I recently posted a blog about a favorite subject of mine: metamorphosis. This most recent post is a direct copy from the text of the 2012 H.O.P.E. Manual: the section labeled “the caterpillar – butterfly metamorphosis.” In it I describe the wonder of how a single-celled egg can become a multicellular caterpillar that literally entombs itself in the chrysalis where it can safely dissolve every caterpillar cell and let specialize clusters of cells called “imaginal disks” open up and create a butterfly out of the molecular stew that was once the caterpillar. Now I want you to explore Our Ego – Soul Metamorphosis: from secular self to Spiritual Self.
In the case of the Monarch butterfly the adult takes off from the place where it was born, to fly a nonstop journey straight to a specialized section of forest in Mexico where the trees will keep the butterflies warm overnight until the next spring! Wonder of wonders, when the time is right, the Monarchs will take off headed straight back to where they came from: be it Washington State or Washington DC; Portland, Washington or Portland, Maine; and any place in between! Furthermore, they will stop once or twice on the way to their summer home, mate each time, deposit an egg, and die. For me, that whole journey is a “remembering”. It has to be a function of consciousness, but where does that consciousness reside? I’ll let you decide. Read on….
I am so fascinated with this because I see a great and powerful shape-changing process taking place in the human race: one that originated I don’t know when but I do know that Père Teilhard de Chardin knew this. He gave it to Jean Houston not too long before he passed… “We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
My studies of the last 30 years have helped me to see that that part of me which is in search of a spiritual experience is my ego, and that part of me that came here to have a human experience is my soul. The human metamorphosis is, to me, what comes of understanding that what is commonly known as the “low self” is the ego and the “high self” is the soul… and the two are to work together!
I also see my ego as a specialist in knowing that my DNA comprises what I choose to call my “ship of life”. My ego is its navigator on the “ocean of life” without knowing why it is here, where it came from, or where it is going. My soul, on the other hand, is the captain of that ship and it came on board sometime before I was physically born with the ship’s manifest under its arm. It knows its cargo, its final destination, and all ports of call in between.
When the ship ties up at that final destination, I, the captain, get off the ship – with gratitude to the navigator – carrying the ship’s log… a legendary experience in the Universal Library along with all other human soul stories. It comprises a gift to Source in gratitude for the life it was given in human form. Of course, it helps Source with Its evolution.
Parker J. Palmer, the Quaker writer, teacher, and activist with whom I had the pleasure to meet and study with a couple of decades back, shared with me in our early days together the following: “Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me? Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” Parker has written several fine books about his life work, and the one that speaks to me most loudly at present is Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 2000). I have learned to listen to that voice in me and others and comment on what I am hearing, both to myself and to others.
I am indebted to a dear friend, now gone, Margot Fanger, M.A., who taught me how to “reframe” the thoughts and words of self and others… as in hearing the other give answer to the intentional question, “What would you like to have happen?” Should the given answer be, “I’d like to be cured of my cancer,” I have learned to suggest that the focus here is cancer and we need to find another focus; so I would ask, “What would you be doing if you were cured of your cancer?”
My response to this one: “What’s wrong with me?” would be to ask, “What would be right with you?” You see, I was taught years ago that what we focus on expands, and the healing work is to find out what comprises a beneficial focus in self or other.
Parenthetically, a H.O.P.E. supportive group is not a “cancer support group” because that makes cancer the thing on which we’re focused. Rather, the actual focus is on hope, the attitude of meaning, and it may well then be a “H.O.P.E. Group for people with cancer.”
Apply this to humanity, and what kind of a metamorphosis do we find? Is it not to be found in the attitudes and actions we’d like to see in the whole world? I suggest that you make a list of those attitudes and actions and share them with four, five or six other human beings who have their own lists… a H.O.P.E. Group (H.O.P.E’s web site). Watch out, you might come to like and love your Self… and others!
Blessing thoughts abide.
