Who are we? What is our purpose? Why do we often feel unhappy or incomplete? How do we best live our lives? While questions like these have long been the focus of human curiosity, satisfying answers have been surprisingly rare. However, recently this search has changed dramatically because we are now re-visiting these ancient questions from a new and expanded perspective. Quantum physics and Einstein's relativity, together, have become two of the most paradigm-altering scientific breakthroughs since the flat-Earth days of Copernicus, half a millennium ago. Today, after an entire century of experiments, we are finally arriving at a point where scientists and philosophers can relax their disbelief enough to speak more openly about what these very consistent experimental results might mean. This new emergent vision is not just a clarification or expansion of older ideas; instead, it permanently and radically changes everything that we once believed about the manifestation, potential, and purpose of our small planet, the entire universe, and even the extremely mysterious process that we call life. We are now beginning to understand, as many traditions have long foretold, how the entire universe can also be found within everything in existence, including a grain of sand and each of us. Today, as more scientists discover surprising new patterns of interconnectedness throughout our universe, what seems to be emerging is the recognition of a deeply intertwined relationship that some scientists and philosophers describe as an expression of "oneness." While it may seem that we are only a small part of an enormous universe, today we are realizing that the truth may be just the opposite: everything that we once experienced as being outside or external to ourselves, originates from within. We don't just live in our universe, the entire universe also lives within each of us.
Our culture is relentless in its messaging about the need to improve ourselves. We find that no matter how hard we work at this, the difficulties we experience in our lives rarely seem to subside, at least for long. This isn't because we aren't yet "good enough." It happens, instead, because our conscious awareness is incomplete and not integrated, leaving most of our activity to the large unconscious, or "dark," parts of our being. When we operate through this unconsciousness, we just repeat our old familiar, but often disruptive, patterns. Growing beyond these dysfunctional patterns is not about choosing the "good" parts of ourselves and rejecting the parts we think of as "bad." It also does not require that we learn more or something new. Instead, to dissolve these old automatic patterns, we must become more whole and integrated. We can only do this by bringing illumination to the uncomfortable darkness hiding within all of us, a shadow world dividing our naturally whole being into many broken, isolated, and incommunicative fragments. This, our most important journey involves a process of discovering, welcoming, and honoring all parts of our authentic and complete being, especially the vast areas of inner darkness that we fear and avoid the most. This book describes one such journey: the very successful process that radically changed my life through the discovery and conscious illumination of my personal shadows. My life today is powerfully energized and filled with satisfaction and joy, but it has not always been this way; for most of my seventy years, my experience was the complete opposite. Today, instead of life appearing to work against me, I experience a world that always works in joyful harmony with my entire being. In this book, I describe my healing journey and the new perspective that changed absolutely everything about my life.
