21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

about is the paradoxical exchange between these two sides of the cosmos.

It might be better to describe this boundary between formlessness and form as a threshold. The essence of a person — whether you call this spirit, soul or just the ‘authentic self’, is also a threshold between formlessness and form. Grace, in turn, seeks to make new beauty in the world — to create form out of formlessness. This in turn is expressed as equality, empathy, compassion and peace. Our moral values are derivatives of this fundamental process.

New form can then be created through us. Or we could put this a slightly different way and say that we can allow a bit of formlessness to enter into our lives and it is this that allows form to be created. It is not us who create form, as to believe this would make it into another compulsion — an ego striving to be something. Form and formlessness meet within us and we become form for others.

Cahoone’s second dichotomy is addressed best I think by quotes from Simon Parke. In one he says simply, ‘We hurt others by our unexamined pain.’ And at the end of another quote is the simple sentence, ‘We see outside us what is inside us.’ Both of these simple sentences remind us firstly that much of the work of self-analysis is not about trying to discover or rediscover our ecstasy, but to understand our pain and our anger and our strange habitual responses. It is this blindness in ourselves that makes our relations with others difficult. Part of the problem, which refers back to our original two questions, is that things are stated from a

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