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The universe will take care of you by making you get up and tend to your business. The universe unfolds in an optimal way, and part of that unfoldment happens through you and your actions. When you have a lot of basic trust, you are courageous and authentic. You take risks. You don’t sit on your capacities. You engage in life wholeheartedly, doing what feels appropriate to you with the confidence that it will work out.
The trust affects your mind in such a way that you begin to see that whatever happens is right even if it’s painful, and things that you had thought were bad turn out not to be bad.
You see that everything that exists in the world is just right and that whatever happens is just right, that what is can’t be added to or subtracted from. This is the Idea of Holy Perfection.
We all want to be at peace with ourselves, with our lives, with whatever situation we find ourselves in. We don’t know how to do that, so we are always struggling and fighting with our reality, trying to bring about some harmony and relaxation, some lessening of worry and fear. But all we need to do is to quit struggling with ourselves and with reality. When it is said that suffering ceases when one is realized or enlightened, what is meant is that the struggling ceases. Enlightenment is not a matter of not feeling pain, but of not fighting it.
Basic trust, then, is synonymous with being realized, with being settled, with not struggling. When we say not struggling, we mean not struggling with yourself. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make efforts.
We don’t trust that if we relax, we will have the capacities, we will have the intelligence, we will have the strength, we will have the compassion that we need to deal with our lives.
We experience ourselves as abandoned, outcast, left on our own—and not only on our own, but lacking and deficient in capacities. We experience ourselves as alone, isolated, separated, not being provided for by the universe, and at the same time, small, unable, and without what it takes to provide for ourselves. So we live in a constant state of fear. This is the basic position of ego.
Because our minds are so complicated and disharmonious, it takes a lot of work, intelligence, and energy to penetrate the thick complexity and darkness, to discover what the actual truth of reality is.
Or you are tired, for instance, and you want to just relax and maybe read the newspaper or watch a little TV, but does your mind leave you alone? “How can I rest when there are things I haven’t done? How about my responsibilities? Am I wasting my time or not? Am I being indulgent? I should have rested before—I’m tired because I don’t give myself time to rest.” If you observe yourself, you will see an almost continuous commentary going on inside.
What determines whether a soul has basic trust? Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of Being that we call Living Daylight. We call it this because if one’s perception is subtle enough to visually see and kinesthetically feel the substance of one’s consciousness, it actually looks like daylight, and is felt as an alive consciousness.
The first level of experiencing it is to perceive that it is everywhere; the second level is to see that everything comes out of it; and the deepest level is to know that everything is made of it. At this deepest level, everything in the universe is seen to be originating in, bathed in, and constituted by, Living Daylight.
In the Hindu tradition, it is called satchitananda, which expresses the experiential qualities of this aspect of Being.
When it is experienced through the mind, it is experienced as light and consciousness. When it is experienced through the heart, it is experienced as universal boundless love. When it is experienced through the belly, it is experienced as a pervading conscious presence. When you feel it in the belly, you feel that you are held, contained, enfolded by a loving presence, and that this presence is what really exists in the world.
Living Daylight is the most accessible of what we call the boundless cosmic dimensions.
Living Daylight is the first of these boundless or universal dimensions, meaning that it is the beginning of seeing that the whole universe is animate and conscious—pervaded by an intelligent consciousness. It is sometimes experienced as a sense of blessing, which in Sufism is called baraka.
Living Daylight is a boundless dimension and at the same time the source of basic trust, it functions as the appropriate holding for the soul in the transition from individual experience to the boundless unity of Being.
This idea of the universe being conscious and animate, alive and intelligent, comes from very early in the history of human consciousness. It is one of the oldest and most basic ideas in religion, spirituality, and philosophy.
So the experience of this alive consciousness at the level of Living Daylight is that the universe is pervaded by love, that it is love, and that everything within it is an expression of love.
If you let go, things will be okay. If you let yourself not know, you will be guided.
So the psychodynamic issues that we have in relation to any aspect of Being are determined by what we experienced during the associated developmental period. However, when it comes to the essential quality of Living Daylight, which gives the soul basic trust, the situation is different. The specific issue associated with this quality has more to do with the overall container for the whole of our childhood development, rather than with one particular period.
From the direct experience of Living Daylight, we can see that the situation in childhood that contributes to the sense of basic trust is what is referred to in the psychological literature as the “holding environment.”
Winnicott, an important figure in the British object relations school. What he calls the holding environment is the environment during the first year or so of life, the period of infancy before the child begins to develop a separate sense of self. Initially, the environment is the womb; later on it is the arms that held you, mother’s lap, perhaps father and other people, the environment of your crib, your bedroom, your house—the whole situation. So “holding environment” here means the totality of the surroundings and the general feel of it through the formative years.
If the environment is a good holding environment, it makes you feel taken care of, protected, understood, loved, and held in such a way that your consciousness—which at the beginning is unformed, fluid, and changeable—can grow spontaneously and naturally on its own.
Your soul needs an environment that is dependable, consistent, attuned to your needs, and that provides for you in a way that is empathic to those needs. This is the ideal environment for human growth. If the environment has a good sense of holding, you will experience basic trust.
matters of maternal care of the holding variety that when things go well the infant has no means of knowing what is being properly provided and what is being prevented.
It is only when there is some disruption in the holding that the lack of trust or confidence begins to be experienced.
Physical holding is the most obvious instance of the holding environment. Infants like being held by the mother or father, but they need to be held in the right way. Anyone can carry a baby, but not everyone can hold a baby in such a way that the child senses that it is loved, it is being communicated with, it is understood, it is merged with, it is secure, its body is molded with.
