Mapping the Great Journey, Alchemy Step Four

Imagine looking back at your life, your work, and your communities two or three years from now. Imagine that, in the year 2020, COVID-19 brought humanity an alchemical offer: gold via personal and collective transformation. It might be hard to see now, but it is sitting there, waiting.

As we have seen earlier in this series, the fire (Step 1) of COVID-19 has waged war, and water (Step 2) followed as an emotional flood. Then an alchemically-infused air (Step 3) arrived with a tiny spark of something new—something that could survive it all. 

With these three steps, we can make something better. 

With these three steps, we can make ourselves better. 

For some, that offer will be the end of the story. Waved off as a terrible nightmare, COVID-19 will have been just another experience in the rinse and repeat of life suffering: What can we do? Life is what it is, right? The spark, unrecognized and unprotected, may go out as quickly as it came. Cobbling back to some kind of perceived normalcy, the alchemical opportunity will have been missed, or worse, seen and squandered. Alchemy will go round and round with the first three stages ad infinitum. 

But for others, the opportunity for transformation will be too great to pass up. 

The wake-up call will be heeded. Wholeness will find a way both in us and through us. The spark will be fanned to a flame, and a new, creative, and truly original way of being with ourselves and each other will emerge. This is the promise of Step 4—conjunction. 

In conjunction, we start with the mess and spark that our first three stages offered us. With it, we create a new earth. To be clear, this new earth is not a vision of utopia for all of humanity, nice as that might be. No, what is meant here is the actual element of earth, the very thing our bodies and houses and cars and pineapples and pinatas are made of. With a newly potentized earth element, we have the foundation needed for a new creation. We are in the early stages of rebirthing our very own selves.

Conjunction requires one thing above others: to deftly recognize and unify our opposites. 

Our left and our right, our up and our down, our male and our female, our spirits and our souls, even our ones and our zeros. This, done well and with “great ingenuity,” as the classic Emerald Tablet instructs, enables every other step to come. 

This unifying of our opposites isn’t only a pitch to promote diversity and inclusion—it’s our critical next move. Likewise, it’s not a mere balancing act. It’s an act of new access—having all parts of us available for a whole self, a whole team, even a whole product or service. 

From this wholeness, this new earth, a critical benefit arises—the capacity for original thought. Without original thought, we’ll just be remaking what we already have, and that is based on the patterns we are both consciously and unconsciously working with. 

Alchemy suggests that to shift this, we must welcome and marry our opposing parts, the most basic of them being our masculine and feminine aspects. This includes even—and perhaps especially—those aspects we deeply dislike. True capacity only comes when we take the rejected aspects of ourselves and welcome them home. 

In the case of alchemy, the masculine king or spirit is the aspect of us that forges ahead and drives us toward perfection. Our feminine queen or soul is the aspect that tells us the "why" of our pursuing, including the meaning, purpose, and feeling of it all. 

NOTE: I hope it can go without saying that we all have both polarities within, whatever our biology, gender identity, or sexual preference. But just in case, I have said it anyway.

If the union of our masculine king and feminine queen sounds a little theoretical, maybe this will sound more familiar: As most of us sit in our social isolation, we experience ourselves as being of “two minds.” One day, for example, we might map out our new health and workout routine—perhaps downloading a video or purchasing that long-considered foldable rowing machine online. We imagine how buff we will be at the end of all this. We decide and we commit. Solidly. Yes, this will be great. We are sure beyond sure that once all this virus stuff ends we will come out all the better for it. Tougher and maybe even wiser. We tell ourselves to be strong—it’s COVID-19 out there! 

The very next day, if not within hours, we find ourselves swamping our glucose levels with sugary indulgences or hardening our arteries with fatty-salty combo treats. We switch from the new exercise video to a re-run marathon of some show that wasn’t even that good the first time. We tell ourselves we deserve treats and a break—it’s COVID-19 out there! 

On day three, we might or might not wonder what happened to our conviction. We might or might not ask who within us did all that planning and who within us then threw it out the window? If we do participate in such self-inquiry, it is unlikely we will do so for long. The cognitive dissonance is just too great. Think of how many times you have shrugged your shoulders at yourself and just let it go. 

This is exactly the territory of Step 4. What if, this time, we actually do something different? What if this time we learn to negotiate between our powerful parts and bring them to a sense of mutual respect? What if we find the little buggers hiding within our very strong opinions, and we do as the great masters suggest—invite them to sit and have tea? And what if through this sitting and inviting, something new becomes not only possible but inevitable?

It’s a little like falling in love. 

What happens when a king and queen meet their true match? They fall in love. So do we when we meet all parts of ourselves and realize we are the most wonderfully and miraculously made creature that ever existed. If that sounds far-fetched, you have not felt the full force of Step 4. True, we become slightly annoying for a while, gazing at our own very divine navel, just like any myopic couple in love. But with time and testing (Step 5), the resulting inner marriage is likely to be a good one. 

