How to Emanate a Crown of Light
Summary: The soul’s disconnection from the GodSelf—and the loss of our crown of divine light—is triggered by the radical uncertainty of the infant regarding the love and intentions of its caretakers, especially the mother. This produces the paranoid proclivities of the ego, which thenceforth lives under a dark cloud of unknowing. But if faith and trust in God can be restored, and if one’s heart will take the risk of adoration, a lightning bolt of redemptive grace from our ever-present, merciful Beloved will transform one’s chaotic mind into silent, luminous, and joyous Presence.
Taken from the recent online weekend intensive:
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So this is the process, and it all happens very quickly when there is no resistance because it’s simply the growth into our natural adult state, from the larval state of the caterpillar to the adult of the butterfly, the angel, the divine one. But one must go through the ordeal of growth, which is one sacrifice after another, one letting go after another of precious treasures that have to be recognized as being worthless, and better lost than held onto, so that one gains one’s freedom at the expense of the security of the ego, but of the fixation of the ego at a state of neediness and fear, and one attains one’s true stature as fearless, divine Presence.
And this is part of honoring oneself. So that’s the good news. Now the bad news.
In theory, all of this is very simple—and instantaneous, in fact. In practice, however, the ahamkar, which is that habit pattern of producing egoic level thoughts and emotions, suffers from a triple bondage—triple bondage of the ego itself, the ego as a complex—and that bondage is made up these days, in a postmodern ego context, of distrust, disloyalty, and disunity. Nearly every ego has distrust: distrust of the other, distrust of love, distrust of oneself, distrust of God, distrust of the goodness of the universe—everything is distrusted. There is a total cynicism and paranoia that is always lurking, if it’s not the leading fragment, it’s always stopping one from taking risks, especially not taking the risk of giving to another a piece of one’s heart, or ruing that you did give a piece of your heart, and now you’re bleeding because it was stolen from you, and you receive nothing in return, but wisdom.
So the issue of resistance always circles around love. And the reason that is, is that everyone has three mothers, OK, and this is a very important structure. It’s one of many triadic structures within the ego, which is omni-triangularity in a way, as a totality of its own complexification. But at this level, everyone has, to some extent, a good mothering object. OK? It may not be your birth mother—you may have been adopted, you may have been emotionally abandoned, but it turned out that the grandmother gave you some attention, so your good mother was the grandmother, or the niece, or the sibling, or whatever, but there’s a good mothering figure that you have to hold on to, even though it might be very sputtering and weak and inconsistent, but you also have a bad mother, the one who failed you, the one who punished you, the one who called you names, the one who was too locked into her own narcissism to be there for you in the way you needed. And it’s very difficult to get this good mother and this bad mother to be integrated so you can see both. And one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to achieve this integration and say, “OK, she was good enough. I survived, and I can accept it without being furious at the bad one and overly naive about the good one,” and always keeping those fragments split apart—but there’s a third one, which is the unknowable mother, because you can never be sure, “What is she thinking? What is she feeling? What does she want from me? Who am I to her?” You can never know that. And your uncertainty about who you are to her keeps you in a very—not just paranoid—but almost a paralyzed state, because that indeterminacy produces a fear that you will become vulnerable to a very unpleasant surprise at any moment.
And so the defense against vulnerability becomes very difficult to overcome. You could deal with the bad mother and say, “OK, I know what her tricks are. I don’t have to be triggered. I can deal with it.” But the unknowable becomes a problem that the ego cannot surmount, and what it usually deals—what it does to deal with it—is it creates an unknowable core of itself and say, “I’ll be equally as unknowable,” and that gives one a sense of safety, right? But at the cost of having cut yourself off from your own core, because now you are literally unknowable to yourself. And this is a tragedy that is almost never recognized, that causes many more tears than people realize as to why they’re crying. But this unknowability that results in an indeterminacy that produces an insecurity about oneself as well as about the other, has many repercussions and consequences karmically.
Lacan dealt with this idea, actually, in one of his seminars, and he called this unknowable other the das Ding, taking it from Immanuel Kant’s idea of the ding on sich, right? You can never know the thing in itself—all you can know is what your senses give you, but they only give you a biased, partial view. You never see reality. Kant was aware of that.
So it’s particularly true of the mother, but then it generalizes and becomes a pattern which does two things: it creates the need to be able to interpret the other accurately, but it also creates the need—because you can’t interpret her accurately—to project a fantasy of your projection of what you think that unknowable one really is, so you can relate with some sense of certainty: “I know who you are and what you want.” This is one of the reasons for coming into master’s discourse so that you can assert and declare that you know what you don’t really know, and that has other consequences in terms of an impostor complex, etc.
But the need to interpret correctly can produce, therefore, either a petrification of the ego at a fixed level of certainty that then will not grow because it doesn’t want to feel disoriented and clueless, and “I don’t know what’s going on, and what I should do and how do I act, and what’s acceptable to the other?” So there’s motivation to remain in a very narrow defile. But there’s also motivation to grow to the point where you can correctly interpret, where you can break through and recognize what’s in that das Ding. And the reason that’s possible to do that is that at the level of the Real Self that is now unknowable, you and she are the same. And therefore there’s a quantum entanglement that knows, right, a resonance that isn’t possible at the ego level because you can’t really relate to either the good one or the bad one, because you know they can flip at any time and they’re not able to be consistent—nor are you able to be consistent any longer because you also are split into a good and a bad and an unknowable. Right? And so it’s very hard to negotiate relationships because sometimes it’ll be the good with the good, and sometimes it’ll be the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, and sometimes it’ll be the unknowables and say, “Who are you and why are we with each other? And what is this?” Nothing makes sense suddenly, right?
And you can alternate between these levels, and you can alternate between those levels at every kind of relationality. “Why am I in this community? Why aren’t I out there making money, having a capitalist life, and doing etc., etc.?” Right? You can question and doubt everything and never be sure if you’re on the right path, or you can grow to that level where there is knowledge but at the cost of the release of all delusion.
So the problem comes down to one very simple drive of every ego, and that is every ego yearns, longs, demands, to be adored, to be adored by the other, unconditionally adored. And it can’t get that from anyone. It can’t get no satisfaction even if it’s there in one moment—but will it be there in the next? “Will I suddenly be the bad one? Will I suddenly not know who I’m with? Will I suddenly feel like this is surreal? Will the bond break? Will I be abandoned?” And so all of these doubts create an unwillingness to adore the other, or even to accept that adoration with an open heart that would make one vulnerable. And so one lives in a relationship, always with a guarded and at least semi-closed heart, and never grows into the depths of one’s being, where one’s real feelings are like a seed that’s unable to sprout, and instead, the weeds of the ego’s projections, anger, anxiety, depression, all of that take over the garden.
So the only way out of this is to adore God, because God can be adored…
Audio File: How to Emanate a Crown of Light – Audio File.mp3