On The Art of Initiation
For many of us, it is a sobering thought that even as we age, we are still accompanied by the same pains and fears we know from our childhood. How we experienced love and abandonment, closeness and distance, tenderness or loneliness as the smallest of human beings shapes us all the way to the grave. We can have a whole river of therapeutic water run over it. These waters might polish and smooth the stone of our imprinting; but the rock of early experience underneath remains the same.
Now, it helps not to see this permanence and persistence of our early childhood trauma as failure or stagnation. Even though this is an almost instinctive reaction for most of us. To me, people often seem as paradoxical as the tree in the following image.
A tree is planted in a certain place and will never be able to move from it. But it can transform the place by its own presence. If we could hear the tree speak, and it had human features, it would complain about how desolate and empty this place was when it was a young sapling. We would point out to the tree what a magnificent transformation its arrival has brought, how many plants now grow in its shade, and how many birds now nest in its crown. But the tree would reply dejectedly: “But all the fruitfulness today does not change the solitude in which I was once planted. All my activity and sprouting have been aimed at alleviating the pain of this desolate memory, and yet I feel the emptiness of the past within me undiminished.”
It seems to me that this is the case for many of us. The riches of today, which we have worked hard to accomplish, never soothe the wounds of the past. The stone of Then is polished smooth by the river of Now, but the rock of experience underneath remains the same.
Fortunately, however, the trees of real nature are wise, not like the anthropomorphized tree we just imagined. Real trees are artisans of transformation, agents of happiness and life for themselves and for the vast ecosystem they host from their roots to their leaf tips. If trees lamented the desert from which they sprang, we would never have seen a forest. If rivulets lamented their insignificance against the mountains, we would never have seen a river.
All beings are made to come out of weakness. Every newborn child begins life with a cry of terror. The first step on any great journey is always traumatic. As humans, we are made to rise from the broken. We are made to grow around wounds. Not just once, but again and again. We are made to grow out of fear and loneliness into joy and community. And then to do it all over again.
This is not a flaw in nature or in ourselves, but our destiny. Like vines, we grow in spirals, crossing over and over again the darkness from which we emerged. Humans are not trees. We change our forms and shapes throughout our lives, in the interplay of strength and desolation, of power and hopelessness, of now and then. And from the insight that deep within us, there is no time but everything flows together simultaneously in the Here and Now. There we stand still before the flickering insight that we are young and old, strong and broken, joyful and in tears all at the same time. Being a microcosm really is not for the faint of heart!
So our demons are always with us, no matter how much alike we become to angels. The world always wants both, and we are its living image. Like the tree that remembers the desert, we grow up to be part of the forest. Like the rock that remembers its typhonic womb of fire, we find ourselves surrounded by soothing waters. Everything is Now, and we are all in it.
To be able to contemplate this reality without drama, to be able to experience it untethered, is one of the essential criteria for the adept and the goês. We stand in the midst of all the demons we fear and all the angels we admire, clasping our hands around the flame of our heart. Calmly my heart burns. Calmly shines the light of my heart. What a wonderful storm this is - and how quickly it is devoured by chaos once the axis of my heart breaks. But my heart has no roots, its flame burns in all times, upon all subsoils and before all backgrounds. I am not a tree, I am not a river and neither a fire. I am that which experiences it all and yet is none of it.
See, there are two kinds of initiations, really.
One kind of initiation is a transmission of consciousness that opens locks and gates which would remain closed without it. Personally, I have no experience of this kind of initiation in this lifetime, as far as we limit it to transmission by other people. Here people like to talk about lineages and of transmission of the necessary keys. Inherently, as it is passed on from human to human, this form of initiation is entangled with power and humans’ control over it. What do I have to do to acquire these keys? Who do I have to convince of my readiness and worthiness? Who might I be competing with on this path? As I said, I have no experience in the culture of human-to-human initiation.
The second type of initiation is the one I wrote about recently. This is definitely not the humanly mediated transmission of powers or abilities, but the organic process of increasing our preparedness to access and hold power. The entrance to this type of initiation lies wherever the vine of our lives turns away from the light and toward the original darkness. Whether such daemonic encounter, the renewed growing through our original darkness, then becomes an initiation or just a scarring ordeal, we alone decide. Most of the time and for most people, however, this is not a conscious decision. It is not enough to protect one’s heart from the daemonic dance and to remain steadfastly in samadhi. What is needed to turn agony into initiation is the ability to understand the language of ordeal: This incision, what is it whispering? This blood, what is it murmuring? This emptiness, what does it speak of? Transforming traumatic confrontation into actual encounter is the art of initiation in darkness. Making language flow between the violent and the wounded is the art of transforming ordeal into initiation. Unfortunately, this art cannot be learned or acquired in safety, without harm or while remaining who we are. It is an art taught exclusively in the open state of transitioning from here to nowhere.
