As Within, So Without

If we want to change the clown show out there, a critical number of us must change the clown show in here.

I’m no astrologer or prophet, but I don’t need a map of the stars to know we’re in epochal times. There’s the grimness, sure. But do you feel this other thing? Have your dreams of late been as epic as mine? Have you felt called back to the legendary stories like The Bhagavad Gita or The Lord of the Rings like me that pitted the forces of light against dark?

I’m sending this dispatch at this most challenging and remarkable time in earth school. Ugliness, greed, and predation are on daily display. A new national budget gleefully promises to redistribute even more wealth from the bottom to the top, the young to the old, abandoning the most needy, mortgaging our children’s futures. Meanwhile, the earth heaves under more rapacious resource extraction, more climate stress.

The models responsible for the structures and systems we’ve only ever known are coming apart at the seams. These systems—which purported to be the most elegant expression of our intellect, creativity and progress, but that ultimately profited from the destruction of the earth, human suffering, and our separation from one another—are continuing to be exposed.

Some part of us understands that the collapse of these systems is inevitable. What‘s less clear in this moment is whether or not these forces will succeed in taking everything down with them. It’s such a very intense time to be a human.

But for those of us still privileged with the spaciousness to reflect, here’s something I’d like to wonder about together here:

The ancient alchemists and mystics understood that systems and structures could not endure in the external world were they not also present in our internal worlds. As the ancient Hermetic maxim goes: As within, so without. This is a tenet that’s been invaluable to me, a law so basic to being, some part of us knows it to be fundamentally true. How could it be otherwise?

If we want to change the clown show out there … a critical number of us must change the clown show in here.

Every minute, every second, we’re being initiated. Into what? Old way or new way? Fear or Love? Separation or Connection?

In the language of neuroplasticity, it means we can default to the well-worn, adaptive neural pathways that were established long ago in our families of origin, via our imprints and traumas, and through no fault of our own. Pathways that may be riven with grievance and protection, isolation and defeat. Or we can wake up inside of these protective reenactments and—in Pema Chodron’s words—do something different. We can be more brave. We can walk towards what scares us instead of away from it. We can stop looking outside of ourselves for permission and approval. We can ask for and create the intimacy we needed and longed for in our most childlike hour … but like grown ups.

Trevor Noah once said of racism in America, “It’s as though you’ve mistaken cancer as a vital organ.” I would say the same about the central tenets of Western imperialism and the fundamentalisms that have arisen in their wake. But the stories they tell—of scarcity, of the denial of real culture or Self so that we might be an inoffensive cog in the system, of competing for resources and of the inevitable death cults that arise as a result—these are just stories that have been told over and over until we come to believe they’re vital to us. They are not.

Father Richard Rohr said, “what we don’t transmute, we transmit.” I think that’s an important one to hold close now. The young ones need us to hold it close, Friends. The new story is, as yet, unwritten, but we write it with every one of our minute by minute choices. There’s an invitation imprinted in the difficulty of this hour. The stories that we tell are the stories that will be born out in the world.

Let us begin to tell a different story. ✨💚