Guest post by Gordon Allan
We are called suddenly, into nature. We arrive unblemished, innocent and free. Soon we face the existential predicament of all children – we discover love is conditional. To be cared for, to survive, we surrender our capacity for choice to the demands of our caretakers – our parents, the agents for the transmission of the culture. And, since we are born into a culture, not of our making and insufficient to our true nature, we create a set of survival strategies in order to get by. We pretend to be some way other than we really are.
However, pretending we are other than we are simply hides the pain of not-being from others, not from ourselves. So to cope with the suffering occasioned by our self deception, we now pretend we are not pretending. We alienate ourselves from the source of our being. Our light flickers and dims.
Sometime around age seven we make a terrible though not fatal mistake. We identify ourselves with our survival strategies. No longer do we simply have ways of surviving, we say we are our way of surviving. We declare “I am my pretending that I am not pretending and, in that moment of mistaken identification, our authentic self is buried three levels deep. We are lost. We have, as Greek mythology suggests, crossed the river of forgetfulness – the river Lethe – and have found ourselves on the other side, strangers in a strange land. Our light goes out!
It now becomes our task as it has been for all human beings since time immemorial to find our way back. To find a practice, a spiritual vehicle that will return us to the banks of the river Lethe and there act as a bridge to empower our return. We must experience an “A-Lethe-ia” moment, a moment of un-forgetting. We must re-member who we really are. Then, on the other side of the river, we can stand whole and complete and eternal in the light of the divine. We realize we are not our identities, our egos or our strategies for survival. We are not our disappointments, hurts, avoidances or our vindictiveness. We are not that!
In that moment of re-membering we are given the gift of participating in the Cosmos coming newly into being – now and in every moment. We realize that this power, to be reborn in every moment, is not an individual phenomenon. How could it be? The light is not ours. Yes, it arises within us – but not only. It also arises between us and the gift of accessing it is granted to each of us by all of us who walk the path of truth. The path of re-membering. And as we stand together on the other side of the river of forgetfulness, one-by-one and in unison we joyfully declare “I am that I am.” Aware that we are not the “I”. We are the power of being, we are the capacity to am. Just as we were the one who said, “I am false” it is given to us to now say “I am authentic.”
And in the moment of that realization we joyfully join our hands together, raise our voices and call out, “Thank You.” for granting us the freedom to be and for bringing us to the realization that is what it means to be human. We are, our freedom to be free.
[In honor of Bob Hoffman (1922 – 1997), Founder, The Hoffman Quadrinity Process]
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Martin Rutte
