Life’s Cooking Pot. The human journey from Frogs to Princes
From Frogs to princes! Our journey through life. biologists tell us we all begin as females in an aquatic world of the womb. Life for a human being is a series of transformations both physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As human beings, we begin our journey into this life as aquatic beings. Swimming (hopefully) gently in our mother’s womb until the birth process expels us from that aquatic paradise into the demands of an air-breathing somewhat hostile world. Hostile to an infant born too soon and like the baby Kangaroo it needs a Mouther’s pouch and protection, to grow big enough to be viable on its own.
What do we understand about life’s purpose? Does it actually have a purpose? Is there an overarching purpose containing some lesser purposes?
The purpose of life is to bring us questions and we have simply to respond as Victor Frankl proposed. The first purpose is to gain control of our physical body within the environment we find ourselves in. Having more or less integrated into our environment we now face the challenge of fulfilling our life’s mission or purpose and delivering the gifts we brought with us into this life.
Victor Frankl’s question is a way to set us free or at least to attempt to free ourselves from the great lie or limitation of our birth. The formation of our Ego enslaves us to ideas that make us smaller than we are and what we were born for. Suddenly we find the life and promises made to comply and be accepted, hollow, empty, and unfulfilling. Please read the poem below. “The opening of eyes” by David Whyte. The poem explains this process of awakening beautifully.
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced” Quote from Dune by Frank Herbert.
Our Ego identity and the Ego’s compliance with the demands of the Status-quo for acceptability causes the slow death of Soul from the Ego’s point of view. The process of building Ego identity and conforming to the Status-quo creates our personal, and some of our collective shadow. The creation of Shadow is a survival mechanism for Soul. Soul, our Soul, cannot be killed it simply goes and lives elsewhere in our consciousness it takes a step back to allow Ego formation. Soul is like the naughty, annoying, and demanding child that’s sent outside to play, it’s always trying to get back inside and seeking attention. Trouble, crisis, and the empty unfulfilled feeling is our personal Soul and later our Shadow’s relentless knocking on the door of awareness, that we often refuse to, listen to with all the empowerment given by the Status Quo to deny Soul’s existence.
The image of the tripod that supports life’s cooking pot is a metaphor. The three legs of the tripod holding up the cooking pot of Soul, Ego, and Shadow and the relationship between them. In the vertical axis of Time, the chain holds up the pot above the fire. The vertical axis of the Axis Mundi or the world tree of the Norse traditions is Time itself. Time proves our existence, without Time there would be no life as we know it. It seems our life is in the cooking pot. A life of unknown limitations. Some people are very happy in this life. Many feel themselves to be the victims of life. Like in the hot frog image below. A sort of dystopian servitude.
Many traditional cultures and stories speak about transformation by fire, either by burning off dross or direct transformation through the fire, the fire of life’s challenges, not a literal fire.
We cannot speak about Soul without also considering Ego, Shadow, Status Quo, and Time itself. We cannot speak of Soul without an understanding of time and Eternity. Eternity is not a time but rather stands outside of time completely independent of time. The only thing that links Time to Eternity is Soul. Soul relates things that are eternal to things that are temporal.
As you can see I have capitalised these three words as I am treating them as proper nouns throughout the site. Apart from that, these three aspects carry our divinity, and out of that recognition, they deserve a capital letter to differentiate those words from the mundane.
Lifting the lid off the cooking pot we find the hot frog. We all know the story of the frog in a pot being slowly heated unaware that it is being boiled alive? Mankind can be like this, dealing with the ever-increasing demands of life under the Status-quo until something snaps.
In a time without meaningful Rites-of-Passage and guidance by elders, those who have gone before us we can die before we realise we have been sold a story that has kept us enslaved. Take nothing at face value.
There is a hope that sometimes we see the actual horizon for what is, even beneath the dark clouds of a dystopian world.
We do not always understand the waters we swim in. We take much too much for granted and then are surprised by life.
Poem. “The opening of eyes” By David Whyte.
The opening of Eyes.
That day I saw beneath dark clouds
The passing light over the water
And I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
Life is no passing memory of what has been
Nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
Seen for the silence they behold.
It is the heart after years
Of secret conversing
Speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert
Falling to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven
And finding himself astonished,
Opened at last,
Falling in love with solid ground.
The great lies of the Status-quo and our culture.
- We have conquered nature and we are separate from nature, Everything in the natural world is ours to use as we wish.
- There is a shortage of resources and you will have to compete with everybody else for your share.
- Your safety and well-being depends on following the rules.
- In return for acceptance in the herd, you must give up your personal rights and follow the collective decrees.
- You must be productive at all times.
As with the poem, one day beneath the dark clouds of the oppression of false ideas we may hear a sacrilegious thing. We may hear the world speak out. Your Soul may hear again the voice of the world speak out and know that life is not a passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book. It is the vision of things far off things. Seen to the silence they hold of the hearts conversing secretly with Soul, speaking out in the clear air.
“Take off your shoes”, sloth off your shoes, those shoes are much too small for who you really are like the snake sloths off its skin as the skin gets too small for it. . Find yourself astonished and falling in love with Souls holy ground.
Ego, is our sense of identity which is formed through the formative years of a child in relation to family, community, culture, and geography. Our psychological, social, and beliefs of the Status Quo create the rest.
As a huge generalisation this Ego formation is done at the expense of Soul during the formative years from birth to midlife. In the second phase of life, the Soul begins to “call us home again” Causing Shadow to hammer on the door of our consciousness.
Soul cannot be destroyed, however, but it can be denied, projected, and suppressed. So what happens to the Soul material rejected or suppressed by the individual in this beginning stage of life? The rejected soul material goes and lives in other parts of the psyche that has come to be called the Shadow. Once here it regresses, if it went in as a small child it comes out as a raging, frothing at the mouth berserker adult who wants to kill you.
Soul through Shadow is always trying to reclaim its place in our Ego awareness often through crises in our lives. This is especially true in the second phase of life when we begin to hear the internal voice beginning to question life, and feel the emptiness of the unsatisfying promises of the status quo. The 2.3 wives the 2.4 children the address of the house, the career. What’s it all for, what’s it all mean? At the same time, we begin to feel the call for something that gives meaning and purpose to life. The midlife crisis, a crisis that questions our very existence.
Shadow has a chapter all of its own. Shadow is always talking to us and asking to be let in, like those pesky family members who come and visit, eat all your food, cause tensions in your household then thankfully leave. The tension they bring is your Soul asking you some questions.
Some thoughts on life by others. Firstly a line from Frank Hurbets book Dune.
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced”
And again similar thoughts by David Whyte. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime With no witnesses to the tiny hidden transgressions. Once we becomes disenchanted with life as we know it, we have the opportunity to see life differently.
Everything is waiting for you. By David Whyte.
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
As if life were a progressive and cunning crime
With no witnesses to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely even you at times, have felt the swelling presence of the grand array;
The swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice.
You must note the way the soap dish enables you,
Or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things to come,
The doors have always been there
To frighten you, to invite you, and the tiny speaker
in your phone is your dream ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and
ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have
left their arrogant aloofness and the gods see you at last.
All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.
A chapter on Shadow.
A chapter on Ego formation.
A Chapter on Soul
A chapter on Status quo.
A chapter on Eternity and Time.