Developing a Better You

Tag: The Cosmic Egg

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 3): The Cosmic Egg

The best egg I’ve ever had is a cosmic one.

In part one of this series, I laid the foundation. In part two, I told a story of my spiritual struggles. In this post, I’ll share the first of three metaphors that helped me through those difficult years – the Cosmic Egg. I learned about the Egg from author and teacher Richard Rohr, who adopted it from The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

Picture healthy spirituality as an egg. The center yolk is My Story. The white surrounding the yolk is Our Story. The shell containing the whole is The Story. The three Stories form a collective whole, one nested inside the other like the parts of an egg.

The yolk of My Story

Most of us begin life almost exclusively focused on the yolk of My Story – my needs, my desires, my dreams, my ego, my hurts, my personality, my agenda, my problems, my experiences. The lens through which we view life is largely self-referential. Our first thought about most things is, “How does this affect me?” This is a normal and necessary starting point for virtually all of us.

The egg whites of Our Story

As we hopefully mature, we move into the egg whites of Our Story. In this stage, we begin to identify more strongly with our place inside of groups. Our family, our state, our country, our race, our religion, our gender, our team, our occupation. We learn to better interact with others, to compromise, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We experience both the benefits and the difficulties of belonging to a larger unit. In addition to our My Story view, we now see ourselves and the world through the lens of our associations.

The shell of The Story

If we continue our growth journey, we finally move into the shell of The Story. Containing both My Story and Our Story, The Story is where we move beyond the biases and limitations of our identity groups. We recognize not only our personal shortcomings in My Story, but also the failings of Our Story, realizing at last the essence of The Story – that all of humanity and creation is an interconnected whole, held together by something bigger than us all. What that something is depends on what you believe. For me, it’s God. The Story is the realm of transcendent meaning where we find the highest virtues to which we aspire – unconditional love, real forgiveness, deep humility, true self-acceptance, authentic goodness, unshakeable peace. These lead us to a total, loving inclusion of everyone and everything, including ourselves.

A Unified Whole

Each of the three Stories is good and necessary, one building on the next. The skills acquired and lessons learned in the smaller stages prepare us for the larger ones. Each must be experienced. There is no “spiritual bypassing.” And once The Story is encountered, the goal is not to eliminate My Story or Our Story but to hold them as a unified whole. Like three notes sounding in harmony, they collectively bring beauty and color to our life’s music. That is a healthy spirituality.

Even if we’ve done the hard work necessary to reach The Story, there is no static state where we can declare, “I’ve arrived.” We slide in and out of that sense of wholeness all the time. But with experience, we can more quickly recognize when we’ve slipped into too much My Story thinking, which leads to narcissism, or too much Our Story thinking, which leads to being judgmental and exclusionary. It becomes easier to once again focus on The Story and work our way back to a unified whole.

How The Cosmic Egg helped me

The Cosmic Egg metaphor clarified my spiritual struggles and helped me understand why I’d grown increasingly dissatisfied with some of mainline Christianity’s teachings. While Our Story gives much needed context to My Story and a wonderful sense of belonging, it also opens the door to the great danger of thinking that OUR Story is THE Story. This is the trap I’d fallen into – believing that only the Our Story of Christianity provided the true path to The Story.

I had a desperate need for a stranglehold on the truth. To be right. To have all the answers. Because if someone else’s spiritual Our Story was equally valid, then my Our Story must be wrong. It took me a long time to realize that my exaggerated Our Story view was blocking my full understanding of and appreciation for the beautiful inclusiveness of The Story. The God whom I now find at the heart of The Story is bigger, more amazing, and more loving than my previous worldview allowed me to imagine.

Eating The Cosmic Egg

Unfortunately, an overly inflated view of Our Story isn’t unique to me or to Christianity. We see this on full display in American politics and culture. White nationalism is a glaring example of an Our Story gone horribly wrong. The belief held by former president Trump and some of his most ardent supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from them, without evidence, is another example of an Our Story creating its own false reality. While those are recent examples, inflated Our Story problems can be found in virtually every political party, country, religion, and group.

The metaphor of the Cosmic Egg provides a wonderful path to healthy spirituality, but as the above examples show, the painful difficulty often comes in moving from one stage to the next. In my next post, I’ll share a second metaphor that helped me make those transitions – The Three Boxes.

So where are you in The Cosmic Egg? How’s your balance of My Story, Our Story, and The Story? What does your version of The Story look like? How do you live it out? Chew on these questions. Talk about them with people you trust. Have the courage to take an honest look in the mirror. If you do, you’ll find your way to a healthy spirituality, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

For a deeper look at the Cosmic Egg metaphor, I highly recommend Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg written meditations and podcast on Another Name for Everything.

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 1): An Introduction

This one’s tricky.

My spirituality is incredibly important to me. I’ve worked steadily at developing it for forty-one years (I mark my start at age ten). It provides a solid foundation for every aspect of my life, and brings me peace, meaning, joy, love, adventure, comfort, guidance, hope, and my deepest sense of identity.

But…

I have readers from across the spiritual spectrum, from those who identify as very spiritual to those who’d say they aren’t spiritual at all. Of those who are spiritual, there is a wide variety of religions and spiritual paths represented. And I respect that. A lot.

So while I love sharing what I’ve learned on my own spiritual journey in hopes that some may find it helpful, I want to tread very lightly. This is simply my experience. Even now, what I believe continues to evolve as I encounter more of life and pursue the Great Spiritual Mystery. (And it is a mystery. If you’re too sure of your answers, that could be a sign that your Spiritual Truth Box is too small.)

My spiritual worldview has been developed over decades. It’s very freeing and helpful to me. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for you. My hope is simply that what I share shines a little light on your own path, whatever that may be. Take what’s useful, and toss the rest.

In this series of posts, I’m going to share three metaphors I learned from author and teacher Richard Rohr that have been extremely helpful to me in recent years – The Cosmic Egg, The Three Boxes, and The Tricycle. They provide simple but powerful frameworks for spiritual and personal growth. Ways to understand and navigate some of life’s most confusing seasons. Methods for getting unstuck on the journey to our best selves.

One of the many things I love about these metaphors is that they work for almost everyone, regardless of where you’re at on the spiritual spectrum. They align with nearly every religion or spiritual perspective, and even with most perspectives that don’t include spirituality at all.

Next week, I’ll tell the story of my own recent spiritual struggles. In the following weeks, I’ll share the three metaphors that helped guide me through that difficult season. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. If you do, I think you’ll discover some very helpful tools along the way, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

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