to leave, but on the way out I find a spirit- man, a being of light who tells me I'm an orphan and he is adopting me. He gently brings me back to earth, but I have a terrible time getting back into my body.
13 As you might have guessed, Jenna was an ungrounded spiritual seeker who spent many hours doing meditation and active imagination while being engrossed in myths and fairy tales. Although these activities gave her solace and support, she was also destructively split off from her sexuality and struggling painfully to fall and remain in love. The dream was helpful to me as her analyst. On the one hand we can view it as a transference dream an idealizing transference of the love and wisdom of the inner guidance onto me, the analyst, with herself carrying the image of the orphaned child. On the other hand it symbolizes what might be a true visit from the guidance. Through the dream the guide conveyed to me the work we needed to do. I needed to help her find her way back to earth and become comfortable in being more fully alive incarnated in the world. Images of the Inner Guidance The principle of inner guidance has a very long history. Plotinus (Enneads 3:iv) speaks of the daimon paedros into whose care we are given, and who is the guide of the soul throughout life and beyond death. Apuleius (c. 125- c. 180) wrote of a group of higher daimons, to each of whom the care of one human individual is entrusted and who serves as its witness and guardian. Philo of Alexandria says there is a man who dwells in the soul of each of us, sometimes as teacher, sometimes as archon (ruler), even as prosecutor and judge. He may also play the part of an impersonal witness. Conscience is another associated quality. The presence frequently takes form as the still small voice.
14 In Sanskrit the guidance is known as prajna and has to do with the recognition of patterns, understanding, and insight, which ultimately leads to jnana, the inherent self- knowing of absolute truth. The inner guide is also frequently regarded as the prime mover of the spiritual quest. Speaking for his integral yoga, Aurobindo had this to say: The supreme Teacher of the eternal secret in the heart of every man is the inner Guide. It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge; that light becomes within us the increasing glory of his own self- revelation. He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being. He sets above us his divine example as our ideal and transforms the lower existence into a reflection of that which it contemplates. By the inpouring of his own influence and presence into us he enables the individual being to attain to identity with the universal and transcendent. Khidr: The Sufis Guide to the Absolute
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16 The figures of a wise man or woman or an angelic guide are found throughout Middle Eastern spiritual literature. In his books Alone with the Alone and The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, the French Sufi scholar Henry Corbin writes of the enigmatic Sufi figure, Khidr, a figure Jung also portrays in his paper Concerning Rebirth. For Corbin, Khidr is an eternal being who has attained the source of life, has drunk of the water of immortality and consequently knows neither birth nor death. He is one with the unborn and undying, and his purpose is to reveal each disciple to himself. Sufi stories call him the true Teacher of the Age. Khidr plays the central role of helmsman for the mystic s voyage from ignorance to awakening to absolute truth. He is sometimes pictured as our heavenly twin, as a man of light, and sometimes as the most ordinary man you could possibly meet. His purpose is clear: it is Khidr, the guide, who challenges and supports the way of individuation, our journey though the labyrinth to the deep center of Being. The Sufis tell us Khidr comes to those of us who 1. Long to know the truth of reality, 2. Are willing to wholeheartedly surrender to not knowing, and 3. Remain open and curious about what that truth is. It can t be just one or two of the three criteria that we must meet. All three criteria have to be met. We must feel the longing for truth, the flame of aspiration. We must be willing to wholeheartedly surrender to not- knowing, to the fact that if we want to know something that means we don t know and we must be humble enough to admit that. Finally, Khidr comes when we are willing to remain open and curious about truth.
