Metamorphosis
And The Continuity Of Life
John Gray September 29, 1991 Glen Ivy, California
To all who are alert enough to watch and to see, the One Spirit constantly reveals aspects of its divinity through all life forms and functions. Here in this realm of creation with which we are familiar, on planet Earth, correlations with all of life’s other forms and functions are contained in essence in human beings. So, anywhere we observe life working we may learn something about ourselves.
Many of us have been talking lately about change. A lot more people have been thinking about change. And everybody, like it or not, is experiencing change. Change characterizes life as it expresses itself in forms. Nothing alive is static or stagnant. In the current affairs of the world we live in, it is so obvious as to be impossible to overlook that deep and unprecedented changes are occurring everywhere. People handle these changes or react to them in different ways: some with jubilant welcome, others with resistance.
To me, one of the most dramatic demonstrations of change takes place countless millions of times each year all over the world: it is the process that certain insects go through in changing from one form into another. Metamorphosis is a classic metaphor. Deep in the human psyche there is a fascination with it.
I have a rather old little paperback book called The Great Chain of Life by Joseph Wood Krutch. In it is a sensitive description of the process of transmutation that a caterpillar goes through in entering its chrysalis state and then emerging as a butterfly.
Joseph Krutch wrote an excellent non-technical description of the process: the caterpillar munching away blissfully for weeks and then acting like it got too full at some point, attaching itself to a branch or twig, forming a chrysalis inside its caterpillar skin and then letting its external skin fall away; then out of the chrysalis some time later, somewhat crumpled but complete, emerges an adult butterfly. Having described that process much more thoroughly and beautifully than I just did, he says this:
“Anyone who has thus watched the progress from caterpillar to finished butterfly has seen incredible things happen... But a great deal has been kept hidden...what he has seen is merely a series of suddenly revealed transformations.”
He goes on to describe some of the internal changes going on in the caterpillar. As the time to form the chrysalis nears, the caterpillar gets sluggish, stops eating and looks sick.
“When our caterpillar looked sick he really was sick... His muscles and his organs were beginning to dissolve into what looked like a sort of pus. He had just life enough left to perform the final rites which accompany his entombment within the chrysalis before he was returned almost to death...
“Once the skin has been shed and the creature—or what is still left of it—ceases to move, the destruction of the original organs and the fashioning of new ones goes on apace. Free-moving cells, much like the phagocytes or white blood corpuscles in the human body, absorb and carry away the disintegrating material, and at the same time new organs begin to form. Ever since the day when the caterpillar was hatched from the egg it has carried within its body certain little groups of cells which were useless until now. They are the buds, if the term be permitted, from which the butterfly’s organs will develop, and these organs grow on the material the phagocytes have been carrying away from the parts of its dead self. From these buds a butterfly began to form as the caterpillar was dissolved. No new material save perhaps air and moisture is available any more than anything is available to an egg closed within its shell. What is more remarkable, perhaps, is that almost nothing is left over. The material in one caterpillar is just sufficient to make one butterfly!”
Here life’s marvelous working in an insect may give us insight into the processes of change and how they work in our own experience and awareness, both in occasional dramatic metamorphoses and as continual changes in consciousness. To paraphrase the author’s pleasant description: entering the chrysalis state, the caterpillar form is willing to become pus-like mush and then out of that material the butterfly form is drawn together. Life is the constant throughout. Life reveals itself in caterpillar form and then as living mush within the chrysalis and later as the emerging butterfly. The shape, the form, that life takes changes utterly, but life itself is constant throughout. A butterfly is not at all a caterpillar with wings. It is a totally transmuted creature, formed out of the substance of what went before but totally new. Life fashions an entirely new creation out of the living matter provided by the caterpillar.
You may be familiar with the book of Martin Exeter’s addresses, Beyond Belief. In the chapter entitled “From Caterpillar to Butterfly” Martin utilizes this archetypal metaphor, equating the caterpillar state with a condition of earthly identity in a human being and the butterfly state with spiritual identity. He emphasizes the necessity that the metamorphosis in this day be a collective one for the whole of humanity, and he also emphasizes the necessity for at least some of us to willingly let this process of internal change occur without undue resistance, thus leading the way in an experience of a profound change of identity for all. Only by willingly participating personally may we understand what life’s deeper urgings are within the whole of the body of mankind.
