Prodigal Return: Community of Self

We are all Prodigal Sons (and Daughters).  We get lost, we run away, we dismiss and disappear.  We separate from our (internal) beloveds, waste our resources and stray from goodness.  Goodness we have inhabited and goodness being extended to us.  We turn away. And we turn away again.  The letting go is cloaked, the truth of it masked. Until the day we come back "home"; stripped, beaten and humbled.  And we are faced with open arms by those internal parts of ourselves that have missed us, longed to be all together, wishing to be whole again.

Homecoming begins when we start paying attention to the tug of "home".  The collective beloved's voice is heard, calling for us to return, a momentary distraction from the familiar turning away.  It's not the voice of guilt or shame or outer authority that hounds and interjects repeatedly on the sojourn, but the "real-deal" voice.  The real-deal voice of the collective beloved having qualities that aren't etched in despair and judgement.  The voice is usually small, quiet and direct; it's heartfelt, not critical  Most of all the voice is patient; its had to be, it's been drowned out and silenced for lengthy periods of time, repeatedly.

photo: Elliott Erwitt

How does that part stay within, stay alive with all the frequent internal abandonment that goes on?  Possibly, that part is of a larger community.  As Lee van Laer (Zen, Yoga, Gurdjieff- perspectives on inner work)  aptly says: "Everything actually begins in/ends in community. The perception of isolation is essentially egoistic. God/Dharma are all-inclusive; we simply don't sense it. Born together, we die together... there isn't any separation except the separation we impose on ourselves."

It would seem we don't have a sense of this community in ourselves because we don't often have a modicum of relaxation present in our collective parts; body, mind and spirit.  We are desensitized by stress and overstimulation.  That voice of home calling us to return requires a sensitization, a regular state of relaxation for us to hear it and for us to return to it.  The community of self needs awareness and some attention to be activated.

van Laer indicates the community of Oneness, the Collective is itself singular. The Community's "parts simply sense themselves as individuals because the individuality that births the community is at a higher level... unknowable. Essential."  This statement resonates with the idea we are a rippling microcosmos of the great macrocosmos.  Our physiologies reflect this.  Our varied self-ecosystems also reflect this.  It would seem the separation our humanness insists upon, whether it be in the prodigal state or condition of prejudice, fails to recognize or experience the relationship.  Oneness, Self Community is both singular and not, much like the universe is single and also comprised of star/planet systems.  This "likeness" (another ring in the ripple of the Eternal, of the Oneness) is in, on and within all layers of everything.  With all this relatedness everywhere, the Community of the Self and otherwise so manifested, it's kind of astounding there is ever a sense of being prodigal at all.  Which brings us to the notion of illusion in what I call (my) reality.  If there is all this relatedness present, how is it one could ever think or act differently from that truth?  What is the illusion in my reality that fails to recognize the relatedness to myself, others and the world at large?  that fails to know the community of self?