METAMORPHOSIS
Our class on discovering your true earth based Jewish purpose is up to Plotkin’s really important concept of metamorphosis. The idea is pretty simple: once you have been blessed with a mythopoetic identity (and I would add or a true purpose), this does not mean that you are ready to return to a village and manifest this identity or true purpose.
Becoming who we are truly meant to be is not a simple or short road. It’s not for the faint of heart. There are no shortcuts, much as we’d all like them.
After revelation, whether of your mythopoetic identity or true purpose the next piece in front of you is to become that mythopoetic identity, to be the kind of person who can manifest that true purpose. Plotkin employs a great metaphor. If you open the cocoon of the caterpillar who is on a path to become a butterfly prematurely, what you get is goop, not a butterfly.
There are way, way too many spiritual seekers who don’t get this step. What happens? Then they climb back and don’t manifest their true purpose, or perhaps they manifest their true purpose but with a really strong shadow side—think of all those gurus who don’t handle their power well, even the ones who don’t sleep with their students. Take our ancestor Jacob. He was gifted with a fabulous mythopoetic identity, Israel, Godwrestler. He started taking some of the steps that Plotkin identifies, only then his beloved Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin, and it sure seems like his spiritual development completely stops.
Metamorphosis is a phase in which we are still working on ourselves, still focused on transforming our egos into alignment with our vision. It seems to me that there are three main pillars in this transformation. I’m using Plotkin’s ideas but rearranging them in a way that I hope is more helpful.
One pillar is to keep the revelation alive. How do you do that? You carefully dwell with the revelation. Revisit your journals. Perform some of the same rituals you associate with your revelation and recollect what it was like when you did that ritual in the process of receiving revelation. Do some kind of artistic expression of your revelation and periodically visit it. Share some stories of your process with carefully selected people. Don’t get lost in the busyness of our everyday lives. This is particularly challenging if you have a family, a demanding job, live in a city etc. You want to be able to spend plenty of quiet time in the more than human world letting the revelation work its way through you. And it is really tough to do that if you are hyper busy and hyper scheduled, as if our societal wont.
A second pillar is some more advanced preparation work. Your revelation gives you a flash of what is possible for us as humans who we can and should be amongst our fellow kin, human and more than human. But it’s a flash, you are still vulnerable to backsliding, to having those parts of you that are designed to protect you, what Plotkin calls your subpersonalities, come out and take control. Your subs are always, always going to be with you, but the core idea is to reshape your ego so that it is aligned with your revelation and to have the revelation (SELF) run the show. Not easy. So you still get to do more and deeper personal work. There’s obviously more grief work to do, more work in your weak directions or aspects of your lives—for me that looks like reclaiming my body and going deep, truly falling in love with and connecting with the physical world.
A third pillar is what Plotkin calls ETCs, an acronym for Experimental Threshold Crossings. These are activities, actions whose purpose is to transform your ego so that it is more in alignment with your vision. They are actions in the world, but the purpose is NOT to serve the world in any way.
Here’s a simple example. When I thought that the way to manifest Dances with the Rhythms of the earth was a grass based farm, I sold some eggs at a farmers market (in those days my understanding was I couldn’t sell beef at the market). This wasn’t about giving people a chance to buy eggs from pastured chickens, which in those days was something rare—you couldn’t buy pasture raised eggs at Whole Foods—but was about me saying in public that I was a grass based farmer, and then dealing with my discomfort about being out in public saying that. The payoff would have been my personal transformation if it had happened, which it did not.
I’ve done two vision quests or fasts in my life (my friend who leads what he calls Vision Quests points out that the term was first used by Ruth Benedict, and American Anthropologist, so the term isn’t a cultural appropriation). I did them 30 years apart, 1987 and 2017. How did I do with these three pillars
The first pillar is keeping the revelation alive. I didn’t do that at all in 1987, because I had no idea what the vision was. I had fragments, but I was left without it being pulled together, so how could I keep that alive? In 2017, I was given/negotiated a specific practice to do. The practice that came to me was designed to impress upon me that I, like all other beings, live in the context of the cycle of birth and death. I committed to doing the practice daily for one year, and I think I missed maybe one or two days. I then extended it to this day, and I think in the 8 years total I’ve been doing this I have missed fewer than 5 days. The practice kept the revelation alive and eventually transformed my life.
The second pillar is advanced preparation work. After the first quest, I wound up doing more personal work than I had ever done in my life, as I worked through a lot of childhood trauma that I had not remembered and not dealt with. This might better be called preparation work, because really I was inadequately prepared when I went on the vision quest. After the second quest, I started doing a lot of work, journaling, writing, praying.
The third pillar is ETCs. I wasn’t in a position to do them at all after the first quest. After the second one, I started with writing a commentary on the weekly portion that we read of the five books of Moses. I shared this was a few close friends by email. I chose this because it was relevant to my overall project and also because it was easier for me than launching some website and declaring myself a teacher of earth based Judaism. My engagement with the weekly portion which has been a constant theme and has given me the profound clarity that what I am up to lies in a certain kind of continuity with my ancestors.
Becoming who we are truly meant to be is not a simple or short road. It’s not for the faint of heart. But if we can persevere, then we can lead lives of integrity.
