The Heartwood of Synchronosophy (Part II, Chapter 8/12)

Love Thyself

When I started loving myself

I escaped from all what wasn’t healthy for me,

and from everything pulling me down and away from myself.

In the beginning I called it the ‘healthy egoism’,

but today I know: it’s called SELF-LOVE.

〰 Charlie Chaplin 〰

photo © Todd Diemer on Unsplash

Under the Spell of Love

In my dream, the angel shrugged and said,

if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination

and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand

〰 Brian Andreas 〰

Following an evil spell of domestic violence I moved to a remote part of England, as far away as possible from anyone I knew, and started a new life.

Magical things continued to happen with no or minimal effort on my part. First I needed to find a new home. Because the area was so remote, not many people wanted to live there (at the time). Banks were offering 100% mortgages. Buying a 4-bedroom house was cheaper than renting an apartment.

All I had was my free-lance translation work, and a publisher who wrote a letter for me. Not exactly great financial security, but the bank wasn’t worried about my lack of credentials or funds. It was a no-brainer.

Soon after moving into my new home I received a phone call from a publisher in Amsterdam, saying, “I have head-hunted you all over Europe.”

He’d been looking for a good translator for a specific project, and everywhere he’d enquired, my name came up as a recommendation. When I mentioned my fees, he replied, “That’s not enough. I’ll pay you 25% more!”

Needless to say, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I became the in-house translator for that publisher for ten years.

About a year into enjoying my peaceful life near the ocean with my kids, I received another unexpected message. This one came in the form of a book, which fell into my hands while browsing in an esoteric bookshop.

Twinsouls: A Guide to Finding your true Spiritual Partner. Each chapter tells life stories of historic couples to whom the authors refer as ‘twinsouls’.

I had never heard of the concept of twinsoulship. While reading the stories, I had a flash of insight. What if this doesn’t only happen to some lucky people out there? What if I am destined to be one of those people?!

How did I know? This is impossible to explain. I just knew I had to connect with my ‘twinsoul’, who was somewhere ‘out there’ waiting, searching, hoping to find me.

But I’m happy living on my own, protested a voice inside my head. Why would I want to take such a risk and make life all complicated again?

Trust me, replied my heart. This time all will be well.

photo © Eugenia Maximova on Unsplash

The Doublespeak of Love

If you are looking for someone to change your life look in the mirror.

〰 contemporary proverb 〰

“Why are there so many different religions?” I asked my father many years ago. “Are they not all more or less saying the same thing?”

I was twenty years old, at the beginning of my inner journey, not knowing much about other religions.

“Oh no,” replied my father, a scholar of comparative religion. “The big difference between Christianity and all other religions is that we have Jesus Christ, who has brought love to the world. Christianity is the religion of love.”

I’ve forgotten the rest of the conversation. What I do remember is that my father’s conviction left me unimpressed. Too many questions remained unanswered.

Why are Christians of all people so disconnected from love? Why do they hate themselves so much? Why do they consider themselves sinners and ask for forgiveness in church every Sunday? Why did I hate myself so much?!

Despite all claims of ‘love & salvation by grace’, self-contempt is deeply rooted in the Christian doctrine. The Jesus-sacrifice may have patched up the wounds inflicted by an earlier vengeful God-father-figure, yet the trauma never healed.

The secular doctrine of science & technology, which has colonialised Western society, hasn’t brought salvation either. The myth of ‘survival of the fittest’, sowing the seeds of compulsive striving for superiority, has produced a culture of inferiority.

The ‘sins of our elders’ are showing up in our children and grandchildren. Constantly comparing themselves with others. Measuring themselves against made-up standards of perfection. Struggling to keep up with imaginary expectations. Trying to paint and prop up an ideal facade. Just like we did before them.

Why do we deride ourselves for being not good enough? A flawed specimen of humankind. Rotten to the core from having glimpsed evil? Who came up with those religions, myths and memes anyway?

I guess, they were human attempts to explain their experience of living in a world they didn’t understand. ~ And we still don’t… At least we’ve covered quite a few paths to hell, and now (should) know better how to avoid them.

