Transcript from a meeting with James Eaton on 28 March, 2017
James: I love the image of a sapling, a young tree – the ground is there supporting its growth, so that its branches and leaves can dance with the wind, can be flowing and open. But it’s rooted, it has that stability in which to play, in which to express, in which to reveal its full glory. This ground (the earth) is like a metaphor for the ultimate, true ground – for wholeness.
In this human experience we all come from wholeness and then, at a young age, we come into separateness – we become a psychological ‘self’. And in doing so we lose the true ground. Even though we’ve lost the ground, it’s possible to rediscover it through the love, the unconditional loving gaze of the parents. But for many of us we don’t get the kind of parental support we need. So as children we feel, “I don’t have the ground”. So what do we do? We manufacture a false ground, each in our individual ways, depending on our experience. Mine was to suck up into my head – “here’s my ground, I’m gonna be clever, I’m gonna understand everything with my mind, and that’s my ground, my security.” It was a total inversion.
But it doesn’t work, and at some point we recognise it doesn’t work. And then we go on a journey to rediscover the true ground, to rediscover wholeness. And in that wondrous rediscovery, we can then meet the pseudo ground from the true ground, and allow the pseudo ground to begin to unravel, to begin to unfold, to release all of the years of clenching that made it appear dense, solid and fixed, that made it seem like the ground.
That’s the process. Wow. That’s the shift – from the imitation ground to the true ground. And what goes along with that, is the shift from the imitation will to the true will. So your actions in life come from that authentic movement, that alignment with wholeness, not from the imitation ground trying to uphold its imitation. That’s the shift.
