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Tracking Your Spiritual Identity

Artists can define their subject by outlining the darkness around their subject or by highlighting the features of their subject. Here you, as subject, can do both in the process of defining your mind and how it has been formed by events. We can say the events of your life are either light or dark—and there are colors in between these and combined from them. It is through these events of oscillating light and darkness that you can begin to see the contours of your mind and how it has been shaped by experiences. The method you will use has much in common with Goethe’s Color Theory. The premise of his theory is that oscillations of black and white converge to make colors. This is proven with animation processes. In the same way, the events of your life—in their light and dark phases—work in a similar way, giving colors and contours and textures to your mind, or your self, and this process eventually even effects your physical body. In other words, both time and events change you on all levels. We can describe these various changes, which result from your experiences, as your “mind content.” It is this mind content that changes and shapes your interpretation of life, and so also your character and personality—eventually even touching your soul, your essence.

Your various experiences and encounters are like textures and characteristics that contrast with your inherent preferences—at various times you will show deep aversions and favored preferences, and also your affinities will shine through. And through the interactions, and sometimes “war,” of light and dark in you—expressed with your aversions and affinities—an outline can be seen. This outline, formed by your own resistance, is very helpful for you to see exactly who you are.

What I mean by that is, each thing you resist, or prefer, or react to in any way shows what is inside you pushing out. And that energy that is pushing out of you is not all simply petty reactions. There is the real you at the base of it. Even if you clean out your pettiness and psychosis, or any perceived inadequacy, there is someone still at home—and they continue to push out, as sure as the green grass persists in coming through the cracks in a broken sidewalk.

You have been hammered and forged into a particular shape, inside and outside. What is that shape? And what is it made to contain? How have time and events changed you? How much have you fought your own story? Are you still blind to your own transformation? In what way?

Tracking Your Spiritual Identity

The sun sends its waves outward, as light and heat; it is radiant, shedding its own version of love in all directions. Oddly, according to some—such as Rudolf Steiner—the sun is cold in its center. I have often wondered whether people were like that. Are their outward reactions merely a reactionary friction that makes them seem emotionally real? According to Steiner, the sun’s perimeter—due to interaction with other cosmic forces—generates heat. In this way, the border of the sun, according to some Steiner and other esoteric authorities, is a shell of heat that gives life to our Earth. Thus, the sun’s heat does not actually come from its core but from its periphery. Even if the sun does generate heat from its core, there is still its periphery, its boundary of interaction, where its forces contrast with the atmosphere around it. And we, too, like the sun, radiate a field of energy—in fact, many fields of energy, and these interact with all that is around us: nature, people, the air, and the unseen world.

What comes from our own periphery? What comes out from of our “interference pattern”?

Life can come from it. There is a quote often attributed to St. Francis about how we emit our own message from our heart (like the sun), which states: “Preach the gospel [“go-spell” means “good news”] always, and sometimes use words.” Our peripheral signal is our personal gospel; we are always emitting it and can influence the message emanating from our heart.

My yoga and wrestling teacher for ten years, Tim Geoghegan, a Bektashi Sufi, taught me that the soul can be compared to a flame. He called it “the luminous self.” This description portrays it a glowing, bright, and lively thing, not static in any way. The soul, like the sun, sheds light and warmth. It radiates evenly in all directions in many dimensions. We may not know just how many dimensions our heart’s flame emanates into! And since this luminous flame has no set form, no crystallization, no petrified statue, nothing that can be held, fondled, imprisoned, or manipulated—it can only be described as something that can be snuffed out or repressed, or left alone where it can shine.

Our soul can also ignite another soul with inspiration or create a fire of conversions, a church, or even a moment of Pentecost, cascading into a history-making movement of consciousness.

A friend of mine, Stefan Ruspoli, the protégé of French Sufi scholar Henry Corbin, one day asked me, “How would you describe that flame to me?”

I told him it was light, like the light of the sun behind a green leaf.

He smiled and said, “Ah, yes, that is perfect. You have the light of the sun, and leaf which it feeds with the green light.”

Is there a potential for any one of us to create a powerful, creative, optimistic flame in our heart? Is the soul trainable?

Is there a school for this green flame? Is this flame a living thing?

Medieval scholars of love considered life itself to be a school. Around and within their poetry lived this idea.

My Chinese Ba-gua teacher, Hung I-mien, said to me that I could relax, as my soul would “unfold” as time and life passed on. In other words, a soul grows like a seed and cannot be cajoled or even trained. It is what it is. This implies there is little or nothing “to be done.”

The psychologist James Hillman called this “The Acorn Theory” of the soul. The soul comes in with a mission. Your heart already has a message. And perhaps this is true about the soul. The mind, however, goes on with its absurd monologue about meaning, and self, and need, and want and “love” get mixed into all of this. I felt my teacher, Mr. Hung, was not giving me much to go on with the “leave it alone and it will unfold” idea! At the same time, I feel there is a great deal of truth to this. But something is missing. There is still something in me that is not willing to sit in the back seat and be driven through life by someone or something else.

Another dear teacher, Owen Barfield—who stood somewhere between the Christianity of C. S. Lewis and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner—during a once-in-a-lifetime conversation said to me, in what was probably his last interview (in 1997), that all the talk of alchemically transforming erotic love was not necessarily essential. Though erotic love has been spoken and written about extensively in Tantric yoga and Rosicrucian alchemy, as well as among the troubadours, it was not an essential thing to human life.

This is true for the simple reason that all aspects of life are love, and erotic love remains love whether you try to make it another kind or not. Perhaps erotic love should stand alone and be simply another room in the mansion of human consciousness and cosmic love? Mind you, erotic love often leads to destruction, chaos, and broken hearts all around—so how does that work out for the good exactly?

Why does love not simply result in more loving? Is erotic love not really “true love” at all?

Certainly, erotic love does not seem to result in a more radiant field of peace and harmony, at least not in the short term. Perhaps in the long term it does. How can we ever know for sure? Well, these questions and erotic love itself force the mind to wake up and try to make sense of all sorts of personal experiences and stories. So, ironically, erotic love somehow does make you think, it does make you more conscious, as much as you might prefer to float along in whatever pleasurable or torturous feelings and cross-referencing you associate with love.

So perhaps in the long term, big picture, it is all somehow love and everything will somehow turn out alright. But is there an intelligent map of this “turning out alright” somewhere? I want to see a design, a template—some kind of map of how to define how things work out. I want to see the deeper pattern behind these many fluctuating patterns. In fact, I want to experience something that is a kind of stable state that comes from understanding the deeper patterns. And I think many people want to get a handle on this state—even you, perhaps?

A third teacher of life and martial arts, French martial arts pioneer Henry Plee, said to me, “You must realize that whatever training you have, you yourself already have something entirely unique. And this unique thing is what has given you an advantage over others, and this unique thing is what you must come to understand regardless of what you have learned and have studied!”

And so, there is something in me behind my fluctuating feelings, patterns, and habits of life, and I was simply born with “it,” whatever it is! It is not a result of education or learning. This is a sort of reiteration of James Hillman’s Acorn Theory: The acorn becomes an oak. It has inherently within it, in its essence, its future identity. There is no education needed for its being.