This book is a personal memoir of my journey toward the Inner Marriage or Hieros Gamos, the Greek word for the inner marriage between the Inner Masculine and the Inner Feminine. In our culture today, we are bombarded with messages that happiness and completeness come from another. From Jerry Maguire’s “You complete me,” to every love song, poem, movie, and fairytale, the prevailing belief is that we are not whole without an outer lover. My book challenges these current cultural myths, and makes the argument that wholeness is an inside job. I show readers how to make the turn inward to cultivate an ecstatic relationship with the Inner Beloved, freeing themselves and their lovers from the tyranny of expecting or demanding the other to provide for them a sense of completeness and wholeness. I examine how it is possible to achieve a wholly satisfactory and nurturing Inner Marriage, a holy, sacred, blissful love affair that complements and intensifies the ecstasy of shared with an outer beloved.
As my meditations and contemplations deepened, I noticed a shift in my writing. I began to experience what felt like direct transmissions from the Source. Wisdom, uncluttered and unfiltered by my ego, began pouring out of me and onto the page. I imagine that all Gnostics or mystics throughout time have written from these deep meditative states. Only from there can we access the Akashic Records. The Akashic Records, Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning sky, space, or aether, is a term used in Theosophy and Anthroposophy to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence.
During a particularly deep meditation, as I engaged in a writing dialogue with my soul, I asked: “Tell me, who are you? I want to know you.” I include the full dialogue below:
I am deep within your soul. I am your wisdom, your beauty. I have so much I want to say. So much that needs to be said. So much that needs to be heard.
“What do you want to say so badly?” I asked, and my soul responded:
I want to speak only of things that matter. I want to penetrate the veils, to touch people in the deepest places where they can find themselves again, or perhaps fully and deeply for the very first time.
I want people to know themselves as God, to remember who they are.
I want you to remember that I am that God within you; that I can guide you through your life from a place of deep wisdom and knowing.
I want the world to know that this is all so incredibly precious; that each moment is a unique universe with everything in it; that life is to be savored; that love is to be cultivated, and then given away totally and completely; that what we are is so much grander than the trivialities that often preoccupy us.
We are capable of so much more—capable of the kind of love that can mend what has broken and can change the course of history.
I want people to know that time is sacred and everyone has so very little of it here. We must be awake—to who and what we are, and to wake up to what we are capable of creating here on Earth.
We suffer because we have forgotten who and what we truly are.
We suffer because we cannot feel our glory. We suffer because we believe in the illusion of isolation and separateness. We suffer because of where and how we seek to remember.
Every place we look is an illusion—a false image of God. God cannot be found in money, in sex, in work, in accumulating material goods.
God can’t even be found in the grandest temples, churches, and shrines. God is found within each of us—through a return to one’s innate glory, beauty, and wisdom. That is where God lives—always. Not just during Sunday Mass, or in a meditation hall, or when kneeling to pray. God lives quietly in each of us illuminating the core of our being.
No god exists “out there” for us to find. Go inward, my friend. Search for the deepest center of yourself, and there you will find me—right where I always am and have always been.
From your center, I look out, seeking you.
I am the “I” within you, whispering your name, stirring your longing, expressing the love you feel, see, and hear.
I am the Beloved.
We have important work to do together, you and I. I will guide you with my words, wisdom, vision, and knowing.
You will need to follow and implement. You are my face in public—one way the world can see me, one of the innumerable faces of God.
I must be your command tower now.
I must be the voice you listen to and follow.
I must be your source.
Turn your eyes and ears to me for your knowing.
I am the Source.
A few weeks later, I had another meditation dialogue with my soul. “How are you today?” I asked.
I am so well. I’m delighted and thrilled you have finally found your way to me. I have waited for you for so long. Have you noticed how happy, peaceful, and calm you feel with my presence in your life? How much joy we have together?
Yesterday, you asked how deep I go. Well, I am deeper than the ocean and beyond the infinite cosmos. We are just beginning an endless exploration of this fascinating, wondrous universe. I will take you so many places.
Love is priceless. Continue to cultivate it—your deepest strength and core truth.
Don’t ever be ashamed or embarrassed about your love, or the fact that you love. Let yourself love freely. Offer it with an open heart, without demand or expectation. Allow yourself to love because you can, because you must, because it’s you.
The other day, you glimpsed that I am what others have always seen in you—the essence you have been unable to see and claim.
I am the gift that others experience you to be. I am your wisdom, beauty, and grace.
Finally, you have beheld me as yourself—the truest reflection of what you truly are.
We have time enough to spare, plenty for me to guide your life. No need, no urgency. Rest here.
Take comfort and solace and nourishment. Drink from the well that I am. I will always have enough to replenish you.
Allow yourself to stay open to gratitude—another expression of your essence. It opens and expands your heart, sweeping away bitterness and resentment. It forges a path to all that is holy, present and available. Continue to make space for me—for us. Wait and be patient, and I will speak. I will guide. I will know. And you/we will know.
Fierceness, too, has always been one of your greatest allies: fierceness to penetrate, fierceness to see, to know, to feel, fierceness to understand, to experience, and fierceness to give it all away.
That is your path. Follow it always. Give away everything you receive.
Eat it, imbibe it, digest it fully, then hand it over, and give it away.
Surrender every morsel and offer it as a blessing to the gods.
Pray as you take it all in. Pray as you digest it all. Pray as you offer it up. Make everything a sacred ritual. It always is.
Let every breath you take, and every step you make, be an act of prayer, ritual, love, devotion, celebration, and thanksgiving.
A few weeks later, I had another soul dialogue, perhaps one of the most poignant. I began by asking, “Okay, so what’s in there today?”
You’re so funny. I’m beginning to feel performance anxiety!
I’m here. I’m not going to leave you. You can trust that. You can walk toward me, but you don’t need to hunt me down. I’m right here. Always.
Sometimes I’ll be quiet and still. No words, but I’m still here.
Sometimes I will be inspired and my words will gush forth like a mountain spring. Trust the ebb and flow. You have no reason to panic.
You are impatient; but I have existed for all time. Your life is but a blink of an eye. I existed long before you arrived, and I will continue to exist long after you go.
I am eternal and exist outside space. Distance means nothing to me. And I have all the time I ever need. No rush. No urgency.
I know you want to know what you should be doing with your life. Time will tell. I have no answer for you yet from the place of All-Knowing. So we wait. The cavern is deep and wide and an echo will rise up from the belly of the universe. Until then, you will not really know.
In the meantime, let your light and your love shine as you did yesterday. You laughed, you loved, you gave yourself fully away, and were in the play and lila of the moment.
Isn’t that enough? Must you feel you have to leave your mark?
You want to do something, or be something, that will make you immortal—something to leave a lasting legacy.
But you already are immortal.
You really have nothing to prove. You already have your place in the cosmos. You deserve your space on planet Earth.
Human beings work so hard to prove themselves worthy. Pure folly!
That is why the Buddha laughs. It’s hysterical, really.
The gods laugh at human folly. That’s why the stars twinkle at night, as their bellies shake with laughter.
Seek nothing more than to remember. And once you do, then rest. Let this divine mystery play unfold before you, and watch with soft eyes.