Answer: W! It is twice U … :)
My son picked that up in first grade, and quizzed me just as I was writing a note on wholeness. I laughed politely, but my thoughts immediately went to my note: sure, W as in Wholeness, it is certainly twice the You! Daniel Pink starts his New York Times Bestseller, ‘A Whole New Mind’ with the premise that we are all on a journey towards wholeness. In a spiritual quest, he says, it is a natural evolution to become androgynous (a balanced combination of male and female attributes). Professionally, he figured, societies and economies will make the transition from left-brained (logical, analytical, objective) to right-brained (intuitive, thoughtful and subjective). That all resonated with me perfectly at that time when I read it. I always felt that I was born an old soul. I was hitting the library searching for spiritual insights during my student days, while my high testosterone friends were hitting on girls instead. And yes, I also have few yin energies running through me, especially after my spiritual path opened up to me.
Later in my professional role as a financial strategist I underwent Daniel Pink’s predicted transition from the highly analytical PhD research to the more intuitive strategy work that can be best described as pattern recognition. Despite all these personal overlaps with his predictions, I still would state his wholeness premise differently: the system we operate in strives for wholeness, we don’t necessarily have to. Instead, express your life story passionately and purposefully, and wholeness will be yours, eventually.
The interplay of yin and yang and the subconscious drive to bring the opposing forces together can be found everywhere. Lao Tzu already understood this law of life 2500 years ago in ancient China and shared his observations in the Tao Te Ching. The interplay of opposing forces can be literally found everywhere. Have a look around, and you will see it too. I discovered the duality of life in my economic profession: prolonged booms set the stage for the next recession; bull markets are followed by bear markets, and hawkish politicians and policy makers will one fine day kick out their more dovish counterparts. Every reaction has a counter-reaction, and we spiritual travelers are called to understand this tension and encouraged to one day transcend it. As it is written in the Tao Te Ching, the Master resides at the center of the circle, watching the world spin.
Observe any group of people and you can see the dance of yin and yang there as well. In my professional life I had the pleasure of working with the most diverse set of people there can be. A group of ten experts covering the globe included story tellers and visionaries, as much as analytical and number oriented minds. We had an equal ratio of male and female, we had Asians, Europeans, Latinos and Americans working together. It was my job to bring their accumulated insights and talents together and that was when I understood that all of them had come together to teach me a thing or two about wholeness, and the tensions of duality.
As spiritual travelers we can see that subconscious drive towards wholeness everywhere. Love, respect and study your parents for one day you will find yourself embarking on a mission that they themselves couldn’t quite finish. Study the lives of your in-laws for some of their struggles will likely make it into your household as well. We are One and we all have signed up for a joint healing mission. Work, home, the interactions with our friends, as well our spiritual journey; the strive to make whole, to complete and, eventually, to let go, can be found in all areas of our lives.
It is a law that the system of people interacting with each other strives for wholeness, but the same does not have to be true for the individual. The mother of 3 boys may accentuate her femininity, subconsciously compensating for the remaining high testosterone household. The system has to be in balance, and the individual has to be made whole by the environment he operates in. Interestingly enough, during my Awakening journey I moved away from my somewhat androgynous starting point. Embedded in a driven, high testosterone-charged working environment, I had to accentuate my assertiveness. Without imposing some some healthy boundaries vis-à-vis my aggressive colleagues, they would have eaten me for lunch a long time ago. In hindsight, it was that tension of finding who I truly am that catapulted me on my spiritual path.
Along a spiritual path we get a clearer understanding of who we truly are beneath the hood. Like a snake that sheds its skin, we let go of the parts that are not us. In some dimensions we become whole, in others, we let others complete us while expressing our idiosyncratic story line. Neale Walsch presented a beautiful theory that describes our Home-coming journey best in ‘A Conversation with God’. In it, God stated that in order to return to the light, we have to make it through all the rainbow colors. Be that passionate red, or embrace the serene blue, just as it feels right. Whatever you do though, go all the way! Express your life story perfectly: the eccentric artist, the passionate lover, the driven spiritual leader, the giving care taker, or the loving and committed mother. Whatever your story is, go and run with it.
GOD has designed this life to bring you Home. Express yourself, and you will naturally attract the support system that completes you. Eventually we all make it through all the rainbow colors, and that’s when the Old Souls become androgynous and seemingly float above all of life’s temptations. We came from wholeness and will one day return to it. Wholeness is your birth-right, claim it
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