“We are not expecting to sprout wings tomorrow and fly away as butterflies. No, this process is happening through the whole, and there is that which is left behind from the standpoint of the chrysalis and there is that which emerges as the butterfly. This is the way it works.
“We may see our responsibility in the matter possibly with a clearer vision because of the use of this analogy. Factually we are not caterpillars, or entering into a chrysalis, or becoming butterflies. But these words are useful to convey what is really happening, and we can be quite confident that if we let it happen it will happen just as easily as that process with the caterpillar transformed into the butterfly.”
I suppose we could argue that the caterpillar does not have the ability to object to change, but human beings can and usually do. We have will. We like to think of ourselves as free agents, capable of determining the direction of our openness. Theoretically that is true, but factually speaking most human beings are virtually always controlled by mass-subconscious factors and don’t make any more choices, really, about what is going on in their lives than a caterpillar does about its. Personally and collectively we feel that the process of change which we are all very aware of both within and without is moving toward some point of culmination. Martin’s concluding words of the chapter are:
“As we trust [the creative process], as we free up in ourselves, and are content to be nothing in the human state, we discover what it means to be something in the heavenly state. We cease being earthbound creatures and rise on the wings of spirit in the fulfilment of the restoration of man.”
Those two sentences put in vast perspective the experiences of internal personal change over which so many in our world today anguish. When we take a small view of what is transpiring we tend to be emotionally involved in it—how it affects me personally, whether I am made more or less comfortable by what is transpiring; whether I like it or not. But if I fall into that habit of narrowness I will invariably misinterpret life’s signs and misunderstand what is going on in my life, in the lives of others, and in our planet as a whole. The profundity of the change that is required is difficult for our minds to fathom. It is one of becoming nothing, “no thing,” just as the caterpillar going into the chrysalis state becomes nothing. It is not a caterpillar any longer; it gives its life in order to find it.
The caterpillar does not have any choice in the matter. It doesn’t question whether to trust the creative process. We can brush that off lightly, saying, “Well, it’s just instinct,” without understanding what is going on. How about us? How deep does my trust in the creative process go? In an internal, personal way that question is posed by circumstances numerous times every day, and we prove by the way we behave where our trust actually is. Sometimes we willingly move with the flow of life as it is moving; at other times resistant habits prevail, we dig in our heels and “would rather not”—and usually then don’t! Who is willing to become nothing? A frightening prospect! Remember that metamorphosis takes place in the external form of things; life itself is ongoing, ceaseless. The presence of life is the one constant. The external forms of things—my body, my consciousness—is where the changes unfold. Who is willing to become nothing in the outer sense?
People may have experiences which at the time seem severe, traumatic, difficult, when dramatic changes in their status quo take place. These are generally labeled as stressful experiences. Among common ones are loss of a loved one, a change of career, moving one’s place of residence, a serious illness, things like this. Such changes can come unexpectedly. Some people go down under the pressure; others find an inner resilience and in retrospect would say that the experience was one of the most important of their lives—and it seemed that they were becoming nothing at the time!
All of us have had the experience of at least one total, dramatic, irreversible shift in our lives—probably more—but at least one. Everyone in the room this evening is physiologically adult. So, somewhere back along the way we all went through puberty. That was a metamorphosis, for sure! The child, the boy or girl we were, passed away. You can remember the child you were but you are not the child you were and you can never again be the child you were. Many young people find puberty, that period of profound transformation, de-stabilizing for a time. The change is utter, complete. Feelings and thoughts one never had before are suddenly flowing in all directions. It is wild and wonderful, exciting, scary, even sometimes boring. Wide, sudden swings of emotion and experience can occur as the capacity to express feeling takes on new dimensions and the ability to think develops.
