Meriam Webester dictionary has pronounced “authentic” as the word of 2023.

Authenticity is a term I have always used to signal the primordial domain in archetypal wisdom. My first group course in 2023 was on the Deity Krishna and about “Authenticity as a sacred expression”. I should has said, Authenticity as THE sacred expression! The word of the year in 2022 was “gaslighting” It is no wonder that in 2023 we yearned for Authenticity amid the delusion of narratives that aim to fix Reality as meanings and ideologies. Usually such efforts lead to deception, and not just by others as we may also deceive ourselves in our anxiety for answers and definitions. We may rush to destinations simply because the unease of a shimmering Reality is unbearable.

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This video has been inspired by something that happened in one of my individual programs. This week, as I was practicing are working with one of the women in the program. She shared with me the teaching that emerged from her practice for the week. And this is what she said, You are the hero of your own life. Your job is not to save the world.

 

This was a very potent teaching very timely, not just for herself in her life, but also for me in terms of what I was experiencing this past few days and couple of weeks. And that is how it is always in these archetypal invocations that the insights and teachings that emerge are not just relevant to the person, but also to everybody who are in their space and invoking or co-creating that expression along with them.

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Anger is a contentious emotion. In our usual stories about anger, it is almost always a bad thing. It leads to violence and destruction. And a lot of the time we are asked to delete our anger to manage our anger or to overcome it completely. Indeed, we have this belief that without anger, we would all be better, better off. And on one level, that is absolutely true. And this is where I want to clarify, as I sometimes do, that, in these approaches, in these videos, we are not looking at it through a psychological lens. But we are considering it through an archetypal wisdom, which includes imagination, creativity, and the Deity, which is a very different thing to a psychological lens. The psychological lens and approach, of course, is extremely important. And we all go to it whenever we need it. But here, it is a different approach.

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Recently I went on an extraordinarily ordinary pilgrimage—to the sites around Canberra, the place where I live, where there are material connections to the geological “Deep Time” of the Earth.

These are humble places, one hidden under a busy overpass, one outside a government department exploring rocks for mining, and one under a major road. Of course, the land we stand on anywhere on Earth is “Deep Time” matter. These places just brought that fact to our attention.

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Suffering is a terrible word in our popular culture. Indeed, we would say that most of the spiritual traditions and philosophies exist, so that we escape suffering, whether it is called suffering or pain or sorrow, we have notions like enlightenment, or peace or transcendence, which are meant to escape from suffering or to eliminate or delete suffering from our lives. And who doesn't want to have a life without suffering.

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The popular proposition of the times that we live in is that human beings are social animals. And therefore, the best way for us to thrive and to be healthy is that we are in company, whether that is in the form of having a partner or a family, or being part of a community, a village, a town, a city, state, a nation, or being part of like-minded groups that share ideologies and values, but we are really told that it is in company that we thrive and that we are doing well. Indeed, sometimes even our very sense of belonging is about belonging, whether we belong in a relationship belong in a family belong in a community, or belong to a political entity, but we are told that even our very sense of belonging comes from something about being in a company or having a position or having a connection to a company.

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The mind must “understand” to find meaning. As we live in mind-led consciousness, we assume that understanding is the universal approach to Reality. Archetypal wisdom traditions propose creativity as an experiential expression of Reality which has nothing to do with “understanding”. One of the important wisdom invocations of this entirely different way of encountering Reality is the archetype of Water.

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For those of us who are engaged in spiritual inquiry, self inquiry, exploration of expansive states of consciousness, or even artistic and creative practices, we know that it's not really a place for analysis, those analytical capabilities of our mind, which are very useful to us in almost all of the other domains of our life, including in more personal areas like psychology and therapy, when it comes to the domain of those areas of the soul, or consciousness, or even creativity, or those areas of considering and enquiring into our divine or sacredness, it does not serve us well, the very those very frames of analysis. They don't serve us well.

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Sometimes spirituality becomes an escape from the daily grind. Every day, for most of us, we have these routines, which are very mechanistic. Who doesn't have to deal with bureaucracies, with computer updates with paying bills, with routines to support family members, whether it's taking children to school or to their activities, taking care of people that are not well in the family, and all these very ordinary things which constitute this daily grind of our lives. And sometimes spirituality becomes the way in which we can replenish ourselves, nourish ourselves, nurture ourselves away from the daily grind.

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It's very common in archetypal traditions to invite a contemplation of ancientness. And it can take different forms in different traditions. So for example, in some traditions, this is the worship of ancestors or forefathers, or it could be in the form of deities that represent an ancientness. For example, there is the goddess Dhumavathi in Indian archetypal tradition, who is presented as an aging body, a goddess inhabiting an aging body, who walks around at the margins of time in lonely deserts, and who is feared and revered, in equal measure.

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