The Mandala of Being

When the mind is in the future, the body experiences worry or hope; when it is in the past, the body registers guilt, nostalgia, or regret.

Male entitlement means an inferior maleness that stands beside a diminished femaleness. This inferior masculine and diminished feminine cocreate each other. We do not yet even know what human consciousness is with an empowered feminine and an empowered (versus entitled) masculine. If we dedicate ourselves to uncovering and actualizing this potential, then we will have begun to create a truly profound legacy for future generations. But for this to happen, both men and women must risk a great deal of discomfort in the depths of their relationships. We will have to move to our now-ness and make an enormous space for trust that the new relationship we are being called to is more intelligent than we are yet capable of perceiving and accepting. We have begun to invite the potential for male-female relationships in which the self of women is not derivative of the male self, and where men are likewise able to start from something more truly of their essence. However, as we lose the familiarity and security of traditional gender roles, great confusion and pain will inevitably continue, as will power struggles. But if we persevere, we may also find profoundly beautiful and deeply transformative love.

Only in the present moment do we have any true power over the future, for if we experience ourselves as full and whole now, we intrinsically trust whatever the future may bring. We do not exercise this power with thought alone, but with the full strength of our awareness and the whole of our beings. True change comes about through the nonreactive gaze of attention that deepens us into the present and thereby opens us to a new vision of life.

There is a wonderful paradox in all this. The vendors of spiritual magic, those who promise that we can have the future we want just by changing our expectations, without having to face fear and despair, are not entirely wrong. We live in a generous, reflexive universe. If what we need in order to learn faith is to change our thinking and take positive action, and then see a beneficial change in our lives, the universe grants this happily. But if we continue to do this, imagining we have found a way to manipulate life, the universe sooner or later reflects back the fear underlying our new strategy for control. Then we discover that positive thinking and quasi-spiritual tricks no longer work, and that we will have to learn faith even in fear itself. This is the “dark night,” the no-man’s-land each of us eventually has to cross if we are to become fully human.

It puts the power to gain security and our self-worth outside of us; we become defined by how much money we have, instead of by who we really are. This is poverty of the spirit.

If we are authentically seeking to know ourselves, it is essential to consciously examine all our me and future stories about money. We will see that fear of loss of money is really a disguise for the fear of nonbeing. Whatever hope money promises, it always leads us away from ourselves. Therefore we cannot hope to know the fullness of being — to cross over from a survival-based existence to a genuine spiritual life — unless all the hope attached to our money stories is released. An acorn does not have to hope to become an oak tree. Neither does a human being need to hope for money or anything else to become a human being. The soul is calling us to our unlimited potential for a consciousness that is not contingent on our circumstances.

It is crucial to our survival to let ourselves finally see how reflexively we flee from fear and follow the lure of hope. When we project ourselves toward a hoped-for future, anything that happens in the present moment that is even slightly threatening to our desired futures causes us anxiety, worry, or fear. Anxiety and worry are immediate reminders that we are not at the beginning of ourselves. Anxiety tells us that we have made our sense of self contingent on something that has not yet happened. If we will not come back to the beginning of ourselves and face our fears, then inevitably our minds will be thrown into some kind of hope process. Hope, therefore, is also an immediate reminder that we are not at the beginning of ourselves.

In our culture, the necessity for achievement is a primary form of Self-avoidance. Hope and fear are the carrot and the stick, as philosopher George Jaidar has written, used to entice and enforce the survival mythos expressed through the drive for success.4

We make poor choices when hope is driving our actions.

When hope pulls us away from the Now, where we might face difficult decisions or distressing truths, then hope amounts to denial of the soul’s capacity to discover a new and deeper connection to life in the midst of suffering. Being present with what is, without hope, and facing into despair without hope, is a fundamental initiation, the dark night of the soul that is a basic means for the evolution of consciousness. In contrast, indiscriminately offering hope is a form of cynicism and lack of faith in the transformative capacity of the soul.