Spiritual Integrity

Spiritual awakening is the beginning, not the end and the core purpose that drives all human endeavor

Like many children of divorced parents, I continue to have dreams from time to time of my parents coming back together. Even though they separated when I was still a boy, even though they have gone on to be happily married to other people for decades, even though my conscious mind does not desire for them to get back together - there is still an aspect deep within my unconscious that desires such union.

Why?

I have reflected on this for a long time.

To a child who has had the privilege of loving, and in turn being loved by, both mother and father - there is no greater pain than the alienation between these two halves of the child’s world. It is an alienation that the child feels helpless to resolve until the child begins to understand that this alienation must be resolved within themselves.

These archetypes of the ‘mother’ and the ‘father’ exist everywhere. They are the fundamental polarities of life.

Spiritual and material…

Love and power…

Man and woman…

Natural and synthetic…

Human and artificial…

Democrat and Republican…

Positive and Negative…

Birth and death…

The polarities are endless. And the fundamental wish we human beings harbor (thought we may not be consciously aware of it) is a union, a harmony, a ‘coming together’ of these polarities. We abhor the alienation between the polarities because it forces us to “pick a side” and in the process to disown all that within us which resonates with the other side. Even if we somehow justify the righteousness of a certain side - we nevertheless live in a state of perpetual estrangement from the other. And more crucially, in a state of internal alienation from that within us that the other represents.

As without, so also within.