As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with things when building the association
beyond words is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the abyss between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
-Rilke
Once we are willing and able to give ourselves over an embodied sense of lived adventure and lived ordeal doors begin to open for us, leading us into the realm of living myths – where metaphors, psychic representations and ambiguity rule the terrain, and our more simplistic, black and white thinking gradually falls away, being of no use.
By allowing an adventure or an ordeal to unfold itself before us, we can learn to approach our own interior spaces assymbolic representations – as dark forests, wide-open desert plains, vast mountain ranges, deep ocean waters or dark underground caves.
By moving beyond our habitual and dualistic judging states (judgments that blame either one’s self or the world around us), we return to the open wonder of a child’s curious and exploratory heart, capable of resilience, surprise and delight.
This is the realm of adventures and ordeals that start to feel ‘otherworldly’, as we are now more capable of being moved by the unfolding events of this world, of being caught up in states of wonder or rapture, and of being engrossed in our full participation with whatever serendipity is taking place in front of us. By participating in this way, the painful aspects of life feel less personal, and the pleasurable aspects of life hold more richness and nourishment for us.
The German sage and poet Rilke reminds us of this early childhood capacity. He encourages us to make use of this state of ‘alive vulnerability’, as we move out beyond the boundaries of the familiar, and open up to the ‘not knowing’ of what lies ahead.
We come to accept that we cannot predict nor pre-determine what comes next for us on any worthwhile adventure, any more than we could predict or pre-determine what dream we will have tonight.
But we can begin to imagine possibilities where they did not exist for us before, and we can learn to move beyond our own familiar bounds towards what has previously threatened us, building what Rilke calls ‘the great arch’ of previously unimagined bridges, beyond any opposing forces, sides, and polarities.
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Once we enter a state of awareness that takes us past thinking in dualities, we find ourselves on more complexground, where uncertainties and mysteries abide – in between and beyond the conflicting ane escalating pairs of opposites. This ‘in-between’ space is where we can be susceptible to varied states of wonder, curiosity, and intrigue – but only if we can bear the unknown of it. This is the pathway towards bliss.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
It is a remarkable achievement indeed to move beyond unwieldy conceptualizations and over-simplifications, and to move beyond our reactionary judgments, and our reflexive negating and oppositional, contentious attitudes.
Instead, we can find ourselves able to enter more deeply and intimately into our felt senses. Now we become more able to respond with authenticity to our spontaneous encounters with the life that is taking place all around us. We can have awareness of a felt sense of life being animated, even illuminated, around us and within us.
To work with things when building the association
beyond words is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
To be able to experience and understand a felt sense of beauty, vitality and mystery is to move beyond our associations with words. We don’t become mesmerized by the menu of concepts, and we don’t confuse it with the meal of lived experience. We can enter the fullness and satisfaction of living into mysteries that can lead us beyond the need for answers or solutions, and into ineffable states of being, where ‘words turn back’.
Yet we also no longer wish to simply be swept along by events that happen in our lives. We want to move past our initial reactions, and instead help shape the tides of life, help to influence others in positive ways. We want to be capable of leaving our mark upon the adventures we have, contributing something that matters, and shifting the bounds of fate towards a realizable destiny.
But in order to do so, as the poet Gary Snyder said, we have to be willing to live with complexity, paradox, and the ability to forgive. And this makes all the difference.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the abyss between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
As we pass through the thresholds of our self-limiting ego identifications and our polarizing states of duality, we practice the power of spanning the abysses of life.
We learn ways to rise above the pitfalls of our own ignorance, our biased points of view, our polarizing contentiousness, and our limiting shortsightedness. We at last learn how to span the limitations that have kept us bound to the same issues, the same patterns, in the same way, over and over again.
It is here, riding on the arch of the soul’s adventure by bearing the challenges of life’s ordeals, that we discover that by facing our obstructions, we actually create the conditions necessary for our personal transformation – this is how we know we have made a successful passage through the threshold crossing.
When this difficult soul work of bridging oppositional forces happens within us, we can be carried to new states of consciousness; we can feel new energy sources awakening within; and we gain new insights that can reverberate and penetrate through us, revealing common ground and universal connections wherever we look.
When we experience this unitive communal field of shared presence, it confirms for us that we have now entered the living realms of myth, and soul will now determine our direction going forward, not our ego.
In fact, as Meister Eckhart once said, we will find ourselves ‘doing exactly what we would be doing if we felt most secure’, even in the most precarious and uncertain circumstances of our lives.