26/06/2025
A teacher and guide
"At the human level, when faced with a great obstacle or a true dilemma, there will be one of two outcomes: either we will become bigger people who understand ourselves and the world better, or we will become smaller souls more narrow in our thinking and ultimately more rejecting of the mystery and wonder of life.
We may feel overwhelmed by fear and anxiety as the tension in life becomes greater and problems seem to grow in size as time runs out, but what life wants is meaningful change. Either we face the way that life roars at us and become wiser and more of a friend of the world, or else we run in fear and shrink from life, mystery, and love.
When faced with a difficult choice, a child will run to one side or the other, typically looking for the place of least tension and greatest comfort. Maturity, however, is related to a person’s ability to withstand and even understand the tensions that come with growing up and facing up to the issues at hand. To mature means “to ripen,” not simply to take on responsibilities but to be exposed to the weather of life and become fully grown, well-rounded, and finally ripened. In order to withstand the stress of life, a person must become who they truly are at seed and ripen into the unique individual they are intended to be from the very beginning.
In the end, all the troubles we face and the struggles we endure serve the purpose of helping us become true and unique individuals. Individual means “un-divided,” the one not divided on the inside, thus able to withstand great pressure from the outside world. The genuine individual is a less divided person who has suffered their own inner conflicts enough to know that an underlying unity can at times be found.
Those who insist upon choosing one side of an issue and condemning those on the opposite side are themselves split and divided within. Their insistence on certainty in the outside world belies a greater uncertainty and lack of self-knowledge in the inner realm. A neurotic is a “divided person,” one who suffers inner splits that obstruct meaningful change as well as emotional and spiritual growth. A neurosis forms where honest suffering has been avoided.
Becoming a genuine individual requires learning the oppositions within oneself. Those who deny or refuse to face the oppositions within themselves have no choice but to find enemies to project their inner conflicts upon. Enemy simply means a “not-friend;” until a person deals with the not-friend within them, they will find many seeming enemies all around them. There are certainly real conflicts and unfriendly people in the world, but real change has to begin where we each are conflicted within ourselves. The genuine individual or undivided person must be made again and again from creative tensions generated by facing fundamental oppositions within the self.
Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas. The same is true for groups that create unnecessary enemies by refusing to deal with their own shadow elements and inner conflicts.
The actual end of the world seems most possible when the power of imagination becomes diminished and people cannot envision creative ways to handle the inevitable conflicts and dilemmas of life. The emergence of the third thing requires an act of imagination and becomes an act of creation as something that was unknown or unseen becomes manifest and consciously known. The eruption of the third thing coming between opposing poles creates a quantum change that changes everything. From a mythic perspective, it repeats the original process of creation when the sky and earth were separated and the world became visible and life became viable.
For creation does not simply rest quietly back at the beginning of time; fundamentalists as well as modern literalists are wrong about that. Creation is ongoing in this world where cells divide to produce new life and opposites can attract surprising energies as well as pull us apart. This world may be at times a valley of tears, a place of great conflict where the blind lead the blind, the one-eyed man rises to rule, and the single-minded, true believers battle endlessly. But it is also the realm where creation is ongoing and each person is threaded to the eternal, capable of being a vehicle for revelation in some way.
Each moment which is fully entered into becomes momentous in some way; the world offers second chances more than once. In mythic terms, it is rarely “three strikes and you’re out,” but more the sense that the third time is the charm. The third thing waiting to be found beyond or below any opposition turns a seeming end into the beginning again—not because someone intelligently figures the whole thing out, but because an unseen aspect enters the space between the opposites. When one genuinely suffers the tension of the opposites, something unexpected will occur; something as yet unconscious or unknown will become conscious, and with that awakening there will also come a renewal of vitality and basic life energy."
- Michael Meade, "Why the World Doesn't End"
