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The Uncertainty Principle
...a quest for authenticity in Self ownership

 A world of absolutes enables us to clearly distinguish between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and consequently good and evil. Unfortunately, the land of black and white is an illusion of denial. The nature of life on this planet changes as the evolution of mass consciousness changes. Our truths unfold antiquating former beliefs and revealing new understandings.

In the Piscean Age the duality of roles was clearly defined: wives and husbands, parents and children, teacher and pupil. These paradigms for behavioral patterns were confusingly dissolved as the Aquarian Age crept in. Students became the mirror of their teachers while children became guides for parents. The discovery of anima and animus turned each set of partners into four personalities.

The new age fostered voice for questions relating to spirit, eternity and infinity. The absolutes of Newtonian physics were suddenly threatened by particle theory. Solid matter couldn’t be considered constant. The Uncertainty Principle indicated that atoms respond to being witnessed! What a wonderful time to embrace a practice of esoteric traditions from the far side of the globe!

In our profound uncertainty, the mythic seeker within desperately needs a sense of stability. We desire a constant which has endured the evolution of civilization and religious thought. As we bear witness to images of mysticism, we find a resonance of longing. Being lost in our fragmented traditions, we project a neediness onto “savior surrogates”. Spoken or unspoken, we yearn to be sheltered by an authentic guide.

We often use the phrase, “meeting our needs”. Unconscious needs can get us into unfathomed dramas. For example, we find at our 2nd chakra a need to create. The essence of giving and receiving is conscious at the 4th chakra. Less articulated is our need to adore and to be adored. The Divine within is provoked when touched by a spark of Impersonal truth. Imagine this as a recipe for failed attempts at bramacharya:

We are limited expressions of a ubiquitous Divine. In being such we unwittingly seek witness. In being such we long for affiliation. Enter the master, the guru, the mentor. We think we are following a tour guide through an exclusive trek through Nirvana. The basic psychology is that we are setting ourselves up to display dramatic projections.

So we work with yoga... the body, the breath, the ideology, the ego shattering and the raising of kundalini. Yippie! We refine our diets, we embrace our acts of tapas, and we access pulses of Impersonal truth. In the reality of this fire, there is a primitive reaction to the awe of an epiphany. We try to touch the intangible, and we are helplessly burned by the grail.

If kundalini left the lower chakras in order to rise, we might avoid some incumbent distress. But alas, like mercury in a thermometer, the force stretches from the root through each zone of life, right to the heart. We are vulnerable to qualities of love, and we are vulnerable to the unspoken need to adore. Acknowledged or not, we have to offer devotion. Our culture doesn’t recognize the somatic reality of adoration any more than it does the need to create.

It seems that praising God in India is a very physical process. Real blood runs from sacrifices at the Kali altars. 10,000 prostrations are offered for Ram. Physical work in a very manual culture uses the first three chakras in a way that our air conditioned, elementally insulated, holistic centers don’t.

It’s possible that Eastern cultures project love ideals directly toward the Source. Rumi exemplifies this practice in poems to God, his Beloved:

Every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own Lord is making love with me.

In a black and white world, fingers can be pointed and accusations noted. “This is your role, and you broke the rules.” It’s possible that we long to escape the responsibility of our personal journeys, “I hand my welfare over to my teacher.” While working with tremendous depth in the hidden psyche, we need to consider if this path of total surrender is feasible. The lineages of Eastern ashrams explore systematically shattering perceptions of self. Here in the Western world of the Aquarian Age, we have many demands on functional boundaries, conscious processing and outer world contracts.

Our teachers can’t be expected to bear the weight of our God projections. They aren’t above reacting to our unconscious acts of devotion. In this age of universal oneness, we each walk in ownership of a developing consciousness. Free will may invite us to choose a teacher, however, we are in an age of mirrored and amorphous identities. As we are taught, so too we teach.

by Toni Zuper
Alternative Healing
Center City, Philadelphia

published in Yoga Living -- November 2004 issue