Trading Your Map for a Compass – Part II
When you finally realize you must exchange your map for a compass, it always comes with great fear, because it means you are stepping into the unknown. You come into a certain ennui or dysthymia or cynicism and you know you must change.
What had been a knowing now becomes a calling. Is it from God? Maybe. I can’t say I really understand these things. But I do know that this calling comes from place deeper than the ego. It comes from the realm of the soul.
When you come to this place of having been called, you will find you are right on time, ready to collect the gods who have arrived down at the station. With trembling, you embark on a path in service to the numinosity of those gods wanting to make themselves known through you. Previously, we avoided engaging in that endeavor because we were not sure we wanted the gods to make themselves known through us. Doing so comes with a responsibility we are hesitant to accept.
The world is desperately in need of the gods making themselves known through us. It is how we are touched by the numinous, an experience we all crave. It is why we cram into concert halls and theaters, hoping to be transported onto a higher plain by a person or persons who are open to the gods making themselves known through them.
We have no idea why Stonehenge exists. When I visited Stonehenge with my daughter Jael, I did my own musing as to its existence. I thought, “Some powerful person had a profoundly meaningful experience on this plain. Maybe this is where they fell in love, brought here by their heart’s desire because the love of their life knew exactly where to sit and watch the sunset on the summer solstice. The person later paid homage to that luminous moment by using their power to engage an army in moving a lasting tribute into place, where for millennia the solstice sun would be captured between the stones every year. The encased sun a reminder of that moment of luminosity from so many years ago.”
It was just a fantasy, but it meets all the requirements of a moment of numinosity. I have a water color of Stonehenge just outside my therapy office. I always hope my clients might search for their own explanation for the stones as they come and go.
When moments of numinous beauty arrive, we desperately want to memorialize them. We set them in stone as a way to hang onto them for as long as we breathe and beyond. This is what religious dogma represents. Jungian analyst James Hollis calls it the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience itself is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is little more than thoughts after the moment of numinosity. It is afterthought, and in its desire to hold onto the ephemeral, it is transformed into dogma.
Dogma is trying to encase a numinous experience in a plaster cast we can place on a holy shelf. To those who did not experience the numinosity, it is but an empty shell vainly trying to hold an experience. It might be a family Bible on the coffee table, unopened for decades but representative of something that was alive to someone once upon a time. It no longer has a heartbeat. Dogma is doomed to fail in its attempt to encase a numinous experience in time.
We cannot live in the dogma of someone else’s numinous moment. We must experience our own.
The most numinous of experiences do have a timeless quality. The experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. We have all said of such as experience, “It was as if time stood still.” The lingering of a moment is a true gift.
I always knew I was transgender, but in my sixth decade I came to realize it was more than a knowing, it was a calling. I wrote about it in my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. The journey was perilous. I lost all of my jobs, my pension, my friends, pretty much everything from my past life but my family and a couple of friends. My life now is marked by discontinuity from my previous life. In many ways it feels as if my life began twelve years ago. I dislike the discontinuity. My dreams are filled with narratives attempting to reengage with my past life, all of them fruitless. When evangelicalism expels you, it expels you for good.
The last dozen years have been incredibly productive. I have influenced far more lives and engaged in more experiences than ever. I have done three TED Talks with over 10 million views. I’ve coached TED speakers. I have been interviewed by more media outlets than I can count. I have spoken for scores of companies, conferences, and universities all over the world. I have written two books and built a thriving therapy practice. I started a church, and have preached at dozens of churches around the nation. I serve as the mayor pro tem of Lyons, Colorado. And I am humbled by the reality that countless numbers of people from all over the world have told me how inspired they are by my journey. For them, I have been a source of light.
I find all of that more than fascinating, because I still have the same human flaws I have always had. I am too needy of the spotlight, too impatient, always in a hurry. I rarely have an unexpressed thought. I continue to be prone to dysthymia and think the sky is falling when I receive any kind of bad news. It is quite a paradox that people find the numinous through someone with so many manifest weaknesses.
When you trust the soul to follow its own compass instead of someone else’s map, people want to know you. They want to understand where you found the strength to set aside the conventional for the road less travelled. They are looking for someone a step or two in front of them on the journey toward authenticity, and they realize that for them at least, you are that person. The gods are making themselves known through you.
The responsibility is heavy. You warn these fellow travelers of the rocks and shoals that want to smash your boat to pieces, including the ones yet to be faced. You do not want them to follow you, but to be moved by your journey to find their own compass, their own true north, their own journey toward living authentically. Then the gods will make themselves known through them too. This is how we all move forward.
I am grateful I abandoned my maps for a compass. I may not know the specifics of where I will journey next, but I do know the direction of true north.
And so it goes.
