Finding Hope in Wholeness

Wholeness - complete, including all parts of aspects, with nothing left out

I suppose I have set myself up for the difficult task of concluding this written series on A New Earth, having offered a reflection on the previous nine chapters. Attempting to summarize what I have learned through this book and what has stuck with me, may be as difficult as explaining quantum physics to a five-year old, let alone me. Add onto this the noise of the construction work that is currently going on above my head - the grinding, scraping, banging, and loud stomping - and the task seems all the more daunting. Talk about finding the stillness!

My Mind is trying to wrap herself around the ideas presented in this last chapter. She is seeking to make meaning, to connect the dots, and to translate the lessons into neat, attainable goals. But, if I have learned anything with these ten chapters, it is that the lessons cannot be understood, they must be experienced.

And experience has not shied away from showing me her pretty face time and time again the past few weeks. In the past few weeks I have faced unconscious and difficult people. I have been able to identify when my ego was turning to its self-defense, preserve-my-image-at-all-costs mode. I have waited - and waited- for something to happen to give me a sense of progress. I have dealt with enormous change and extremely unfamiliar circumstances that at times have made me want to sit in a corner and suck my thumb. I have come up against views of this world so different from my own that I have pinched myself in disbelief. Experience has proved once again that these things are to be expected in life.

I chose wholeness as my theme for this entry, because it is the only word that I find to be most the fitting, and the only word that captivates the sense of hope that enlightenment has brought me. I suppose there is two parts to it: the wholeness of the universe, and the wholeness of ourselves.

The first I will only touch on briefly. For the last nine lessons, we have been learning about how to fit into the whole of this world. What is my place in the whole? We have answered this question from a variety of vantage points and, of course, realized it is much easier to talk about than to do. The second part - the wholeness of ourselves - brings us hope amidst the challenges presented by the task set before us in the previous nine chapters.

Your ego, or that voice inside your head, will always see you as a fragment, and makes every effort to remind you of it. You will always be incomplete, always lacking, it says. But the reality is that wholeness is neither unattainable, nor something we can become - it is already within us. For some, that wholeness cannot be completed without a saviour and a divine influence. For others, that divine influence is their own consciousness. However you view it, realize that these two viewpoints essentially lead us to the same conclusion. If God didn’t see the potential in us (that wholeness beneath the surface), his offering of grace would make little sense. Likewise, for those whose consciousness plays that same role, if that wholeness was not within us, any amount of awareness could not free us from our egoic nature.

Many times we have heard people telling us, “live your life to the fullest!” To this I say ‘yes!’ but at the same time, I believe that it cannot happen without God/Conciousness. Tolle says that wholeness can be achieved through ‘awakened doing,’ which is also the alignment between our inner and outer purpose, which I discussed last week. There are three different ways in which this can happen - through acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm. If none of these modalities are operating, you will be creating suffering for either yourself or others. I’ll leave you to read the book, and find the definitions of these three modalities. The point is that wholeness comes with our attitudes towards our circumstances. We will be left as fragments if we offer resistance. Consider the way water flows down a mountainside. It takes the path of least resistance, and in the process smoothes out the boundaries and obstacles in its way.

In conclusion, being that presence in the lives of others gives us both our place in the whole, and wholeness within ourselves. In turn, others may find wholeness in themselves. Imagine a world where everyone felt whole. Imagine a world free from fragmentation between people, between ethnic and religious groups, and within ourselves. When we think little of ourselves and others, we accomplish little. Imagine what we could accomplish with wholeness.

“I am a (w)hole in the flute that Christ’s breath moves through. Listen to the music.” (14th Century Persian poet and Sufi master, Hafiz)

These words are inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61).

© Meghan J. Ward, 2008