The opportunity should not be lost to look at what just occurred and its impacts and consequences.
I had just written the article on “Emerging, Standing Forth” when Linda Steiner’s article synchronistically appeared. My article discussed the process of emergence and Linda’s article struck me as a clarion call, which brought an instantaneous response from me.
This was not a planned event but simply happened.
It’s been since forever that I heard as clear a call as Linda’s and I immediately responded and in that response I came forth.
The Growth Movement would say I took a stand, made my personal declaration, broke through my resistance, etc.
Initially I felt myself fully present and courageous. I wouldn’t call it superconsciousness, but I would call it optimal trim. If this were wartime and we were about to charge the enemy, I would be acting in a heroic manner.
But it’s peacetime and there isn’t the occasion to follow through and so no opportunity to somehow capitalize on this space. And no one around understood what I had just done. No one was available at that hour to hear me.
I took myself out to dinner and relished feeling awake and alive. After an hour I began to feel as if I had run a marathon, but I still felt exhilarated if tired. By the time I reached home again I had to sleep.
The first counter-impulse that came up was the worry that I’d upset everyone around me, that I’d be thought of as manic depressive or unstable, etc. And I see-sawed back and forth with that one until I took a stand on that as well.
That stand was that I needed to be free of the constraints that bind me. I want to live life outside the box and at the edge of knowledge and endeavor and in fact I always have. One of the reasons I didn’t succeed in completing doctoral programs was that I did not and felt I could not stay within disciplinary boundaries and it’s the same here.
The bigness I felt felt comfortable. It matched an inner bigness that I felt I had to honor or lose my aliveness. I heard myself say such things as I cannot live small any longer. And in fact I know I cannot. This decision sends me further into a sense of isolation out of a refusal to conform to any smallness that might exist around me.
I heard myself also say that I needed a bigger project, a bigger problem. And that is also a true reflection of how I feel. While I haven’t mastered the projects and problems I now have, they do in fact feel familiar enough that I hunger for more.
What I usually do with this feeling is go further within and search for the doorway to the next level of knowledge of myself. I may meditate more, just breathe into this feeling of expansion brought on by standing forth.
There’s always the temptation to abandon what one has just accomplished and fall back into step with others. That isn’t at all where I want to go and so I may seek solitude for a while and consolidate this breakthrough.
So perhaps consider this a full demonstration. We have the article on exiting the constructed self and we have the illustration of exiting the constructed self. I would say that I exist at this moment in the emerged Self. I would describe the act of emergence as “standing forth as the Self.”
This is definitely an area I want to explore. It may come at the cost of my friends but what there is to be learned here is more important than the hopefully-temporary loss of friends. I will source the vasanas of loneliness that come up but the service of consciousness attracts me more than the comfort of friendship.
And I will either have my friends back after a while or make new friends – those working in this same field. So has it always been in my life. Deeply regrettable but a hazard I seem always to have had to face.
