66 The unsung ground of your existence

LG66

Jesus said:
Show me the stone that the builders rejected.
That is the Keystone

This text is a literal quote from Psalm 118: 22. Whatever he means there, we must look for the meaning of this quote here.

What is actually a keystone? The word was usually translated as ‘cornerstone’, but the keystone is perhaps a better translation. It does not matter much which of the two is the correct translation, because this is something that was first rejected and then turned out to be essential.

A keystone is a very nice picture of that. That is the stone in the middle of a stone arch, above a gate or a window. The left half of the arch and the right half of the arch lean, as it were, against the keystone in the middle, and thereby obtain their joint stability. The keystone makes stable what was initially shaky. The keystone also connects the two halves of the arch, thus lifting their duality, as it were. He turns the two into one. Nice image, right?

Why was the cornerstone rejected first? Because he is tapered. It is not a beautiful square stone. So for bricklaying a wall or a pillar, or for the upright sides of a gate or window, it’s no use. Then you put such a tapered stone aside as a bricklayer. When you have almost finished the two halves of a stone arch, you start looking for such a tapered stone. Then the stone that you could not use at first appears to fit exactly with what you intended, even the perfect solution for it.

What is that keystone doing here?

When we are born we land in a story. Our parents, and all sorts of other people with them, tell us the world. And they also give us our own role in the world of the great people.

There is a danger in this, namely that we do not dare, for a smaller or larger part, to be as we are. If we, as a girl, like to climb trees, we are told that this does not suit a girl. So you no longer climb trees. If you play with dolls as a boy, you will be laughed at. So you no longer play with dolls.

The danger is therefore that we will hide part of ourselves in that process of adaptation, because we are so eager to meet the desires of our loved ones. We can then even start to deny that part of ourselves exists.

However, that part of our being that we deny or disallow in our consciousness is not lost. It is a part of ourselves that there will always be, even though it leads a hidden existence. It sticks to you like a shadow. You can do whatever you want to get rid of your shadow, I mean your real shadow as it can be formed by the rays of the sun, or from a street lamp, but we all know that it won’t work.

It is exactly that way with that part of yourself that you deny. It always stays with you, even if you are not aware of it. And it wants to be constantly recognized, it wants to participate in life. And that has consequences.

In every person there is an almost irresistible urge for self-development, for the realization of your personal individuality. That is the task that life places on each of us. That urge can come into serious conflict with your social environment. That can scare us for ourselves.

And so we can learn to suppress the keytone of our being, our natural individuality, our true self, in a convulsive manner. Our tapered individuality does not fit in with the social well-being of our everyday existence. No matter how much we do our best, our personal qualities continue to rise. That is their nature. And it may seem as if there is a hidden evil within ourselves that is constantly encouraging us to disrupt the self-evidence of our social well-being, sometimes even to the anger of those you regard as your loved ones.

For example, a boy may have been put in the cradle to become a scientist. It is curious and wants to investigate everything. One day the boy gets a little car from his daddy. He took that from a long journey. The kid is happy with it and within a few minutes he completely demolished the car. And then he gets to hear from his angry dad that he is ungrateful and always breaks things almost immediately. Do you have any idea how much it costs?!

In this way a beautiful talent, the will to know how the world works, is transformed into destructiveness, into something ugly. The boy becomes afraid of the talent of his curiosity. And then it seems as if it is correct to suppress that “ugly” property. That then goes in the shadow of your existence. It is still there, but it is not allowed to participate.

If you fear a part of your own being, it obscures the view of the wholeness of your true self.

To become a whole person again, to rebuild our existence in our true self, a confrontation with the shadow of our existence is inevitable.

The confrontation with our shadow definitely does not mean that we must learn to accept that we have “bad” sides to ourselves, that we should come to terms with our “badness” by first acknowledging and accepting it. Unfortunately, the concept of shadow is often explained in this way. In this way it is simply a continuation of Christian notions about the sinfulness of man, a continuation of old suppression mechanisms.

What does it mean?

How did the shadow arise again? By hiding away parts of our true self. How do we do that? By learning to call them “bad.” We learn to label certain parts of our true self negatively, and that is how the seemingly just repression of those aspects of our true self comes about. So we are not bad, we learn to label certain aspects of ourselves as bad.

We are ashamed of those negative labels of parts of ourselves. Please note: we are ashamed of the negative labels, not the reality of the self. But we can mean, because we have learned that, that we are really so bad. That is why we believe it is good to keep hiding that side of our true self.

If we want to retrieve those hidden parts of ourselves to become a whole person again, then we cannot ignore those negative labels. So we have to confront those negative labels. We have to look for the rejected tapering stone in ourselves. That is often a painful thing. Because we are reminded of the pain that it caused to be punished for something that really belongs to you. The outcome is not that we accept that we are “bad”. If we are really prepared to face these learned negative labels, the result is always (so here it is: always!) That an almost magical transformation is taking place. Your supposed bad side appears to be a very beautiful side of your own being. That is the healing transformation of the confrontation with the shadow.

The sun shines behind the clouds, the saying goes. The same applies: love lives behind our shadow. The keystone that was first rejected, your true self, appears to be your own and unique connection between acting in the world and the foundation of your existence.