Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, and having seen it, to find one in himself.
– Plato
What would it be like if such a universal pattern did exist? How might this change the way we live our lives?
Imagine all things in the entire Creation making up an interconnected whole. Imagine a world in which the explicit purpose of life is to realize the wholeness of the entire creation, to serve the good of the whole, and to live out our lives in wonderment of and in harmony with that whole.
In this wholeness, everything is so interdependent that apparent opposites – like yin and yang, feminine and masculine – are complementary, interrelated halves of the same whole, balancing, integrating, uniting, and transcending their assumed duality.
A big clue to our living into this wholeness is found in the Hermetic principle of “As above, so Below; all things accomplishing the miracles of the One Thing.” This is the vision of wholeness that Plato offers us, too. A pattern set up in the heavens that we can find in ourselves as well.
What if there were even more ways we could discover this pattern in ourselves? It turns out that such a pattern can be uncovered and decoded within the structure of a story itself. This hidden thread of wholeness connecting us all also runs deep in mythology, mysticism, ritual, and psychology.
In mythology, this pattern is seen as a journey of departure, initiation, and return. In mysticism, it is a process of awakening, purification, and union. In ritual, it is separation, transition, and incorporation. And, in psychology, it takes in the stages of the birth of the ego, death of the ego, and the birth of the whole self.
This central pattern of transformation is evident in the basic structure of a story, which is not just the beginning, middle, and end, but on a much deeper and more meaningful level beginning, muddle, and resolution.
The muddles, or challenges we face, are the core of the pattern bringing the process of transformation to its completion, or resolution. When we merge all these ways of knowing and practices into one, we come up with a blueprint for living into the wholeness that brings with it a unitive consciousness. This blueprint consists of 3 main parts: Call to Wholeness, Path of Purification, and Return to Wholeness, as described further in A New Story of Wholeness.
This pattern is part of our archetypal DNA. It guides our evolving consciousness, transforms our lives, keeps our focus on the wholeness of all things, and keeps humanity on its evolutionary path.
We become aware of this universal pattern as we communicate more with the inner realm and as the eternal bursts forth from our unconscious, giving us a timeless understanding that countless others have experienced before us. When this happens, everything changes.
In living this universal pattern, a roadmap for achieving the greatest expansion of consciousness that is humanly possible, we not only fulfill our innate potential but by naturally wanting to pass on its understanding to others we also transform the world in the process.
Living into our wholeness includes wrestling with our demons, dancing with our angels, making plans with our inner guide, and connecting with our soul, resulting in a deeply lived life.
In this process, we discover that, at our essence, we are more like others than not. And we experience the sense of union with creation that comes through service to, and deep interpersonal relationships with, others.
The goal of the process of remembering our unitive consciousness is not to escape from the world, or even union with the Creator, but to the fullest possible spiritual development through our work in the world.
As we tap into this unitive consciousness, we become the social artists needed today to ensure Earth’s well-being as a living organism in need of collaborative relationships and dynamic coevolutionary partnerships on a planetary scale. Our personal and collective evolution of consciousness depends on living in this wholeness. As we do so, telling our own story of how we’ve experienced this wholeness, we connect the human family, one story at a time.
Adapted from A New Story of Wholeness: An Experiential Guide for Connecting the Human Family by Robert Atkinson (November 2022)
You can learn more about this here and by visiting Dr. Robert Atkinson’s website
