The Power of Coincidence (13 page)

The left is active; the right is receptive. Both sides have a gift dimension. Both are initiatory
and
consolatory. Yin and yang are indelible features of the human psyche. In every archetypal story, we see the hero exploring both shores of the river of experience. Our ego makes us fear or feel ashamed of visits to the right side. We may trust only effort and activity. Is this because we have noticed its noise-making drowns out our panic about the gap, the void that opens when we are not in full control? Is this what makes us more at home with changing things than with accepting things?

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE,
Julius Caesar

T
HE
E
MBRACE OF
E
FFORT AND
G
RACE

The Self cannot be gained by the Vedas, nor by understanding, nor by learning. He whom the Self chooses, by him the Self is gained. Nor is that Self to be gained by one who is destitute of strength or without earnestness or right meditation. . . . The wise, having reached him who is present everywhere, enter him wholly.

—U
PANISHADS

There is nothing to be attained, yet I engage in action.

—B
HAGAVAD
G
ITA

Our psychological work requires effort: handling fear; practicing assertiveness; dealing with inner child issues; addressing, processing, and resolving concerns in life and relationships; etc. Our spiritual practice requires effort: meditation, mindfulness, rituals, prayer, loving-kindness and compassionate action, etc. As we saw above, these are the equivalent of kneading dough. But for bread to result, there has to be a period of rising, in which work ceases and nature takes over. This is the equivalent of grace, a force that takes over where will, effort, and intelligence leave off. It is a mysterious endowment not a result of the work, yet it often cannot happen without the work, as our quotation from the Upanishads attests.

Both effort and grace are necessary for personal integration—as both psychological work and spiritual practice are necessary for wholeness. Effort is a choice; grace is a free gift, beyond our control or ability to predict. It cannot be conjured up at our initiative. The best we can do is simply to place ourselves in an apt position for grace to occur. Ultimately, however, effort may not yield transformation and grace may come our way with no effort at all. The muses are personifications of grace. Any writer knows that the muse cannot be seduced by our effort though we work hard anyway. The Greek poet Pindar refers to this mystery when he says, “If happiness is at all possible to us, it will take struggle. Yet a god may grant it to us even now.”

Here is a chart that may help show the connection between effort and grace based on what we have seen so far.

Grace, as we have been seeing, is the advocate archetype, the assisting force that helps the hero when he has nothing going for him but his limited ego. It is often symbolized as the aid of a god or an elixir, a talisman, or some form of magic. Grace is that which cannot be willed by ego; it is a free gift of the universe/God/Higher Power/Amitabha Buddha. We may instruct ourselves in knowledge using our intellect, but wisdom is a gift. We may progress in spiritual practice, but enlightenment is a gift. The attitude for work is to gird our loins; the attitude for grace is letting go. Now we see that letting go of ego is transcendence.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, recovery requires a spiritual program. Willpower will not suffice. A Higher Power refers to a source of power beyond what ego is capable of, that which transcends the limits of intellect and will. Our overly controlling ego will never yield only to effort. It takes grace to surrender it. This is the concept of the twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. “I am powerless” is an admission that ego is insufficient.“The Higher Power that can restore me to sanity” is the grace that picks up where the willpower of ego leaves off. We are already and always fitting vehicles for the light, thanks to the action of grace. Honest self-acceptance is thus an opening to grace.

Every one of us is like Pinocchio in the Disney cartoon. We were not born real; it is something we have to achieve by effort and receive by grace. At first we think becoming real/healthy/whole means being dutiful: “Go to school and follow your conscience”—things we can control. Soon we find it takes more than that. We have to confront our dark side. We have to notice how we lie, how we look for a quick fix, how we still believe our addictions can content us in ice-cream land. Then we find out that we have to go into the belly of the whale, the depths of the unconscious, and be inventive enough to light a fire to help others live. Only then are we reborn from the dark, that is, spit out of the whale’s mouth. Then and only then are we ready to become real, but we are still not real yet. We cannot achieve the final part of the transformation on our own. The Blue Fairy has to lean lovingly over the body of a broken boy, a disassembled, dissolved ego ready for rebirth. The Blue Fairy (feminine intervention) represents the grace that makes us whole. Effort (masculine power) was not enough, not even heroic effort. It takes the wand of grace to tap us in its own time for the process to be complete. The reality of liberation is achieved
and
received. We saw all this in the childhood cartoon. Now, in this paragraph, we see
into
it in a new way. This too is synchronicity.

Before the work, before the journey, we are still only makeshift persons, headpieces filled with straw, parts held together with ego’s unreliable mucilage. We are all wooden heads until we achieve a crossing of the thresholds of F.A.C.E. and receive the beatific vision of grace. Achievement may only congratulate and inflate the ego; grace reminds the ego of its limitations and then joyously completes it. Spiritual materialism is the illusion that enlightenment will happen by effort. Spiritual sanity and spiritual adulthood see past the omnipotent theatrics of ego and show gratitude for the play of grace.

Pinocchio’s story is a myth of our childhood. Joseph Campbell says, “The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our lives.” As another childhood example, we have the story of the sword in the stone, Excalibur, which tells us that spiritual power is hidden in the dark and can be released with ease if it is our destiny to release it. The special capacity comes only to the one who fits
this
story: only Arthur can free Excalibur, not knights from other ancestries or Prince Charmings from other tales. Our personal story is an apt birthplace for transformation.

Arthur can only grasp the sword when the time is right. An essential feature of grace is certainly timing, the corollary of synchronicity. The chick cannot break out of her shell until her beak is firm enough to crack it. Only then will her effort in pecking at the shell yield liberation from it. The timing is graceful and synchronous in that the food supply in the egg ends at precisely the time the chick is ready to emerge. This is also a metaphor for the work we achieve and the perfect grace we receive to make our work effective.

Timing also means pacing. Babies pace their birth unless they are rushed through it, in which case they suffer a birth trauma because they cannot track—feel the coherence of—their experience. Our respect for our own timing makes it possible for us to track ourselves and process our life events. This is how we become conscious and gain a sense of personal power.

Grace often enters the hero story at the moment when the time has come for the hero to acknowledge his inadequacy. This is the dismemberment theme; we find ourselves in pieces. A force comes to us that takes us beyond our own limits and enlarges us, that is, makes us whole. A hero story seems to require constant action, but within the struggle phase there is always a period of captivity, a pause that allows other forces to come into play. Robin Hood takes action, but then he is in chains until Maid Marian helps him. Even the dungeon, that is, the void, is part of the path.