When you were still in the womb and for some time after you were born, you were entirely dependent on the provident support of your taller powers for the protection, nourishment, warmth, and loving attention you needed to thrive. Being helpless and defenseless, and having no sense of yourself as an “I” in relation to a reality that was “not me,” the effect of your earliest experience was to prompt your nervous system to spontaneously adapt itself to the conditions around you.
This baseline nervous state of your brain and body established your place in the order of things, registering the degree in which those early conditions evoked from you a response of trust or mistrust. A trusting nervous system is calm, open, and engaged with reality, while an untrusting one is anxious, closed, and disengaged. It’s important to realize that at this point you were not really “thinking about” anything or observing discrete “things” outside of “me.” You had no language to make such distinctions, nor a centered ego to provide perspective for rendering judgments.
In the ensuing years of early childhood, with the acquisition of language and thought, and managed increasingly by an emerging center of personal identity (ego), your web of family relationships likely perpetuated and confirmed that primordial attitude of trust or mistrust. In a truly provident environment your taller powers were securely centered in themselves, as they lovingly connected with you. They used their power to shape and influence you in positive ways, but rarely to manipulate or oppress you.
Their love supported and enabled you to get established in your own center of identity without feeling that you had to please, placate, flatter, or impress them in order to win their approval.
Relationships that feature this dynamic balance of power (integrity/autonomy/influence) and love (altruism/intimacy/compassion) possess a strong bond of trust. Without it, no relationship can be healthy or last for long. Your capacity to trust and to be a trustworthy partner is one of the most precious legacies of your infancy and early childhood. Even today as an adult, when other people try to attach themselves to you for the security they need, or try to manipulate you into serving their neurotic cravings for control and self-importance, this capacity to trust keeps you centered, or able to quickly recover when you do get pulled off your center.
My diagram offers what I’m calling a “mandala of the spiritual life,” and in the background is a compass to remind us that your human spirit is an intelligence that seeks wholeness, fulfillment, community, and wellbeing. Regardless of what your early life was like, this spiritual intelligence continues its quest for what is authentic and wholesome. And because no family is perfect and every parent has an “inner child” that is somewhat insecure as a consequence of their early experience, the collective of human cultures from the dawn of history have preserved and handed on the spiritual wisdom we all need.
We ignore this collective wisdom to our peril. Without it, the insecure “inner children” of parents cannot allow their actual children to become grounded and centered in themselves, but instead they manipulate them into serving their own neurotic insecurity. These children, effectively attachments of their parents, never learn to trust, and then proceed to pass this insecurity (and mistrust) into their children – and on it goes.
If the loss of one’s center (literally “missing the mark” in archery) is the meaning of our word “sin,” then perhaps this deep inheritance of insecurity and mistrust through the generations stems back to the “original sin” of those first self-conscious and insecure primates who started the process so many millenniums ago.
The balance of power and love as trust in healthy relationships is among those wisdom principles we can find. As partners stay centered in themselves and use their personal influence (power) to support each other and deepen their relationship (love), the bond of trust grows ever stronger. They are able to be present to one another, to be open, vulnerable, and honest with each other. This is one essential dimension of the spiritual life: living in relationship with others, moving deeper into genuine community.
A second dimension is represented in my mandala as a vertical axis rooted in the ground of inner peace. Your learned capacity for trusting others opened up a place deep within yourself where you can relax into being. A calm nervous system allows you to sink below all the agitations and ambitions of your personal life, into the cradling rhythm of your breath.
It’s likely this creative support of your breathing body is what inspired one of the most widely attested metaphors of the spiritual life (spiritus, ruach, pneuma, prana = breath). Its rhythm of taking in and letting go reveals the inner secret of life itself.
Enjoying inner peace, you can simply let things be; or you can use your creative freedom to bring about necessary change. The spiritual life is neither passive nor active, but engages reality with the understanding that “all is one” and “we’re all in this together.” Such a spiritual understanding allows you to be intentional rather than reactive, to live on purpose and by a higher purpose – higher (and larger) than your personal concerns (ego) and beyond the limited sphere of human interests alone.
With our consideration of inner peace, creative freedom, and higher purpose, we have arrived at the apex of the spiritual life. The mandala might lead you to conclude that coming into your higher purpose breaks past the plane of relationships and its dynamic balance of power and love. Perhaps a “fully self-actualized” human being is someone who possesses supernormal abilities of clairvoyance, teleportation, miraculous powers, and the like.
But in fact, the fulfillment of your spiritual life lies in a near-devotional commitment to love, and to forgive without conditions; to encourage and support others on their life journey; and to be the provident reality they can fully trust.
Tracts of Revolution 