the wilderness
The Wilderness -- The Realm of the Prophet
The Journey Within If we don’t go within -- we’ll go without forever.
We Enter the Wilderness
The Last Wilderness -- the Unconscious
Children Can Not Enter the Wilderness
When our Best Efforts to Avoid Ourselves Fail
Temptation in the Wilderness
There Comes a Time
Like a Newly Outted Gay Man or Woman
The Midlife Crisis
The Turning Point on the Journey -- We change ourOrientation and Go Within
The Journey Within
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We enter the wilderness
A rite of passage is only the beginning -- it leads away from the conventions and comforts of the norm and into the uncharted landscape of the wilderness.
A rite of passage is a profound, life changing transition. It leads the initiate from identifying with the child’s fears to the beginnings of adult autonomy, but it is only a first step into adult authenticity. We have not entered the Promised Land of enlightened living.
The rite of passage catapults us on a journey through a wilderness. It is an arduous process of an externally-defined false self disintegrating and an internally-defined true self integrating. This transition takes time, patience, and endurance.
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The last wilderness -- the unconscious
Today, little wilderness remains. We have subdued, if not strangled, most of nature into
submission. But a remnant of wilderness remains that we fear as much as any forbidding tangle
of darkened forest. It is the unconscious – a terrifying realm.
This often inexplicable and unexplored part of nature, the psyche, has many of aspects
of the untamed forest that primitives feared. Wild forces lurk in its shadows. Primitive feelings,
scalding hatred, murderous rage, especially at our families and ancestors, are locked in psychic
chains. Horrors from childhood too dark to name are shamed and shackled into dark crevices,
crying to tell their tale of abuse.
Also, locked within this psychic maze is our vibrant spirit – a dynamo eager to explode
our illusions. But entangled by a snarl of traumas, our life force is stymied. With its dynamic
urges aching to grow and evolve, we thwart our spirit at every turn with our denial and
dissociation.
We resist unlocking this dynamo of life teeming within us, because if we do unlock our life
force, we release our demons as well. We’d free the feelings frozen in time from our traumatic
history. To explore the unconscious not only liberates our spirit, but also reveals the crimes of
our families and parents. This dismal honest assessment of mother and father is the norm’s
ultimate taboo – the family condemns to exile any bold, investigative individual who would honestly
tell the family’s tale of woe.
Thus the unconscious, the key to personal liberation, vitality, and holiness, is the hardest
part of nature to explore. Yet we must if we are to survive. And there is pressure from this
psychic pool, teeming within us to be as God and life, and not the clan, intended.
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Children can not enter the wilderness
The odyssey into the wilderness of the unconscious is not for children. The wilds we are
entering is adult work. With maturity and courage, we stand apart from our families and their
delusions and enter the tangles of deeper self-knowing. As we drop our addictions and
depression that shield us from the horrors of childhood, we begin mature living listening to the
“still, small voice within” that allays our fears as we enter this disturbing terrain.
When we were children, there was no one to whom we could turn to share our concerns – for those who
harmed us the most were often our care-givers. We may still feel these frightening feelings of
childhood with no one to turn to for help. Except now, we have ourselves.
As we enter the wilderness of honest living, we are no longer children at the mercy of the
dangerous world of our forbearers -- we are adults. The world and the wilderness may still
have its unnerving situations, but we are no longer scared children without recourse. We are
adults, capable of facing life’s upheavals with the courage that resides at our core.
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When our best efforts to avoid ourselves fail
When our own best efforts to avoid self-reflection and conquer life’s uncertainties through
bravado and nerve have led us into despair, when our attempts to find salvation in worldly
achievement and relationships fail, when our efforts to avoid feeling the pain of our traumatic
past through addiction, depression, dissociated highs, or distracted busyness is killing us –
we must find another way. We must enter the wilderness.
To ancient people, the wilderness was a frightening place -- a wild region beyond man’s
control. Civil law had no jurisdiction. Forces of nature ruled. Bandits and “demons,” imagined
or real, were ready to prey upon those who dared enter. Doesn’t this sound like modern man’s
fear of the unconscious – and our resistance to entering it?
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There comes a time when the outer journey must end and the inner journey begins --
or we will die.
This turning point can happen quietly or disastrously – in a break up, a break down,
a divorce, a rehab – even a prison. But one thing is sure, we know that one more mountain
top, one more career achievement, one more sexual escapade, or drunk, or high, or even
one more marriage with another child is not going to bring us the fulfillment we seek --
the profound sense of well-being in our existence. This sacred feeling eludes us in our driven,
outward experience of the world.
