Point 5: Inner Lines

Line 5 – 7: Active; Personal to Transpersonal

It’s easy to feel hopeless at point 5. We see the Garden along the line from 5 to 7, but we can’t find a way inside. We feel locked out, lost, having come so far from where we began. It seems like we will never reach the Garden even though we are actually closer than ever.

Prayer, meditation, dance/trance; however your cultural background recommends that you reach out towards what is beyond your personality is needed here. The act of prayer or meditation may have no immediate result. The transpersonal is not controlled or constrained by the personal. It enjoys at least one additional degree of freedom. The act of reaching out toward the transpersonal is not an attempt to make something happen. As Jim Morrison once said “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.” You can remind yourself that the Lord is, although She does not “exist.” Whatever it is that She does, it is more than existence.

Line 7 – 5: Receptive; Transpersonal to Personal

On rare and random occasions, without warning, without our having earned it, the transpersonal reaches out to us. Paul on the road to Damascus, the inspiration of the creative artist or scientist, the still small voice that’s nearly impossible to hear and even harder to trust. All of these are the action of Grace.

Line 5 – 8: Active; Personal to Transpersonal

This line represents the power of active imagination: not dreaming or fantasizing, but making a mental image, creating a “what if?” scenario, a thought experiment, entering into an emotion that we have created. We can access the power to move beyond our limitations, if only for a moment. At point 2 the vision of unconditional love happens automatically. At point 5 it requires an active effort to make that connection. This is an opportunity that was not available at point 4, where we have to console ourselves with the memory of having fallen in love.

Line 8 – 5: Receptive; Transpersonal to Personal

It’s a paradox that the imperfections appear so harshly because we now have a different kind of contact with the goal, the fulfillment of the path of relationship. This is the fire, the heat that will transmute our own substance, our real selves. A potato or a pork chop just goes into the oven. We have to voluntarily submit to the fire at point 5. With the sun of unconditional love in the background, our limitations appear as elongated shadows etched onto the landscape of our life together. At point 5 we are required to bear things we cannot stand: about each other and about ourselves. Point 5 puts us on the dark side of the moon.

Seeing perfect freedom and the freedom of perfection from our own imperfect, conditioned existence, we realize the gap between the two. It seems unbridgeable because our attention has collapsed into the foreground and we’ve lost sight of the background against which the insoluble problem stands out so clearly. Submitting to the fire means bearing our own unpleasant manifestations.