You might think this self-love is common, but it is not. If you ask people, as I often do, most will tell you flat out that they don’t like themselves. Some feel outright self-loathing all day and every day. Outer success has no bearing on this, sadly. Which is all the more reason the alchemical journey is critical for a life well lived. 

I cannot tell you how many times I have shared this great secret with a client: One day, if you follow the great journey of life with dedication, you will call me and say, Robin, it happened. I finally fell in love with myself! I promise you there is initially much snorting and scoffing at this idea—but also a rare, blushing hope. I also cannot tell you how very often I have gotten that call. We may not call it conjunction as we celebrate, but that is what has occurred. 

Because this marriage is an inner one, no one can take this fourth step for us. Even if we employ a midwife (coach, mentor, boss, partner), this baby is ours to conceive, grow and push out into the world. But in the same way, when we decide to take this step, no one can stop us. This transformational gold is ours to seek and to find. 

Balance is wonderful, but not exactly what we are after here.

When we think in terms of balance, it is as if we see our lives as a tightrope we are walking. Concrete and external, we place ourselves precisely between a multitude of competing stimuli and pray we can make it all work. With this view, a life of imbalance holds an ever clear and present danger. Fall off your personal tightrope, and some kind of injury—possibly fatal—is a sure thing. Tragically, many actually do die from the stress of attempting this balancing act for too long. 

In reality, what we need in our lives is a conjunction—a bridge that allows for the union of our many internal opposites. While balance puts one aspect apart from the other on two ends of a teeter-totter, conjunction encourages them to scoot closer to the middle. 

Right now, COVID-19 is requiring our standard-issue push, push, push to simply... stop. We are internal, sitting with ourselves, like it or not. Right now, it seems to be pushing us to the edges of insanity. In the long run, it's an alchemically good thing.

Note that “internal” is a key concept here, because know it or not, our internal “self” is actually running the show. There may be ten thousand things to look at and worry about on a given day out there, but in here we are deciding which ones to give attention to and act upon. And because our brains are extraordinary creatures of habit, we will most likely see what we have seen before and ignore what we have ignored before. Thus, we will get what we got before. But with an internal bridge, all that changes. This is COVID-19's offering, rough as it is.

First, there will be resistance. 

Few of us are open to people and ways that are not like us. If we love to save money, we may be horrified at acts of grandiose spending. If we tend toward a free-wheeling “it will all work out” checkbook, a budget might feel scary. If we believe ourselves to be wisely cautious, we may be wary of those who seem to run their lives on a wing and a prayer. If we lean toward positivity and support, we likely won’t want to hear a critical word. If we err on the side of safety and boredom, even the idea of something risky can be deeply anxiety-producing. If we are literal, the essence of things might escape us. If we are the kind to dance the night away on Saturday night, staying in for weeks and months may make us feel like we are not ourselves. And on and on it goes. 

In The Alchemy of Opposites by Rodolfo Scarfalloto, a book written in 1997 (the year of my first profound awakening experience—the autographed book literally fell off the shelf and hit me on its way down), we see a wide range of opposites explored. These chapter titles say it all: Duality/Singularity. Pleasure/Pain. Creative/Repetitive. Doing/Being. Speak/Be Silent. Hold On/Let Go. Feasting/Fasting. Justify/Condemn. Austerity/Wild Abandonment. Hero/Villain. Individuality/Competition. Birth/Death.

Naturally, we have our predispositions. Through our alchemical conjunction, however, we can learn to interrupt that habit of avoiding the aspects we don’t like in favor of the ones we find good, right, or simply preferable. In conjunction, we learn to seek out mutual respect for all sides and make more conscious choices to include what we might normally reject. With a bit of self-examination, we can see things that were always there.

The promise of conjunction is creative breakthrough and original thought.

Only the successful conjunction of our inner king and queen can complete alchemy’s next step toward true gold. With a capacity for stark truth and clear beauty as well as a floating imagination and a great range of feelings, the best art arises out of us. Even better, we are changed into the artist we have always wished to be. Combining our inner essence with outer universal truths, we move forward with both vision and realism. 

Just as the male and the female are where babies come from, so the masculine and the feminine are where a new self comes from. Again, if this sounds lofty and theoretical, realize that very soon we will be creating our post-COVID-19 world. If we want something other than more of the same, we will need this conjunction ASAP. 

Step 3 gave us the spark we are to work with. 

If Step 3 was successful, it brought a true alchemical flicker. This gift of creative flame did not come from our old selves, but as a gift and grace from Something More (define that as whatever you will). Now, our job is to put that flickering spark to work to create conjunctions in our habitual brains, our greater minds, our physical bodies—even our conversations, our visions, our day and night dreams.

Once our opposites have a bridge, we can begin to solve what I like to refer to as horseshit problems. As the story goes, back in the days when horses were the only form of transportation, a meeting of city planners was held to discuss New York City’s exploding population. What would they do when there were too many people? One man stood to refute the problem entirely: Not to worry! It will never happen. What would we do with all the horseshit?

