Crossing the Threshold

And so begins the initiation

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious

C.G. Jung

It’s been hard finding words this week. Maybe you can relate. Words seem so small, so flimsy, against the maelstrom we’re facing. I feel the darkness like I never have before; the fervor growing and the bloodlust seeping through the cracks of the fundamentalist facade. It’s one thing to intellectually know this is coming. It’s another entirely to realize it’s actually here.

As I begin to write and with trepidation allow myself to know what I know, I feel an impulse to say a lot, to explore and wander and vent. But energy seems so precious now - mine and yours - and really, when have we ever actually had the luxury of wasting time?

So I’ll get to the point:

We have crossed the threshold.

Don’t you feel that?

We’ve crossed a boundary from which there’s no turning back.

This is either the darkness of our collective casket being lowered into the ground or of the birth canal. Either way, nothing will ever be the same. There’s no returning to safe ground now, no fixing this with half-hearted measures or tepid pretend politicians. There’s no petitioning or even marching our way out of this. This is initiation, which means death to all that was. Surrender and courage are our currency now.

Francis Weller has called this time “The Long Dark,” an initiation that he sees lasting at least two generations, likely more. That means we won’t see the other side. One way or another, this is our destiny. From here, we live and love and fight and grieve amidst the portal of the unknown. From here, we will see hatred normalized and celebrated. There will be more storms, fires, floods. We privileged Americans will learn what the word violence actually means.

And, we will keep going.

Uncovering the shadow aspect of religious, political, and scientific agendas is of great value if it can help to free us from bondage to unconscious habits of behavior that lead to the suffering of others. But there is a massive amount still to do if we are to become more aware of how easily we can be manipulated by the shadow behavior of governments, religions, and science.

Anne Baring

The writing is on the wall, as less than a week into the new administration, rights are being stripped away at unseen levels. They’re sending 500 billion dollars to an AI surveillance project. The lies that got him back into power are laid bare now. The poorest will receive tax hikes to make up for the tax cuts the wealthy will receive. Nazi salutes are back in style, ICE raids have begun en masse, they’re financing a genocide in plain sight, and millions of people are cheering. I don’t even think the health hippies are going to get the raw milk they wanted so badly.

And, this is just as it was always going to be.

These are the days that our ancestors saw coming. Biblical prophesy, the return of Quetzalcoatl, the fading of the Kali Yuga. We’re in a portal of mythic proportions and our souls are being tested. What work we’ve done on ourselves, what ways we’ve conceived for discerning truth, the wounds we’ve worked out or ignored - there’s no escape - we’ll be faced with it all.

Demons, devils, and a confrontation with evil are an unavoidable part of initiation. Not everyone makes it through. Without the individual and communal initiations tempering each generation and the celebration of spectacle that western society has become, we are relegated to facing all the darkness at once, here and now, in the guise of infantile power-drunk demons proclaiming greatness.

The heart is the soul’s organ of perception. It has its own kind of consciousness, its own deeply instinctive way of knowing, just as the mind has its own way of knowing. It acts as a kind of umbilical cord connecting us to all life on this planet and to the greater life of the Cosmos.

Anne Baring

On the level of the soul, I know I was born for this time. In that place of truth that nothing or nobody can take away, this is the portal that my incarnation has been pointed at from before my first breath. Perhaps you can feel some of that for yourself too. Perhaps you recognize the emptiness of the mainstream and sense a deeper truth, a longing that leads up around the corner.

I have many stories to tell about how I’ve come to know this, but I’ll just share a simple vision that I landed in while doing an Authentic Movement session:

I am an old man, walking with a staff, through a dark tunnel. I get the sense that I am walking through a mountain, and the longing to get to the other side is fierce. My strength is fading, but I am determined to reach the other side. Suddenly, it hits me: I’m not going to. I will die inside this mountain. Realizing this, I stop and turn around. There is a group of children following me. I bend down and hand my walking staff to a boy, who takes it from me. And then I die.

So in the name of getting to the heart of the matter, which is where we always are anyway, if nothing is going to be the same, if this is indeed an initiation and we have stepped across the threshold, what is it long past time to let go of? What illusions, dreams, blind spots, lies, need to die so that you can keep walking with your ear connected to the sacred?

As a client recently told me, we are no longer in the time of preparation. We are in the time of experiencing.

So I’ll see you in the mountain. Your heart knows the way.

This post is written as the first of a likely series, potentially leading to an online writing series called Write of Passage, utilizing writing, imagination and community as a way of engaging this unchosen initiation. If you’re interested to learn about that when it is released, please reach out.