The holding environment includes the psychological, the physical, the emotional, the spiritual—the totality of the world the child lives in.
soul feels supported by the environment and therefore, intrinsically connected to the universe. The soul can then experience its Beingness in a continuous way, without disruptions from the environment, and that sense of Beingness can develop and mature. The child feels himself to be an inherent part of the universe as a unique expression of it.
With ‘the care that it receives from its mother’ each infant is able to have a personal existence, and so begins to build up what might be called a continuity of being.
This continuity allows the child to develop into a mature human being; this is what we call the process of individuation.
If the holding isn’t there or isn’t dependable, the child will try to manipulate herself, her parents, and/or the environment to bring it about.
By having to react to the loss of holding, the child is no longer simply being, and the spontaneous and natural unfoldment of the soul has been disrupted.
The less holding there is in the environment, the more the child’s development will be based on this reactivity, which is essentially an attempt to deal with an undependable environment. The child will develop mechanisms for dealing with an environment that is not trustworthy, and these mechanisms form the basis of the developing sense of self, or ego.
Implicit in the ego, then, is a fundamental distrust of reality.
The Enneagram maps the various ways the ego develops to deal with the absence, disruptions, ruptures, and discontinuities of holding. The reaction for Point One is to try to make the holding happen by improving oneself. For Point Two, it is to deny the need for holding but, nonetheless, be manipulating and seducing the environment to provide it. For Point Three, it is to deny the need for it but pretend to oneself, “I can do it on my own. I know how reality can be and how I’m going to develop and I’ll make it happen.” For Point Four, the loss or absence of holding is counteracted by denying
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Because there are degrees of holding and of impingement, and because no holding environment is without failures, we typically develop a real (essential) and a false (egoic) self in varying proportions. Basic trust is usually not totally missing, but it is seldom complete. To have absolute basic trust is to be completely realized.
In order to develop basic trust, and consequently more contact and identification with Being, we need to experience the lack of holding imprinted on our souls. As with any other aspect or dimension of Being, we must first work through the resistance to experiencing the absence or “hole” of it, and then when we fully experience this hole, the missing quality will arise. The effect of the hole of Living Daylight in early childhood is experienced in adulthood in many ways. Emotionally, it will be felt as the need for holding and the sense that no one and nothing is holding you.
This can lead to the physical sense that there is a kind of emptiness in the belly which makes you feel as if you are suspended in a cold and inhospitable space.
sense of basic trust is also increased each time you experience the environment responding to you in a supportive way and each time you experience yourself being held in one way or another. In the process of spiritual work, each time you move beyond your usual sense of reality and of who you are—each time you jump into the abyss with its sense of disintegration or fragmentation and accompanying fear—and you experience Being coming through, giving you a sense of support, a sense of relief, of satisfaction, of meaning, your basic trust is strengthened. The more experiences you have that involve
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This issue is a specific barrier to experiencing Living Daylight, especially on the level of the heart, where we refer to it as Loving Light. The barrier is a kind of resistance that often takes the form of a profound skepticism about the existence of such a loving intelligence: “This sounds like a lot of new age bullshit to me!” Or it may take the form of anger: “If there is such an intelligence, where has it been all my life? Where was it when I needed it?”
These reactions are manifestations of disbelief in, distrust of, lack of faith in, paranoia about, suspicion of, a sense of betrayal by, anger at, or even hatred of, this intelligence. The issue here is your relationship to this intelligence, which—if you conceive of it theistically—is your relationship with God.
These reactions have a history of hurt, frustration, and a sense of betrayal by God, and they are universal in the sense that everyone who is identified with an ego experiences them in one form or another.
The distrust that is fundamental to the egoic perspective is based on not experiencing the goodness of the universe. From this distrust arises what we call the Beast, the part of the ego that is not only frustrated and angry, but also hates what is good and positive. When you are experiencing the Beast, if there is any love, you hate it and want to destroy it. “Where has it been? Where was it when I needed it?” or “God is supposed to be all-loving, all-merciful, all-compassionate, but if that’s true, why am I suffering so much and why is the world such a mess?”
Unless you have worked it through, everyone has anger toward God or the universe, however you conceive of it.
The issue of the Beast arises when Living Daylight is experienced through the heart as a quality of light that is loving and holding. The Loving Light is what some call Christ consciousness: universal, boundless, unconditional love and light. As the Loving Light arises and begins to affect ego activity, what it does specifically is erase egoic hope. Love is action in the now, while hope is for the future. So, as the love arises, it affects the egoic hope, and the more you let go of the hope, the more ego activity ceases. Loving Light arises as a result of seeing the hope as a central part of
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If you do act out your hatred, of course it is destructive. But many people believe that just feeling the hatred will be destructive.
The Beast is a very specific issue related to the essential quality of Power. The essential Power of the soul is caught up in, and distorted by, the hatred and pride in the Beast structure.
If you are able to feel the hatred without resistance or acting out, the hatred will transform into essential Power. This Power can penetrate the delusions that keep the ego’s reactivity in place and it can allow the soul to become still enough so that the quality of love can affect its state and its perception.
frustration about early nourishment and love; this structure we call the Jackal and it has to do with the experience of negative merging (see Chapter 20, The Pearl Beyond Price, Almaas, 1988). The Jackal state is a more animal-like sense in which the quality of the soul is deep suffering, burning frustration, and aggression. When this is happening, you are experiencing the actual negativity in the soul that appeared partly in response to frustration and also in response to being merged with mother in the symbiotic stage when she was in a negative state.