17 A good Sufi teacher might drive his or her students to exasperation to help them develop these criteria because without longing, the willingness to not- know, and open curiosity, the inner search and guiding process will not be intense enough to drive students to their natural state of felt- oneness with Being. By contrast, if we cultivate these criteria our journey through the labyrinth will unfold, and we will be taken from the simplest discovery about our motivations all the way to the deep center of Being. The Land of Truth (from Idries Shah, Thinkers of the East) I d like to tell you a Sufi story in which the guidance appears as Khidr, the so- called teacher of the age. A certain man believed that the ordinary waking life, as people knew it, could not possibly be complete. He sought the real Teacher of the Age. He read many books and joined many circles, and he heard the words and witnessed the deeds of one master after another. He carried out the commands and spiritual exercises which seemed to him to be the most attractive. He became elated with some of his experiences. At other times he was confused; and he had no idea at all of what his stage was, or where and when his search might end. This man was reviewing his behavior one day when he suddenly found himself near the house of a certain sage of high repute. In the garden of that house he encountered Khidr, the secret guide who shows the way to Truth. Khidr took him to a place where he saw people in great distress and woe, and he asked who they were. We are those who did not follow real teachings, who were not true to our undertakings, who revered self- appointed teachers, they said. Then Khidr took the man to a place where everyone was attractive and full of joy. He asked who they were. We are those who did not follow the real Signs of he Way, they said. But if you have ignored the Signs, how can you be happy? asked the traveller. Because we chose happiness instead of Truth, said the people, just as those who chose the self- appointed chose also misery. But is happiness not the ideal of man? asked the man.
18 The goal of man is Truth. Truth is more than happiness. The man who has Truth can have whatever mood he wishes, or none, they told him. We have pretended that Truth is happiness, and happiness Truth, and people have believed us, therefore you, too, have until now imagined that happiness must be the same as Truth. But happiness makes you its prisoner, as does woe. Then the man found himself back in the garden, with Khidr beside him. I will grant you one desire, said Khidr. I wish to know why I have failed in my search and how I can succeed in it, said the man. You have all but wasted your life, said Khidr, because you have been a liar. Your lie has been in seeking personal gratification when you could have been seeking Truth. And yet I came to the point where I found you, said the man, and that is something which happens to hardly anyone at all. And you met me, said Khidr, because you had sufficient sincerity to desire Truth for its own sake, just for an instant. It was that sincerity, in that single instant, which made me answer your call. Now the man felt an overwhelming desire to find Truth, even if he lost himself. Khidr, however, was starting to walk away, and the man began to run after him. You may not follow me, said Khidr, because I am returning to the ordinary world, the world of lies, for that is where I have to be, if I am to do my work. And when the man looked around him again, he realized that he was no longer in the garden of the sage, but standing in the Land of Truth. This little story shows us that the functioning of the guidance can potentially help us to access the depth and richness of the inner life, Khidr guides our journey of inner awakening and reveals to us the magnificence of the soul and how much it means to be embodied as a human being. It aligns us with our potential to realize all the essential qualities of Being: love, compassion, peace, knowledge (gnosis), peace, serenity, strength, power, and many others. And as we integrate the wisdom of the inner guidance, we come to experience our true place in the larger unfolding of Being.
