INNER WORKINGS    

Enter the Chamber

Undergo Transformation

Exit Born Again

The entry door invites us to "come in." Into the black box of an unknown process that will transform us...uncertainty, courage, fear, worry, concern, hope...all of these feelings abound when entering the door, crossing the threshold, into the unseen inner workings of a process that will change us. At the start, we cannot say how long we will be in the process, along the journey, traveling and experiencing life. 

At some point, we will exit through another door inviting us to "go out," to leave the now more familiar, and enter another place/space/time. Through this exit door, we can look back, perceiving how we are transformed, in a spiritual sense "reborn again." Perhaps we even have wisdom to share with others, although language is often a poor rendition of the actual experience, but we do what we can with poetic, mysterious, and paradoxical language to provide others with a taste, a sense, of the experience. 

We all undergo many of these inner transformations every day. Consider the inner workings of the myriad of cells in our body. In a broader sense, we undergo one larger transformational journey, entering at birth, living out our life, and exiting at death. 

These inner workings are depicted in the image below as a linear process, but there is no reason why the entire process couldn't happen at the same time...in the flash of lighting, in the blink of an eye, we may enter, transform, and exit.

There are many traditional spiritual methods of that describe the inner workings of the unseen realms of the process of transformation...from Buddhist mindfulness meditation to Christian centering prayer to Hindu mantra chants to 5 Rhythm dance, to mandala art, to all forms of music, to forest bathing in nature...The scientific minded might create a program to "test out" each of these methods in a systematic way, exploring and attempting to quantify the results of their experiences in terms of validity and reliability while the more artistic minded might follow their intuition/heart, exploring and feeling their way through processes as they organically present themselves on the journey of life...of course, one can mix art and science, and mix and match the methods, although there is a certain kind of wisdom in staying with one method for a long time, like digging a one well to reach water rather than several shallow wells and never reaching water...on the other hand, all wells lead to the same underground river--see Matthew Fox's book One River, Many Wells.