The fact that these passages from Jean Houston's The Search for the Beloved are the most heavily highlighted in my library attests to the potency of betrayal for my search. Betrayal has been the most important catalyst in my spiritual search. Added emphasis appears in red, and my reactions are enclosed in a box: (Note 99)

Sacred psychology is the process and practice of soulmaking; and soulmaking, as you may have discovered, is not necessarily a happy thing. Critical parts of it are not. As seed making begins with the wounding of the ovum by the sperm, so does soulmaking begin with the wounding of the psyche by the Larger Story.

The Tao was clear about there being no high without the low. Without the pain of soulmaking, there would be less joy in the fullness of the moment. My equanimity depended on soulmaking. Recovery of Kuan Yin's poise meant suffering the betrayal.

Soulmaking requires that you die to one story to be reborn to a larger one. A renaissance, a rebirth, occurs not just because there is a rising of ancient and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached. In this wounding, the psyche is opened up and new questions begin to be asked about who we are in our depths. These powerful questions need not lead to alienation and withdrawal, but can lead to the seeding of the world with the newly released powers of the psyche. A Larger Story is revealed by the wounding. . . .

The more powerful the betrayal, the deeper I plunged into the lower unconscious mind. The deeper I went, the more profound the questions were about who I was. To be reborn to a larger story meant I had to engage rather than avoid soulmaking.

So, too, is your wounding, the breaching of your soul, an invitation to your renaissance. Our woundings tell us that old forms are ready to die, however reluctant the local self may be to allow this to occur, and that hitherto unsuspected new forms are ready to flower. . . .

My old form was a dominant rational attitude. The new form waiting to bloom was a flexible, integrated response. This was prefigured in the HIP and PSI assessment tools I developed. However I did not embrace this attitude until I plunged into the depths of betrayal.

The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. When we fail to do this, we tend to repeat the same old story over and over again. . . .

As these personal changes took place, my career became more productive and my classes more creative. Energy that had been locked up in old patterns was released for a fuller range of expression.

In times of suffering when you feel abandoned, perhaps even annihilated, there is occurring - at levels deeper than your pain - the entry of the sacred, the possibility of redemption. Wounding opens the doors of our sensibility to a larger reality, which is blocked to our habituated and conditioned point of view. . . .

The higher unconscious opened up with a flood of archetypes. The more pain I felt, the richer the archetypes that presented themselves. Through the pain of betrayal, Shiva, Kuan Yin and Kali came to me.

Betrayal, of all the woundings that may be suffered by the soul, can be the greatest agent of the sacred. This wound has always had an awful and luminous quality surrounding it. It marks the end of primal, unconscious trust, and forces upon us those terrible conditions that accompany the taking of the next step. . . . The condition of this trust has been a subtle and powerful binding that blocks the fullness of the greater consciousness needed to respond to new situations - situations that cannot be met within the old conditions.

My naive primal trust blocked emergence of The Intuitive Self which had the fullness of consciousness to provide everything I needed to do anything I wanted to do. Until released, the answer of answers was hidden behind old patterns of being.

Trust always contains the seeds of its own betrayal; the taboo implies and requires its own transgression. Betrayal allows for the coming of reflection and therefore of consciousness. . . . The loss of primary attachments permits the entry of the "gods," the entry of the More, of insights and knowings that you could not assimilate before. The message of betrayal is always that things are much more then they seem. . . .

The emergence of collective archetypes showed things were infinitely more than they seemed. A rich archetype such as Shiva Nataraja was overflowing with meaning from the Larger Story.

James Hillman provides a list of the many life-denying forms that we choose. The first is revenge: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a betrayal for a betrayal. . . .

Another self-defeating choice is denial. If you have been disappointed in a relationship, you may totally deny the value of the entire relationship: "I never loved him/her anyway." . . .

Or you may choose cynicism, which can also take the form of broken idealism. The most meaningful things in your life are now seen as cheap, hollow frauds. . . .

Ultimately the refusal to accept the opening offered by betrayal leads you to self-betrayal. You betray yourself in belittling your deepest hopes, values, ambitions, and story. . . .

The supreme disease of betrayal is paranoia, All human actions and affairs are seen under the rubric of betrayal as the constant for everything all of the time. . . .

For each betrayal, I went through successive stages with revenge, denial, cynicism and self-betrayal. I did not experience paranoia. The impetus of primary relationship betrayals pushed me over the edge to recognize self-betrayal at the core of the others. While my partners were getting on with their lives, I was mired down in the past!

How, then, can we change the pattern and transform the suffering? Transformation occurs in the discovery of the Larger Story. Often that means that the healing cannot happen for a long time, not until the context is larger, until the Pattern that Connects is manifest. . . .

Exposing myself to evocative situations helped me connect with the Larger Story. I spent several days on a retreat to Chichen Itza. Each day was flooded with archetypal images calling out for attention. I wrote a sheaf of poems to capture the lessons of the experiences.

Time in thus essential to the healing of our betrayals. Time reveals the Larger Story, hidden to primal consciousness, in which we must play a part. Looking back on your own betrayals, you may notice how they have given you the necessary shove, the unwelcome but needed kick in the pants to invite you to release patterns and attachments that need to die, so that the world may be grown again and a deepened conscious trust may be born.

My relationship betrayals got me off dead center. Had my partners not taken the initiative, I might still be bogged down trying to make the relationships work. My codependent self held on for dear life!

But the key to redeeming our betrayals is forgiveness. Anyone can forgive a petty matter, but if you have been involved in a situation of deep trusting, of mutual flowing into one another, of rich coherence in which you have shared your soul - and then have been betrayed - forgiveness takes on a momentous and evolutionary potency. Such a forgiveness will allow you . . . to enter into fully conscious partnership with the creative principle. . . .

The transformation kicked off by these betrayals released the time, energy and foresight to strike out on new adventures. The energy behind a twelve hour day, seven day a week effort writing this memoir was released in the transformation process.

In our betrayal, the other becomes the instrument of God, bringing us to a tragedy that needs our ennoblement in order to understand it. And the only way to be ennobled and to forgive truly is through love. In giving much more than one thought one could, one discovers that one has much more still to give. This is the mystery and miracle of love, and it changes the very fabric of reality, the very structure of our lives.

Though there are pangs and twinges now and then, I embrace my "betrayers"as messengers of the spirit. Each betrayal was a "Blessed Betrayal!" The colors of the tombstone drawing bear this out.

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