It has come to seem to me how much it is that finding balance, in my own life, in dealing with others around me and that I encounter in daily life, and in so many of our political and social justice issues, can feel so much like walking a thin high-wire, a narrow and shaky walk-bridge, sometimes a fragile string across a deep chasm that falls away into spans of jagged rocks far below.
Some years ago, the accumulated residual effects of events and experiences over the course of my life broke free from the closed doors behind which I had carefully, and to standards of expectations in our society, dutifully, kept them hidden away, some even from my own awareness, in a crisis triggered by a number to tragic, traumatic, and unexpected event my own and lives of others close to me, for which I had at the time absolutely no point of reference for understanding what was happening to me. It would take some years to work through not only that crisis event itself, my fears at times I was sinking into some strange kind of madness, but learn as well about what it actually was I had experienced.
I learned such a life crisis event has been called by different names at different times and in different cultures and religions and different disciplines...Spiritual Emergency (as that word applies in both meanings), coming into Cosmic Consciousness, Shamanic call, the Ascent to Carmel, the venture into the inner depths of the Interior Castle, Spiritual call to Quest, positive psychological dis-integration/re-integration, individuation crisis, the transforming crisis of the new birth, into a new creation. Christian and non-Christian, civilized and pagan, religious and secular, such a thing has been called by so many names, attributed to so many sources and causes, yet all describe, for any that have passed through it, something that is essentially the same.the place into which I found myself thrown, abruptly, unexpectedly, even traumatically, was a place and state I came to call "walking the between."
To be walking the between, between what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, the seen and the unseen, what is my own point of view and that of another, was at first disorienting, at times frightening, but I came to realize that was for that I had reached the point in my life when for the first time, that I was really walking, going anywhere, at all! It was as the point at which the child has peddled along merrily on the bicycle under the trust that the grown-up holding onto the bike, and the training wheels that lent a sense of more security that in fact they ever did, suddenly realizes the training wheel came of and the adult had quietly let go and stepped back, actually quite some distance back along the road. At which point of course, the sudden realization he/she is really on their own, without some outside other force to keep them upright, protect them from falling, usually results in the child's becoming distracted and afraid, promptly loosing control and crashing the bike. Like the child on the bike eventually learns to get the bike up and going again, to keep it balanced, and peddle away on his/her own, I eventually regained balance and was able to move forward confident that I really could move on without the illusions of outside supports and guidance I had once relied upon. I learned that while that event had seemed strange and unknown, it was of a nature of event many have experienced across the spans of time and distance and cultures, but that does seem to be occurring much more frequently to a great many more people than has been typical in past eras.
As I sought to orient myself, my new and strange experience, I learned that I had entered a circle in which I stood in some pretty good company. Names of "great" men and women that are now famous, that in relating their own life stories, spoke and wrote of such a point, a time in their lives, at which "everything changed." Inside our became outside in, and upside down became right side up. Tolstoy's transition at that point was from a common hack writer of pulp fiction, to such a work as War and Peace. Jung found himself rejecting the promising future as Freud's star and primary pupil and heir apparent, to pursue a course of understanding human nature, thought, and behavior, that included, to his old mentor's dismay and very deep and bitter disappointment, a Spiritual aspect as well as Freud's purely atheistic 3 part model, of Superego, Ego, and Id, that was over-arching even those 3 element of the human psyche.
But also, those that may have lived more quietly, never doing anything that brought them into the notice of history, for whom this at first disorienting and disturbing process transformed their lives toward way they made difference in place, in whatever circumstances of life they were. That, as Paul wrote of it, served in whatever position they were when called, to affect their own little place in the world, and greater scheme of things.
In this present world, as there seems coming upon us a time of new awakening, has the opening up of access, through various communications channels, to all manner of information, knowledge of events throughout the world, it may be that greatest effect has been that of communication with one another, other people, and their thoughts, and ideas, with barriers of time and place removed. Those awakening in place have for centuries found themselves most often alone, walking quietly among those with which they lived their daily lives, being in their world, but not of their world. Walking the between. Being seen, yet unseen, for in so many places and times of the past, and yes, in some even today, those recognized as being 'different' in such ways, were, by that recognition, perceived as threats, placed into real danger of their lives. Only now, can we span time and distance, to find one another, these that walk the between.
And I have come to wonder, is it the whole of our society, no, the whole of humanity, that is coming to this point of crisis, this place of walking the between, of ever seeking center, the balance points, in so many issues we face in our reality in this new and changing world? Could this be, even, that prophesied, on more than one culture and era of time, the coming of the Light? The 'second coming of Christ' that would be as the lightening cometh from the east and spreadeth to the west?
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