Finding Our Chosen Relations and Redefining Marriage & Family: Searching for Deeper Patterns of Wholeness

Our search for deeper and more highly integrated patterns of wholeness is this blogs focus. Our search for relationship, for family, for keeping a marriage together, and the dervish way of life (wandering) is intertwined with the archetypal myth that we have been split apart. This realization that without relationship we live in a state of alienation or exile constitutes the first necessary step toward finding a true sense of community, and a true sense of communion with our earth/body.

Throughout our evolutionary history we have known this as our search for our lost half, and the story of star-crossed lovers, such as the Egyptian myth of Isis, Osiris, and his ememy-brother Set. Jealous of his brother's wholeness, Set cuts Osiris into pieces and scatters the fragments of his dismembered body all over the world. Coming to his rescue, Isis sets out on a quest throughout the world: seeking to find the dissociated/divided or no longer familiar fragments if her psychic other, her lost sense of wholeness, her original self. Eventually Isis succeeds in reassembling Osiris's fragments: ". . . except that his generative member could not be found. So Isis fashioned a new one and impregnated herself by it" (Metzner: 104, 1998). Using the language of Western psychology, Set is a metaphor that characterizes our shadow-self and represents addiction.

In referring to this search for our lost half we often tend to believe it means finding a lost physical part of our self that we have become divided from, which represents our cosmic twin. This is the personal mythology I once had about finding our lost half. Through my experiences with love, loss, and human relationships, I have continued to revise my own thinking about this search for our lost half. I now believe that this search refers to finding that person or persons who, through our interaction with them, assist us in discovering and remembering the unconscious characteristics of our personality that we could not otherwise actualize in our conscious awareness. These are the people that help us become whole, assisting us in remembering the lost constellations of our self. These are the people that help us heal our psychic fragmentation, that assist us in freeing ourselves from our dismembered state of consciousness. These are the people that "know where we are coming from" and with whom our dynamic interchange and dialogue serves to create something new together. Places we typically refer to as "sacred" are also able to serve as "organizing fields of conscious awareness that can help us to remember and make us whole." Indeed we are called to visit these places in the same way that we are called to be united with a particular community, group or loved one.

Regarding our search for family, for community, and a sense of belongingness, Ralph Metzner provides us with an excellent summary of the archetypal search for our lost half. Metzner tells us that this search has "been beautifuly expressed in the following paradoxical saying by the great 13th-century Chinese Zen Master Ekai, also called Mumon":

"When you understand, you belong to the family;
When you do not understand, you are a stranger.
Those who do not understand belong to the family,
And when they understand they are strangers.

The first line (above) refers to our ordinary situation--accepting conventional social reality and experiencing the acceptance of belonging to a 'normal' family. But, as the second line states, one who awakens, who expeiences inner realities and questions previous beliefs, will feel like a stranger in the conventional world. The third line tells us that those who seek and question, searchig for knowledge and enlightenment, find then that they are part of another family, the family of other alienated seekers, others "who do not understand." The are for him or her what Goethe called the 'Wahlverwandschaften,' the 'chosen relations.' As the fourth line states, these alienated seekers understand only that they are strangers in this world, and because they understand this, they do, in fact, in the eyes of the unawakened, become strangers. This is why in so many cultures there are traditions of the 'holy fool,' the 'wise idiot,' the eccentric, quirky person who turns out to be the most enlightened one of all" (Metzner: 253-254, 1998).

Reference

Metzner, Ralph. (1998). The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience. Novato, CA: Origin Press.