28: It's All About Balance

28 

It’s All about Balance 

On one of her daily walks several years ago, Penny met a neighbor and her little boy proudly riding his little bike. He was not quite three years old. His name was Jessie.

“Wow! Look at you, you’re doing really well; riding a two-wheeler without training wheels,” Penny said excitedly, as Jessie rode up to her.

“It’s all about balance,” Jessie said, with a proud little boy smile. “When I was big I used to ride a bike all the time!”

And Jessie’s mother replied, “Now you’re telling stories.”

But was he? Was the little boy’s imagination acting up, or was Jessie remembering one of his immediate past lives?

Penny didn’t respond, not wanting to engage the mother in an awkward conversation about reincarnation; but Penny knew the boy had lived before. Many children, in fact, remember their past lives before their memory “fades into the light of common day,” as Wordsworth tells us in his poem “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In Verse V he writes:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

              Hath had elsewhere its setting,

              And cometh from afar:

              Not in entire forgetfulness,

              And not in utter darkness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

              From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison house begin to close

               Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

               He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

                Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

                And by the vision splendid

                Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day. 

God is our home, as the gifted poet tells us; and we all come from God “trailing clouds of glory” to fulfill God’s Design; but we all forget where we came from and go from life to life yearning for something to fill the void in our soul.. That’s the central mystery of the human condition, and the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

          I wrote in The Pearl of Great Price that life is a divine mystery. The “pearl of great price” is Christ’s metaphor for the object of our yearning, and not until we find the “pearl of great price” will we be satisfied. That’s why we keep coming back over, and over, and over again until we satisfy the yearning in our soul that will not go away.

          But just what is this “pearl of great price” that Jesus compared to the “kingdom of heaven” (“God, who is our home”) and the rich young man in Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan refused to seek for fear of losing his worldly possessions? What makes this “pearl” so precious that we have to sacrifice so much to purchase it?     

          There’s a program on television called Ghost Inside My Child, which I’ve seen half a dozen times; and it’s about children that have pervading memories of their past lives. It’s all very confusing to the parents if they know nothing about reincarnation, like Jessie’s mother; but even when they are acquainted with reincarnation, the reality of their children having a “ghost”(a former personality) inside them shocks them into a new paradigm.

          In my current life, I was born into a southern Italian Roman Catholic family; and, of course, they knew nothing about reincarnation. But in high school I had four distinct past-life recollection dreams (one lifetime as a fish monger in London, England; another as a North American Indian; another as black slave in southern Georgian; and another as a statesman in ancient Athens); and shortly after these dreams I discovered the “secret doctrine” in Plato’s Dialogue, the Phaedo. “There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand,” said Socrates. But, as usual, the great philosopher was being ironic because his whole philosophy was about opening the door to man’s prison of reincarnation.

          “I deem that the true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is every pursuing death and dying,” said Socrates; essentially expressing the same teaching of liberation that Jesus gave to the world. “He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus in the Gospel of John; and not until we learn the secret of “dying to our life to find our life” will we break the cycle of life and death and satisfy the yearning in our soul.

          I broke the cycle, and I no longer yearn for God; but it took a long time and a lot of pain and anguish to lose my training wheels and find balance in my life… 

          My yearning consumed me, as it does every person that is called to seek their lost soul when life can no longer satisfy their need for more. “At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me, and horror came over me…My soul, where are? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there?” wrote C. G. Jung in The Red Book, and he went on a quest for his lost soul because life could do no more to satisfy the yearning in his soul; and, more than forty years later, just before his death in the eighty-fifth year of his life, he had a dream in which his unconscious confirmed that he had found his lost soul in his achievement of “wholeness and singleness of self.”

When Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, Jesus said, ‘When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female,” thereby giving us the key to our prison door; but the key only works when we learn the secret of how to make the two into one. And the two are one, St. Thomas tells us, “when we speak the truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy.”

Jung called our “two bodies” Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2; and he spent his whole adult life learning the secret of making the two into one that he called “the individuation process” and my first mentor G. I. Gurdjieff called “creating” our own soul.

Gurdjieff’s teaching was my training wheels that replaced my Roman Catholic training wheels when I moved on from my Christian faith in my quest for my lost soul; and after I achieved “wholeness and singleness of self” with the path that I forged out of Gurdjieff’s teaching, I got a new pair of training wheels in the New Age teaching of the Light and Sound of God that was introduced to the modern world in the early nineteen sixties; but thirty-some years later, I felt confident enough to drop my training wheels and cycle my way through life unaided by the training wheels that all religions, philosophies, and various paths afford us.

Out of the mouth of babes, “It’s all about balance.” 

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