What if the first bite of the ‘forbidden fruit’ is a metaphor representing the unavoidable human experience of trauma?

This often happens around birth, if not before. Leaving the womb then becomes the second act in the drama of life, alluding to the eviction from Paradise.

Like their biblical ancestors (according to the Western paradigm imprinted with the Christian creation myth) newborns suffer the consequences of their ‘first bite from the fruit of knowledge’. Sooner rather than later they become self-conscious. Sooner or later, this embryonic human Consciousness will discover that it is ‘naked’, meaning helpless, vulnerable, weak, powerless, wholly dependent on the love of their fellow human elders.

What if those elders are stuck in the trap of illusory human inferiority themselves? What if those humans hate themselves, still struggling to become role models for their human hatchlings?

Nobody who holds self-hatred in their heart can know love truly and fully. We can only catch glimpses of it. We can even talk in tongues of love, while the language of our actions says something entirely different. That’s doublespeak, the ‘language of pseudo-love’ passed on through many human generations.

It’s easy to blame our elders, pass on the baton of guilt, sin and eternal shame for not being up to the job. But it doesn’t solve the problem. On the contrary.

Finding a scapegoat for our suffering only perpetuates the trauma. Offloading responsibility is also an act of self-disempowerment.

Accusing an external ‘other’ for anything ‘evil’ ~ while commanding ‘good & love’ for ourselves ~ sets up an inevitable conflict. Accusations, blaming, and scapegoating are expressions of separation, repressed aggression, hatred, and revenge.

To find our way into love we must practice love towards ourselves ~ unconditionally! No more doublespeak.

But what does that mean?

photo © Darius Bashar on Unsplash

Meeting my Twinsoul

When two souls call for each other

the universe hears the whisper and conspires to bring them together.

〰 Daniel Nielsen 〰

With no idea how to go about my search, I knew the first step would have to be the healing of my dysfunctional relationship pattern. Listening to my emotional pain and suffering from a place of wholehearted empathy and unconditional self-acceptance had been a good start, but it wasn’t enough to clear whatever needed to be clarified.

A friend recommended a therapist, who happened to work with psychosynthesis, the method I’d already studied during my Totnes years. She was a good enough match for my needs.

After our first session and listening to my story she told me, it would take about two years…

‘Two years?!’ my heart plummeted. I don’t know what I’d expected. It seemed like the only option, so I said yes.

She taught me a new visualisation method called psychoexpansion. I took up this practice with great enthusiasm. According to my previous psychosynthesis therapist I have a natural talent for this type of work. “Most people,” she told me, “don’t have such a strong visual channel.”

Psychoexpansion is in many ways similar to lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying. It enables the dreamer to travel in time and space and visit dream-scenarios which represent the difficult situation they want to resolve. The mental images themselves are spontaneous, like night-dreaming, but the dreamer remains aware and engaged in the travels of the Imagination.

Psychoexpansion gave me the tools to ask questions, receive answers, and experience scenes at a profound level to receive insights about my trauma pattern and impulses for spontaneous healing ~ without manipulation or wishful thinking.

About six months into a series of weekly sessions, my therapist invited me to join a module of a training course for therapists. That particular module was dedicated to relationships and held near Land’s End over a weekend.

During the weekend we did a visualisation exercise called ‘The Sword and the Chalice’. As with many psychosynthesis sequences of mental imagery, you are asked to find a particular spot within your inner landscape to complete a specific task. The key instructions for this sequence were, “go to your sacred mountain retrieve a chalice and a sword, then continue to the summit, create an altar, and perform a ritual with those items.”

The result of my visualisation was confusing and disturbing. Although my chalice and sword were beautiful objects, each powerful and attractive symbols in their own right, they didn’t match. There was no way they would ‘work together’ in a ritual.

I mentioned this to my therapist at the beginning of the lunch break, and she suggested I repeat the exercise later, at home, with a couple of new questions.

I didn’t wait until I got home. During the lunch break, I found a quiet spot and repeated the exercise. Immediately! I received a new pair of symbols and was able to perform my ritual. After this exercise I knew I’d cracked the issue. The work was done.