If we contaminate the process with our old, horseshitty ideas—those things we think we already know and the ways we have always relied on in the past—the true death knell of Step 3 has already rung and Step 4 hasn’t a chance. On the other hand, when we admit that we don’t know what we don’t know, we show the early promise of being able to solve our horseshit problems even before they have fully materialized. 

For those of us who lead…

Solving such problems is, of course, exactly what great leaders have always done. But now with COVID-19, we’ll have to step up our game. Just as we could not have fully predicted the specific horseshit problems of a life on lockdown—think remote workers falling en masse into depression and our beautiful Spain and Italy without the liveliness of bars and restaurants—we cannot fully know the problems our post-COVID-19 world will usher in. We only know that we don’t know and begin anyway. 

Those who have tapped into the process of conjunction before, either personally or as a team, will find the capacity for original thought arising spontaneously. For example, those who are able to access both the reality of statistics and a deeper, more intuitive thought process will have smart, creative new ideas come—often before it is fully obvious how they might be used. The guy who created a ventilator to serve nine people instead of one had no idea how much of a need would arise, yet there he was, creating ahead of time. Even if his particular invention was not perfect, it existed to help quickly set other ideas in motion. Even kids took it on for their science projects. 

Below are a few ideas that have come up from recent calls with leaders who are willingly working with their own conjunctions. While each situation is unique, these processes show the kind of thinking that can build a conjunctive bridge in ourselves and our teams.

• Look at your work with conjunction in mind. The reporter who becomes a patient is a better reporter. The museums and broadway shows that stretch into online offerings can see their art from an entirely new angle. The doctors who bring in experts from every specialty—even ones that are seemingly unimportant to the case at hand—see things they did not see before. The rabbi who offers Seder at home and the small town church that offers Easter services on YouTube to a congregation of not more than 50 illuminate what is truly required for a sense of community and connection. These things are already obvious to us now, but until very recently, they were largely unheard of. We who are leaders can now go one step further. What will we need next month and next year? How will the reporter of the future report? How will art come to the people next month and next year? What will the online communities of the future look like? What is possible that we have not yet considered? While others are yet wondering, the alchemical leader is already dreaming, planning, discovering, testing and preparing.
• Now is the new someday. While COVID-19 is putting virtually everything in our lives and work at risk, it is also inviting—rather, demanding—that our constantly rushing-pushing-forging-ahead culture take a self-isolating break. As it does, and as we do, we begin to see that the present moment is still sitting here, waiting, just as it always is. Hello, present moment! Here we are, breathing. Here things are happening, even while we sit. They always do—as anyone who has paused to sit knows. We can take this time to do our personal work now, no matter how tough things are, and invite our inner opposites to arise and have some tea. Every master of every art, science, and religion tells us that now is all we have to work with. Yet still, we have insisted on pushing forward even as we also have wallowed in our hurts of yesterday and succumb to our fears of tomorrow. When it happens to me, I simply say: There I go again, feeling uncomfortable with what is right here, right now. It’s okay. I’ll just sit a while anyway. And then all the things that arise pass, or not, and I get up. Most days, little comes of the process. But sometimes, an original thought comes and I smile.
• Yesterday’s crazy is worth a revisit. Bitcoin. Universal basic income. Socialism. Budgeting. Selling the boat for a different kind of freedom such as freedom from debt. Fill in the blank. Whatever you have previously encountered and rejected is perfect for a deeper examination. This is not because we are meant to jump on any specific bandwagon, but because every rejected idea tells us something about our preferences and leanings. When we see them, we can easily deduce the opposites we have been rejecting. In fact, our knee-jerk reactions are the very best way to discover our inner dichotomies. Knowing the themes of our preferences and thus what we might have overlooked within ourselves is its own kind of gold. Take the time for a deep dive while you have it.
• As leaders, we can present inner inquiry as a valid and vital part of our job. There is an old saying: Nobody soul searches on a good day. I say: Except for leaders—because that’s what makes us leaders. When we make reflection and contemplation an openly valid part of our own creative process, we give permission to those we lead to do the same. We already know we will need powerful, original thought to get through the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. Why not go first and encourage it in others? In fact, why not sit in our wild imaginations and consider the least tolerated actions and ideas in our various work cultures and then imagine how we all might collectively tolerate those very things? This is Step 4 at work. It builds a bridge to the ingenuity to come. 

Now once again, imagine looking back at your life, your work, and your communities two or three years from now. Imagine that, in the year 2020, COVID-19 brought humanity an alchemical offer: gold via personal and collective transformation. Imagine you embraced more of your opposites, more of the opposites of others, and more of the ways and means you once rejected. Imagine your opposites conjoined and out of that inner marriage, something new was conceived. Imagine you built a bridge within yourself and fell in love with your own life. That is the promise in front of us all.

Of course, a good marriage is more than falling in love. We will talk about that in alchemy's Step 5.

I'm Robin Rice, a senior advisor in conscious leadership for individuals and organizations. I lead, mentor and teach at the intersection of work, personal relationships, and social impact. I invite you to connect with me here on LinkedIn or through my website at RobinRice.com.

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