THE EVENT HORIZON
Reflections About Our Journey as Spiritual
Beings Living in a Sacred World |
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The Event Horizon Vol.
1 No. 1
By Adam Sokolow
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Living in a Sacred World
An Introduction
A little over a year ago—on January 4,
2005—I awoke at 7:30 in the morning in my apartment in New
York City with a strange pain deep in the center of my chest. I
didn’t know at the time that I had developed a one hundred
percent blockage in the top of my left anterior descending coronary
artery. I didn’t know until I was in the ambulance with the
team of paramedics, chasing through the morning traffic toward Saint
Luke’s Hospital, that I was dying.
The experience of almost dying confirmed for
me a belief that I have had for quite some time: We are
spiritual beings living in a sacred world. In essence,
I am advocating that we should feel empowered to live life to the
fullest, using our senses, hearts, and minds to reveal its profound
mysteries. By doing so, we acknowledge our responsibilities as co-creators
with the divine to do our part to bring about an enlightened and
sustainable future.
I feel very lucky to be here. I welcome this
opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences in this series
of reflections about the human race and the planet on which we live,
about our spiritual journey in a sacred world. I hope to infuse
my words with the spirit of philosophy, which in classical
Greece meant a passion for wisdom expressed through the pursuit
of knowledge, and with Prajna, an ancient Sanskrit term
for the wisdom realized through the methods of meditation.
Illuminated in the light of wisdom, our human
story reveals its plot line—the ongoing quest for meaning
through the discovery of the Logos: the underlying divine forces
that act as the ordering principles of the universe. When properly
understood, these forces give coherency, meaning, and direction
to the course of human history and point toward the possibility
of a positive future, not just for people in general but for each
of us in particular.
Individual lives can be described from four
perspectives, which are themselves reflections of the four aspects
of our humanity: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.
The way we view life depends very much upon our natural proclivity
to emphasize one of these aspects over the others. Imagine, if you
will, that these four aspects of our being are arranged in the shape
of an Egyptian Pyramid: the physical at the base, then the emotional,
followed by the intellectual, and the spiritual at the summit. Just
as the Pyramids are built from the bottom up, there is an evolutionary
progression as we build from our physical base toward our spiritual
apex.
I am proposing that our collective human story
also unfolds through four stages. In the first, humanity’s
physical foundation was established through a series of significant
events from the dawn of time to the invention of writing around
3000 B.C. The second period dates to the time when the worldwide
calendar was set by the birth of Jesus. It is at this time that
the second tier of our human evolutionary process, our emotional
aspect, begins to become differentiated. The sign of this occurring
was the emergence of worldwide religious institutions. The third
layer, the intellectual, appeared in the form of philosophy during
the Classical Age of Greece. Since then, humanity’s faculty
of reason has continued to advance our understanding of the world
through a vast range of social and physical sciences up to the present
day. In the present fourth stage of humanity’s evolutionary
progression, the three others will become integrated.
For individuals, this means undergoing a gradual
transformative process that permits us to embody the Logos and function
as whole spiritual beings. For humanity, it presents the possibility
of finally learning how to live with one another in peace. The most
significant sign that humanity is at long last entering into its
spiritual fourth stage is that women began coming into their power
in the middle of the 20th century. For at its very root, our spiritual
process is based on the integration of male and female wisdom energies.
In individual human lives, the development
and interplay between these four aspects of our being does not emerge
in a clear linear progression; and their expression in our collective
human story does not occur in a well-defined sequence either. I
am using a historical timeline as an armature to creatively sculpt
a trajectory toward the human race’s collective spiritual
maturity—a process that somewhat parallels the actual spiritual
development of a single person. We grow in fits and starts; we fall
back and proceed again. The path we take is circuitous, and at every
stage, whether personal or collective, our progress is uneven. It
is experienced as periods of growth and regression as we instinctively
try to grow toward actualizing our inherent human potential.
We fall short, however, if we fail to appreciate
the value of the final, integrative stage, for without this last
stage of our development, we will remain unaware that the world
we see reflects what we are predisposed to see. For example: if
we emphasize the physical realm, we tend to be practical. If we
emphasize our emotional side, we feel more comfortable expressing
ourselves. If we emphasize our intellect, it is natural for us to
conceptualize. And, if we emphasize the spiritual, separated from
the other aspects of our being, there is a good possibility that
we will be inclined either to devalue everyday life in favor of
a mystical transcendentalism or go to the other extreme and indulge
in forms of mercantile spiritual materialism.
When individuals intentionally make the effort
to understand themselves and integrate the four aspects of their
being within the environment at large, it is called doing the work.
This series of reflections illuminates this idea by exploring what
the great 20th-century psychologist Carl Jung called Depth Psychology
and the Process of Individuation. Then, using that as a foundation,
we will be able to integrate essential teachings from some ancient
mystical/wisdom traditions into our own cultural idiom. Here, East
meets West because both are pointing toward the practical significance
of the integrative stage of development—where we become oriented
to experience life as an unfolding of ”whole experiences”
in which all things are appreciated for being interrelated and interconnected.
The clearest sign we as individuals are making progress in this
direction is that we will increasingly relate to our world through
the integrated spiritual/wisdom energies of love, intelligence,
and compassion.
In the next episode of my narrative, I will
share with you some reflections about how the world appeared to
me as I walked out of the hospital a year ago and saw the sunlight
again for the very first time. Then, we will begin our journey with
the sun casting light and shadow on the mountains of ancient China
and continue back to the furthest reaches of time—to the Big
Bang—when existence explodes out of primordial emptiness.
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