It’s hard to explain how I knew and what exactly had happened, because I didn’t explicitly do anything. But all of a sudden my inner space was crystal clear, as if a thick cloud cover had torn open after a thunderstorm, revealing glorious sunshine and a bright blue sky.

On the drive home along the coastal road, a murmuration of starlings appeared in the early spring sky. The cloud of birds accompanied me for a significant stretch of the way, dancing ahead, in sync with the elation dancing within my heart.

“I think we’re done,” my therapist said at the end of our session the following week.

Three months later I met Josh. The moment our eyes made first contact we both recognised something. He said he saw a luminosity, as if there was an aura of light around me. For me it was a sense of familiarity and deep connection, a feeling that we could be both, best friends and lovers. A year after that first meeting he moved into my house.

photo © Alexander McFeron on Unsplash

Magic Doesn’t Just Happen

The world is its own magic.

〰 Shunryu Suzuki 〰

In the months leading up to my first encounter with Josh, I designed a bespoke healing-relationship-pattern program for myself. There were some ‘exercises’ I practiced daily to experience being in a healthy and constructive relationship. Others were just one off ‘rituals’. I’ll share those activities in later chapters of this book as appropriate.

Some of the practices, which found their context within the framework of Synchronosophy were already known to me ~ intuitively or implicitly ~ long before I understood the theory, or knew the method, or could have explained what I was doing.

The fundamental problem I needed to address was my intimate relationship stress syndrome (IRSS). Although IRSS is a fairly common type of suffering, it is by no means the only trouble-spot in contemporary humankind.

In the context of IRSS practicing self-love seems like an obvious healing approach. What about other dysfunctional patterns? you may wonder.

I have two tentative answers to this:::

First ~ anything can be viewed through the relationship-lens. Whether I’m struggling with a career stress, or money issues, or a health affliction, I can always approach the problem via my personal relationship with the trouble ~ which always brings me back to my relationship with myself.

Second ~ love is a fundamental condition of life. Although much confused with emotions, sex, fondness, fancy, liking, passion, lust, infatuation, adoration, idolisation, religious devotion, worship, even obsession and jealousy ~ none of those are Love. Unconditional Love is exactly that. Unconditional, no strings attached, a gift like life itself. We could say that love is the force of oneness that holds the living universe together.

Love is the energy source that feeds and sustains life.

Meeting ourselves in unconditional love is a basic practice, which Synchronosphy can teach us. It’s a path of learning we can choose to take. If our elders have been unable to meet us in unconditional love, it’s not ‘their fault’. It’s not that they didn’t want to.

They were suffering from IRSS too, just like us, just like their elders and so forth, all the way back to the first couple in Paradise, if you want to pass the buck that far.

When you need to change something in the outer world ~ most likely a conflict or problem with which you feel stuck ~ there is always a matching pattern in the inner world, also known as personal paradigm.

In Synchronosophy we aim to shift a shred or snippet of a dysfunctional paradigm one session at a time. It is virtually impossible to do this under the command of the rational mind. However, by applying a certain sleight of mind process we can align ourselves with unconditional love in any troubling situation.

This alignment has the same effect as opening a combination lock. A unique configuration of bits of information can dissolve a blockage within the paradigm, which has caused trouble in the inner world. Such a shift must happen spontaneously, in an unpredictable manner.

As a result, an instant surge of energy is released into the entire organism, giving human Consciousness a kiss of new life from true self-love.

The inner shift is tangible and visible when it happens.

External changes follow by synchrony, without manipulation, as if by magic.

photo © Brian Lundquist on Unsplash

Love Thyself and you will Know Thyself

I will look for you in every lifetime and love you there.

〰 Kamand Kojouri 〰

‘Know thyself!’

The ancient words associated with the Oracle of Delphi can be taken as a command, just like God’s warning ‘Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil! (or else…)’

Human minds imprinted with anthropocentric mentality tend to think in terms of laws, commands and orders. This way of thinking is spawned by the hierarchical structure of the Anthropocene, supported by everyone who holds a lifelong subscription with the Abrahamic religions and/or the Darwinian theory of evolution, and/or an undying faith in saving the world through science and technological progress.