There is a great temptation in the wilderness to return “home”, to deny the unconscious and
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Temptation in the Wilderness
return to our family’s belief system, its delusions of rescue, and the addictions necessary to block
out the truth teeming in our being. There is a great temptation to abandon our struggle, to give
up on liberating our spirit and to return to the fold, gay or straight, and its seeming safety and
comfort. Conformity calls to us, even if returning to the norm requires us to numb our emotions
and die to truth.
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A lesson for all from gay men and women
When life erupts causing emotional upheaval from external or internal pressures, we feel great anxiety. Change is imminent … or perhaps change has already catapulted us into new terrain. We have dared
to be honest. We have outted a repressed part of the unconscious -- perhaps the lies of the
family. We have faced facts as never before. We are terrified as we tell the truth of our
existence that there will be consequences for honest living.
When a closeted gay person can no longer bear the lie he or she is living and comes out,
we enter a wilderness of honest living and encounter life’s risks and pain apart from the conformity
of the family and clan. We experience the pain of the pariah. But also, and perhaps for the first time,
we feel the promise of life.
This painful transition holds true for anyone who dares to leave the conformity of the norm to enter the wilderness, which is the necessary process that leads to enlightened living.
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The midlife crisis
The midlife crisis comes – for some even in their twenties -- when the outer definitions and
patterns of our lives no longer work. Our externals which include our successes and disasters
no longer support an internal sense of well-being. Even normalcy, affirmed by our families and
society, feels empty. We are confused and frightened. Our outward journey, which always worked
in the past, is now empty -- over.
We sense peace is somewhere. We’ve searched everywhere, and done everything. A queasy feeling sets in – we realize that nothing on the outside is going to bring our heart and soul the
peace and fulfillment we yearn for so deeply. Yet what will? There must be more to life than futility,
since we have seen the grandeur of the world that excited our spirit. Yet emptiness pervades. We
panic. Old answers are hollow. We’re older. We’re tired. We’re at the end of our rope -- and fear
another rope will hang us. We stop, for to continue as we have will kill us. We’re lucky it hasn’t
killed us already.
We realize it is time to go to the one place we’ve never been and do what we’ve never
done – go within.
As we shift our focus from outer to inner, we discover that all the adventures and misadventures
in the past have value. Our life experiences become the food of contemplation and help reveal
the meaning of who we truly are – and who we’re not. We see past adventures as reenactments
of the horrors we endured as children, as misplaced attempts to rectify and resolve our trauma –
or to avoid seeing and feeling them at all. Without these experiences and insight into their
disastrous meaning, we might be enticed to take one more journey in the world of externals.
Now we’re no longer tempted. The tragedy of our past must be faced, not enacted. In our
journey to the ends of the earth, there comes a moment when we realize the answer is not out
there -- but within. It’s time to come home.
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The turning point on the journey -- we change orientation and go within
Once we commit to self-knowing, even with its accompanying anguish, there is a certain peace
with our purpose. At last our destination is clear, and resonates with the deepest values of our
true self. We answer the call of Self calling to self. What is true and eternal calls to what is
frightened and limited for restoration.
As if a load stone were pulling us, the truth at our core leads us on; it pulls us through our
interior terrain and its terrors. We face monsters fierce, and tempters seductive who would tell
us to give up or give in.
We hear most painfully the voices of our families and parents who taught us to belittle
ourselves and our value. “You can’t be you – original, authentic and for some of us, gay!
“This must stop! We don’t approve of your life-style.” We hear their voices echo through the
chasms of our being.
Other voices tempt us from the straight and gay tribes: “Come drink with us, drug with us,
never be alone, be my partner, marry me, let’s have children, come numb out and let’s create
a family of our own.” These temptations are seductive for they come from people like us – after
all we grew up in the norm and we feel an affinity with their plea and great social pressure to
conform to the comforts of living like everyone else.
The gloom of depression, the desire to feel nothing, pulls at us too. The deadening
arms of despondency offer a dubious haven from the pain of self-knowing.
There are many ways to dull the journey to depth – or to give up completely and seek oblivion.
We may even misuse God, waiting for him to save us, give us a miracle as we remain passive,
wounded children, waiting for rescue. But hope in magic demeans the God-given miracle that
we already are and our capacity to seek, know, feel, and heal.
If we stick with our journey through the wilderness, day by day, we get stronger and closer to
truth. We begin to live honestly. We lead a life consonant with our values. We love from our true
selves and are loved in return for who we truly are. We discover that as we seek the truth, the truth
seeks us in return -- and we find our true selves.
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