What is occurring during this time is a change in identity. The child identity becomes nothing and an adolescent identity emerges, a personality-self takes shape. All too often of course, young people decide that this is what they are, and that decision is aided by a vast population of people in older bodies not acting any more maturely than adolescents. So the general model is immature, and therefore many, many young people, taking their cues from that, settle into a mediocre identity as a personality-self. That would not be the end of the process by any means if life were allowed to have its way. Sometimes, of course, people awaken to this fact years later. Maybe twenty, thirty, forty years later they wake up and say, “My gosh! All these years have gone by and there are so many things I haven’t done.” Maybe they are ashamed of what they have done or not done. Or maybe they have really become somebody and now it doesn’t seem to matter so much. If you have achieved some goals—personal, career, financial—now what? This can be mid-life crisis time! A finite lifespan stretches ahead. At age fifteen life seemed eternal; now, not so much remains over the horizon. It may be scary again; there are again unfamiliar feelings, invisible urges. Ah! Life is providing another chance to continue maturing—a “second puberty.” This time it’s a change in experienced identity from the personality-self to a spiritual self.
Those who feel this stirring going on in themselves and elect to move with it find themselves sooner or later facing the challenge of becoming nothing. Like it or not, sooner or later everything we’ve brought along goes to mush! What we thought we knew, things we were sure of, everything that we thought was stable and infallible, unchanging—it all seems uncertain again. It is as if the rug is pulled out from beneath our feet and we come face to face with the fact that there is only “me.” That realization is the pivot point of the metamorphic process. It seems like a low ebb: “All is lost. I give up.” Immediately as there really is a giving up—the willingness to become nothing—the emergence aspect of the transition phase becomes predominant. Rather than the disintegration of what was, the “going to mush” of the caterpillar form, now the formation of the butterfly-to-be becomes predominant in experience.
The “little groups of cells” which were present in the body of the caterpillar but served no apparent purpose during its caterpillar stage now become the starting points for the development of the differentiated parts of the butterfly. They were present in bud form, as Joseph Krutch put it. I think this is a beautiful illustration of something in us as well. The starting points for all that is to unfold are completely present in us already in undeveloped seed form. It is said that within seeds, whether of an animal, a human or a plant, the whole design and pattern of the mature living form-to-be is invisibly present in essence.
There is in everyone the in-built capability in the very substance of our bodies to let dramatic metamorphic change occur safely. We have personal proof and precedent of profound change in our lives: everyone in this room survived puberty! Maybe we (or our parents!) didn’t think we (or they) would survive it at the time, but we did. We are living examples that we can go to mush and come out the other side as something else.
I think a lot of people feel themselves either in or on the edge of this kind of experience. Some dig in their heels and resist it, and others are more enthusiastically welcoming of it. Again, how deep is our trust in life’s creation process?
How deeply do we trust what has brought us to where we are, to such awareness as we have now? Are we willing to let that continue to develop? You might say that is all that life is asking: just that there be those who are so willing. For such ones are like these little groups of cells—buds—within the larger body of humankind, the foci of the differentiated parts of the larger body which is in formation and yet to appear in adult form. As I said earlier, wherever we observe the way life works we can learn something about ourselves—not just ourselves as individuals, but ourselves as a collective body of human beings. Do we know to the depths of our beings that the secure, controlling hand of the One Spirit is in fact on this metamorphic process that we all observe and know?
The caterpillar-to-butterfly analogy also applies to viewpoints, opinions or thoughts that we tend to have on this or that. Sometimes such things are pretty fixed. We may feel that we have considerable evidence to support a certain point of view: “This is the way it is.” Well, it may be somewhat like the way it was once, but nothing stays the same. Life moves on and if the structures in consciousness do not, the life processes themselves bring pressure to bear to turn that substance to mush. It is time to change! If we resist, trying to maintain our structures at all costs, it will prove to cost all, because we either relent, let go, let the process work, or we get out of the process. Getting out of the process is to die, whether it happens soon or years down the road. Getting out is an option that many take, but I think it much more sensible to yield and say, “Okay, so maybe the way I see everything isn’t exactly, entirely, one hundred percent totally the way it is forever.” Life needs only a little bit of willingness—and a sense of humor helps!