19 Elaboration of Khidr Before we look at what the story tells us about this mysterious, enigmatic figure, let me say one thing the story assumes you already know. Khidr is said to live where the two seas meet. The two seas symbolize all pairs of opposites. Khidr lives where absolute and relative dimensions of reality come together, where transcendence and imminence are not- two, where heaven and earth meet in the heart of the human being, where love and hatred are held in a larger, more encompassing consciousness, where our masculine and feminine parts live together in a dual unity. He is also called the Verdant One, the green man. He is not physically green but filled with the green essence, one of the qualities of Being. In the Sufi tradition green is the color of attuned guidance, the color of a consciousness that reaches into the deeply hidden, into the Secret of Secrets (Idries Shah, The Sufis and A Perfumed Scorpion; Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart). The absolute (heaven) and the relative (earth) meet in the nondual heart, the color for which is the green of love- wisdom. Conscious and unconscious, time and timelessness, light and dark, transient and eternal, and all opposites, meet in the nondual heart. To put it another way, Khidr guides us on a journey to an altogether different plane of realty than the one with which we are most familiar (the heart of love- wisdom rather than the mind that separates and differentiates). He guides us to the heart of matters, to the center of truth and love, then guides us back again to integrate it into our daily lives. To put it in more orthodox religious language, he guides us to realizing we are one with God and then brings us back into our ego or
20 separate self- sense, but in a way that does not allow us to forget our underlying unitive consciousness. In this sense he doesn t just leave us in the garden of truth; although not covered in this particular Sufi story, Khidr actually supports our psychospiritual integration. We arrive in the nondual heart by engaging in the inner search, guided by our longing for truth, but return to embody our realization, to be creative, and to contribute to the life of our times. I sometimes think of Khidr, the inner guidance, as God s answer to our neurotic mind. As the story shows, he does his work in the world of lies. His job is to awaken us out of our closed, circular, safe world to a realm of greater truth and understanding. Sometimes to do this, to bring us from the lie of the separate self- sense to the truth of oneness, he has to break us down. Where we are thirsty and blocked from finding the water of life, Khidr brings us the pain and longing we need to motivate our search. Whenever we are caught in a complex that limits our living, and we are forced to wake up to that reality, Khidr is there. In this, Khidr has a wrathful side, very much like the wrathful deities of Tibetan Buddhism. Although his whole motivation is to further realization of our felt oneness with Being, we are sometimes so stuck in our habitual patterns that the most compassionate and loving thing Khidr can do is lower the boom. On the journey to awakening, then, Khidr doesn t particularly care what our personal egos have to go through or how difficult the process may be. He is resolute in his purpose. He is uncompromising and will not let us stray very far from the path. He will put up with nothing less than the truth of our underlying oneness with Being. For Khidr, the seemingly problematic circumstances of our lives are gateways to greater depth and fullness of being alive.
21 From this perspective, moments of catastrophic change (Bion) in our thinking, and moments when our carefully constructed and maintained worlds fall apart, Khidr is there, doing his job. I also call Khidr the great transformer of perception. One of the ways he works is to help us see through the neurotic aspects of our separate self- sense into what the late Trungpa Rinpoche called the brilliant sanity of our true nature. As A Course in Miracles puts it, The search for truth is nothing but the honest seeking out of everything that interferes with truth. If we follow Khidr there will come a time when our self- concepts begin to dissolve and we will see we really don t know who or what we are or what the world is. We often experience this as a state of total bewilderment, yet for mystics of all persuasions, this is actually a very advanced developmental stage. A Course in Miracles tells us why: It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound. Where self- concepts have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. As a way to help us break through to truth, the inner guidance unfolds, illumines, and transforms our unconscious emotional convictions, conclusions we ve drawn about life, beliefs about reality, resolutions we ve formed, and goals we ve set all of which are associated with the conditioning influence of the past and are now manifest in love, work, and the ways we view our world and ourselves in that world. Here is one final piece of information about the green man. Khidr is especially your inner guide and true friend if you have no outer guru, if your path is not some orthodox mystical path, but a path of spirituality that is truly your own, a path that serves the values of the individuation journey, a path that arises from your
22 own relationship with the unconscious. Individuation is a lonely road but the only one that will work for many of us. If you are called to a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine that bypasses any ecclesiastical authority, then Khidr is your guardian, your mentor, your muse. He is always with you. He is a facet of your very Being. He will speak to you through your dreams if you ask. He will speak to you in meditation if you ask. He will speak to you through active imagination, if you sincerely do the practice. He will speak to you through provocative, disarming comments from friends and colleagues and patients, if you are open enough to hear them. Remember, he is often disguised as the most ordinary man or woman. If you are sincere in your search for truth, are humble to admit your ignorance, and are deeply curious, Khidr will unfold things in the flow of your subjectivity that will surprise you, bewilder you, disturb you, infuriate you, reduce you. And if you remain open to the confusion and rest in the silence behind it your bewilderment will give way to wonder, and your amazement will bring you peace. But you must truly be willing to listen.