Speak through me, O Mercurius, O Logos, O Christ, O Spirit of Wholeness

Psychological development in all its phases is a redemptive process. The goal is to redeem by conscious realization, the hidden Self, hidden in unconscious identification with the ego. - Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype



Imagine that before you hangs a great tapestry, like the kind that hugged the cold walls of medieval stone castles.

This great tapestry possesses a stunning beauty. 

With shining threads of every color, the tapestry depicts the cosmos: humans in joy and in torturous despair; water, earth, air, and fire; all sorts of animals and plants; angels singing and demons dancing; stars and black holes; every kind of pleasure and every kind of pain.

This great tapestry is you.

The wisdom (logos) that weaves the strands of the tapestry together into an intelligible, meanginful, purposive design is love: fondness, desire, eros.

Logos is Eros, Eros is Logos.  Love is the Law, Love Under Will.

Your inmost Self is the Wholeness of everything that exists, exquisitely, inextricably, interdependently intertwined:  hot and cold, life and death, instinct and spirit, masculine and feminine, kindness and cruelty, gain and loss, good and evil. 

Like it or not, you and me - everyone - we each contain the entire tapestry.  We’re all microcosms of the macrocosm. 

To realize this wholeness - fully, consciously, deliberately - and to act in alignment with it is the purpose, the destiny, the telos of our human lives. 

To realize this wholeness and to act in alignment with it is an accomplishment with many names: the fulfillment of the Great Work, the attainment of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, the achievement of individuation.

This accomplishment gives us meaning, purpose, inspiration, joy, and power.

We humans, uniquely capable of self-reflection, constitute the nervous system of the Earth, we (and beings like us elsewhere in the cosmos ) are God’s sole chance at becoming known to Godself.

How very sad it is, then, that most humans remain almost entirely unconscious of their wholeness - that is to say - they remain one-sided.

A one-sided person does not recognize a fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity, and evil within themselves, but only in others. 

A one-sided person lives under the delusion that they only like pleasure, kindness, intelligence, and goodness.

When such a person encounters the polar opposites of these, as we all must in the course of our lives, they tend to imagine themselves a tragic victim of an utterly alien, unrelated force - of wicked “others,” cruel Fate, or a meaningless, barren cosmos.  Furthermore, they tend to go to war against those “wicked” others who they see as the source of their troubles - a war that takes various forms: actual battle, break-up and divorce, political polarization, and self-destruction in every form of addiction.

As I write, a plague of one-sidedness has torn our contemporary culture in the United States apart.  We experience now a higher rate of divorce, depression, anxiety, suicide, and drug overdose than we ever have before.

Yet fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity and evil - when recognized and lovingly made conscious in oneself (for every strand belongs to the tapestry and makes the tapestry beautiful), can be consented to and loved.

  In this consenting love, our darkness can be rendered volitional, somatically experienced and integrated with the ordinary conscious ego.

When this integration happens, a person re-owns all of their projections.  With this re-owning, a person realizes their own Wholeness, their own complete Self, ceases to see themselves as a victim of wicked others, gains a great sense of humor and resilient humility, and becomes capable of contributing great genius to the world. 

Such a person isn’t perfect, but they sure are fun to be around.

Because one-sided people lack this recognition and integration, though, their fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity, and evil remains entirely outside their conscious knowledge and volition. 

This means that one-sided people impose pain, cruelty, stupidity and evil on themselves and on other people “sideways” - accidentally, unconsciously, and entirely without realizing what they’re doing.

As Jesus Christ said of the one-sided Roman soldiers who jabbed him with spears as he hung on the cross:

“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”