But then comes the change. The way we thought things were, our understanding of them, becomes uncertain. It goes to mush: “I thought I knew that.” There have been people, for example, who perhaps attended a spiritual education class back along the way, and came out of it with a lot of enthusiasm to willingly put themselves in the middle of life’s stream one hundred percent. The metamorphic change in consciousness keeps working and as a natural and unavoidable aspect of that process the point is reached where everything comes into question. And what we thought we knew, we didn’t really know because we only heard and accepted it, which is quite different from knowing, “Yes, I buy that. It rings right.” If we were open-hearted when we received whatever training we did, we probably had that wonderfully accepting attitude. We FELT as if we knew it because we were vicariously experiencing in the substance of the class setting the One Spirit as expressed by Uranda or Martin or perhaps a faculty member. But it was not fully our own experience yet. For our individual consciousnesses, the class experience was like those little groups of cells in the caterpillar—something life would activate as personal metamorphosis continued. Deeper changes must work out later, because in order for real personal transformation to occur there must be a lot of living consonant with the tone of what at first we just accepted open-heartedly but theoretically.
If we understand these things, should we question the process? If we ever feel de-stabilized and confused, great! The former structures in consciousness are going to mush. Wonderful! However, when we’re in the middle of it, it may not feel wonderful. We may feel uncertain, doubtful, perhaps even despairing and depressed; we may feel alone, on our own, and under the necessity of sinking or swimming personally. At a dark time we can either remember the state of open-heartedness which brought us to the experience or we can turn away from what at the time we think is the source of our anguish. This is characteristic of adolescence, and something that any of us who have teenagers and all of us who were teenagers know something about.
At some stages most teenagers tend to react to and resist their parents in various ways. I think this happens in the “second puberty” too. Maybe there is a certain reaction to spiritual leadership known in the past. “Well, Uranda was around a long time ago and I love his voice, but how do I really know that ‘he was there’?” Martin’s been gone a long time too. My point here is that questioning is analogous to what probably occurred when we were fifteen and our parents suddenly became stupid. Structures in consciousness arise again to be handled clearly. This should not come as a surprise, and yet to many it does!
The cause of metamorphosis is invisible. It is a spiritual control well back of the cellular level, at what we could call a vibrational level. The caterpillar makes its total living substance available to the metamorphic process: it gives its all. That equates to complete open-heartedness in a person and the willingness to become nothing. With that yieldedness, that openness, then the One Spirit creates a new form out of the substance that was provided by the previous form. Life starts “butterflying” in the chrysalis before the butterfly form comes to the point of emerging from the chrysalis. There is the overlay of butterfly essence to which the mush responds, a pattern of invisible butterfly essence. The mush responds and forms itself along the lines of force in the butterfly essence, utilizing those seed cell groups as contact points in the material. Life “butterflies” first and then the form of butterfly comes around it. When the form is adequately together and mature, the chrysalis-womb can open and the butterfly emerges.
Living essence creates living structure. Essence contains the pattern of both form and function. This is an interesting thing to consider in terms of our own consciousnesses. For example, if I say, “A bird can fly because it has wings,” most people would agree with the statement because if you turn it around it’s clear that a bird could not fly if it didn’t have wings. But if what we call a bird is life “birding” and essence creates structure, then a bird has wings because it flies. Think about how the metamorphic process in consciousness can be released to operate more fully and thus the re-creation of the big life form of humankind may take place efficiently and effectively. This is what I feel we are responsible for.
It’s sometimes suggested that a first step toward an experience of new identity is to assume it, even though one might be still convinced of the old one. If we start acting like an adult, even though we may have an adolescent identity, an adult experience will be created. Our essence as human beings is divine, an aspect of the One Spirit. This is already present. It is the constant that is back of all change. We have forms because we live. We don’t live because we have forms. Let’s emphasize the source, the origin, of the life that is flowing through our bodies, minds, and hearts. Let’s identify with that, and the form, the structure, will change to accommodate that real nature. This is the way the door to transmutation opens.
Together, our invisible essences may create humankind anew. We can look at the transformative urge as it is appearing in ourselves and everywhere in our world. We can see it in any terms we might wish—social, political, economic, militarily, you name it. We know this process at a personal level, psychologically, emotionally, but if we relax in openness of heart we can accept the larger pattern in which it is all safely contained. Then the changes occurring in and around ourselves will be in accord with the divine design. That’s how it works. What could be more fulfilling?
© Emissaries of Divine Light
