Alchemy of Spirit

Our work in this world is about the transmutation of energies—the alchemy of Spirit. We are given the crucible of life and our own being within it to do this work—as in a laboratory. The energies we are given to work with are the vicissitudes of our own interior “climate” and our personal response to the world around us. For example we experience the emotions of anger, fear, sorrow, loneliness and anxiety. These are the “normal” reactions that we have in our intimate dealings with a troubled world—we cannot but have them. The transformation of these energies (the raising of them from a higher to a lower state), however, is the practice of the alchemy of Spirit. Such practice, however, can only take place in a new environment, that of Presence which we enter deeply within the chambers of our own hearts. When we willingly and voluntarily enter unconditioned Presence there, the possibility exists of a transmutation (or “vertical shift”) where, as John Welwood says, “… one moves from personality into a deeper quality of being, as a fixed constellation of observer/observed dissolves, along with all reactivity, contraction, or striving” (Toward a Psychology of Awakening, 120). Out of engaging such Presence anger can be transmuted into energies of strength, sorrow into compassion, fear into courage and groundedness, loneliness and anxiety into spaciousness and peace. It is in these different ways that pure Spirit is manifest in the human soul in daily life, right in the midst of our own experience.