What the above listed doctrines have in common is the promotion of a concept of a universe where humans hold a status superior to other living beings, either by divine right or evolutionary advantage.

I’m not mentioning this to argue about right or wrong, good or evil, positive or negative. Instead, I want to present an alternative worldview, which emerges spontaneously by viewing ourselves, our environment and ultimately the whole universe through the lens of belonging.

We can call this lens symbiocentric because it matches perfectly the basic laws of the Symbiocene and the evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis, rooted in symbiosis. We’ll delve deeper into these in future chapters. All we need to know here is that the fundamental premise is cooperation and/or synergy as a principle of life, rather than competition, rivalry, and a race to the top.

The Symbiocene speaks the language of togetherness ~ oneness ~ love. This is not only the opposite of separation ~ propagated by anthropocentric laws & orders. It opens up a new path beyond human paradigms and paradises.

The Symbiocene is governed by heterarchy rather than hierarchy. This means there is no pecking order. No top down commands. No whip-wielding God punishing non-compliant humans.

Our way to the higher path of self-love is, unfortunately, littered with obstacles, beginning with the word itself.

Self-love reeks of egotism, self-centredness, narcissism, self-importance, self-obsession, vanity, self-adulation, delusions of grandeur, self-absorption and ~ God forbid ~ inconsideration towards other beings, including God himself.

Such fears are stirred by an Anthropocene mind, which ~ understandably ~ can only see its own projections.

To find our way to true self-love it is essential to keep our inner navigation system firmly directed towards the Symbiocene.

In other words, having a ‘good & virtuous destination’ ~ such as LOVE or PEACE ~ is not enough. It’s the totality of the mind we need to take with us, if we want to avoid slipping back into the old quagmire of the Anthropocene.

Turning back to the Oracle of Delphi and reading the full inscription at the ancient temple, we notice a second part:::

Know thyself, and you will know the gods and the universe.

What appeared to be a command, turns out to be a statement about a universal law. The symbiocentric interpretation reads as a simple statement, “If you know yourself, you will know the gods and the universe.”

This new understanding reveals a meaning reminiscent of the famous first lines of William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palms of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour…

What the Oracle of Delphi and William Blake are referring to are universal principles, rediscovered by scientists in recent decades, long after those words were written.

When embarking on my mission to find love, I managed to throw off the shackles of self-hatred, based on those same principles. What I found was not only self-love.

I discovered a profound understanding of the oneness of the universe, a sense of belonging, and a native ability to communicate with life itself through my own subjective experience.

Self-love turned out to be the single most important piece of the ‘secret passcode’ to cross the threshold into love, and life itself!

This experience didn’t give me a ‘new lease of life’. It released me into an experience of love and life I’d never had, or couldn’t remember. Self-love set me free to know myself and live my life.

It dawned on me that the foundations of love in human relationships, as taught to me within the anthropocentric Christian paradigm, were all wrong. They were transactional, idolised as altruism. A conditional kind of ‘love’ with a sticky net of suffocating strings attached.

The living symbiocentric understanding of life affirms one simple principle in an infinite number of ways:::

The outer experience mirrors inner experience.

The life you perceive around you shows you where you are in your inner world.

The love you experience in the outer world is the way you love yourself.

What people do to you in physical reality reflects how you treat yourself in the invisible realm of your inner landscape.

When I started loving myself, I discovered not only how healthy relationships between humans are supposed to work. I learned that Love Thyself, as a life regenerating agent, goes hand in hand with adage, Know Thyself.

This was perhaps the one most important and life changing lessons of my whole journey. A simple lesson with more complexity than meets the eye. A complex lesson, unfolding the secrets of the universe…

Love thyself and love will find you.

Love thyself and life will speak to you.

Love thyself and you will know thyself.

Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links

The Rootstock of Synchronosophy

Chapter 1 The Mycelium of Synchronosophy, Chapter 2 Sub-Soil of Synchronosophy, Chapter 3 Nutrients for Synchronosophy, Chapter 4 Adjustments to an Unnatural World, Chapter 5 Loss of Self and Identity, Chapter 6 The Destructive Trail of Trauma

The Heartwood of Synchronosophy

Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers