In the early days of spiritual exploration I relished the challenge of venturing into the Unknown. I thought of it as a Great Mystery that would be revealed to me through diligence and hard work, a reward for demonstrating my commitment to Spirit and perseverance in seeking to ‘find God’. I thought it would be exciting, eventually stepping into the Void, despite the necessary rites of passage including the inevitable ‘dark nights of the Soul’.
I realize now that I had adopted, unknowingly, an old paradigm – I embraced a masculine approach to the Spiritual Journey, the Hero’s Myth of going after the Holy Grail (or slaying dragons, my own for instance). I took the long way around the block, as it turns out. To save some of you the arduous and tedious way, I would like to share a new paradigm, a new way to vision the Spiritual Journey and our relationship with the Unknown.
Consider that the Unknown is like the edge of the darkness. Imagine yourself standing in a circle of light, and at some point the edge of light becomes shadowy, the light ends and the darkness begins: This is the Unknown. The circle of light contains our reality; our day-to-day existence as we know it, and right outside the edge of that circle is what we have yet to step into, our Great Mystery.
Instead of holding the Unknown as a huge Universe out there that has yet to be discovered, an endless sea of black (like the night sky without starlight), I propose that it is nothing more than the next step. We simply move from the edge of our circle of light into the shadow that has yet to be illuminated. Much like the saying: “Strangers are simply Friends we haven’t yet met.” Our Unknown is simply the Known we have yet to experience.