Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
Follow me on:
The Threshold of Transformation
What I have come to call the Threshold of Transformation is little understood, less spoken about, and often doubted.
The threshold is reached when you come to the end of your personal work. Both psychotherapeutic and spiritual viewpoints will challenge the existence of the threshold. Psychotherapists may question it cynically, because it puts therapists out of business (since their view of growth and development is typically bounded by ego-expansion). Spiritual teachers and practitioners may commandeer crossing the threshold, considering the crossing of this threshold a spiritual event, which it isn’t. Yet others may misunderstand, because they no idea what the threshold represents since there are so few people who can model the threshold and its fruits for them.
The journey of self-discovery sees the seeker working in a variety of ways to overcome his or her emotional and behavioral patterning, which is based on early conditioning and familial relationships. The way is complex, the time it takes varies enormously and in the present culture, most people are unlikely to complete this stage. Nonetheless, the threshold is crucial to human development. Those pioneering individuals who meet the challenge of the threshold are forerunners in the revolution of mind and heart that augurs a collective transformation through sincere inner work and the resultant self-knowledge.
It is important to keep in mind, that you will never reach this threshold without a guide, a mentor, a teacher. Don’t think you can; it does not work. It is part of the present human paradox that the ones who transcend conditioning may be available and able to help the ones who are ready to let go and reach the threshold. At the threshold, however, you let go of everything, even the hand of the guide who brought you here.
The threshold is usually preceded by the intensification of the enquiry: What is the meaning of life? It may not be a new question but it is a new intensity and it may be as if you hear it for the first time; it is now nearer to your heart.
Here at the void, when you are getting closer to the threshold, there are three things to remember, three encouragements I have for you. First, you must clear away all past forms: memories, attachments, childhood conditioning, family identities – all this. St John of the Cross said if you are tied down by one hundred ropes and ninety-nine are released you are still tied down. This is your opportunity to release the hundredth rope and be free. So you must carefully and diligently search within, using all your prior knowledge, skill, and application to find the very last bindings and let go. This is one way of approaching the problem: being discriminatory, entering into the darkest corners of the unconscious mind, and releasing what is still concealed in the psyche and in your soul. The other way is total and it is transcending thought. You can use a thought-transcending practice like meditation.
Second, your energy at this time is essentially initiatory, unformed. It is all potential and possibility without any clear projection, no future composition, shape or creation. Being with this initiatory energy is all you can do, and you must do it. So you will need to be very present, here and now, breathing, walking, sitting, interacting, working, driving your car, everything in the moment, profoundly present. Do not be seduced by any temptations to foretell the future, to have prescience, to predict, to pre-empt, ignore, or avoid. This initiatory energy will take as long as it takes to incubate, to gestate and it is your job now to support that process as caringly and attentively as possible.
Third, crossing the threshold entails a great responsibility. There is no going back, no return to the state of ignorance. Now for the very first time you take complete responsibility for you. There has never been an event of this magnitude in your life. It is an event of transformation, of irreversible change. You experience time like a concertina – reminiscences coalesce, memory orientation dies, your center is realigned, the profound individual processes of wholeness and forgiveness and the final healing of your attachments to personality and character resolve and complete. You open the doorway to the soul, to the spirit, to the heart, to your authentic self.
Authenticity is base camp. When you have attained authenticity, you are real, genuine and centered. You are capable of acting as yourself, feeling like yourself, and responding to the world, giving and receiving. You are heart-orientated rather than centered in the lower energy system. You have resolved issues of early life, childhood, parents, upbringing, and dependency. Your life is at the starting gate, you have arrived at base camp. You are like a stringed instrument which has been tuned. You are ready to make music, to dance and sing. You are ready for life, that’s all it is.
Now you may ask: How do I know I crossed the threshold? What happens at the threshold? How is it after I have crossed it?
Knowing that you have crossed the threshold is a tricky matter because of the transformation that is involved. You may know yourself before and you may know yourself after, but the crossing entails a lack of self-consciousness that tends to manifest as a rupture in your personal narrative as the attachments to the past fall away. The metaphor of crossing appears as an individual event that carries personal significance. The essential elements are the lack of presence and awareness, which stem from the absence of your consciousness of self and a courageous willingness to relinquish all previously held limiting identifications. Often this happens through a token test or changes in which the seeker renounces some previous form or forms of attachment. Unbeknown to the seeker at the time, this token change or test is, so to speak, the actual and symbolic final test in first-stage awakening.
What happens at the threshold? You have completed a great process of loss – the loss of everything you hold dear, in exchange for the only thing of any real value – yourself! And when you emerge, you will be bright, loving, and ready for life. The threshold is a void. You step into voidness. You will gasp and your heart will accelerate its beats. You will enter the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil. You will die to the old and be reborn. When the therapist/guide has brought you to this point, he or she will let go, so you have nothing with you at all – nothing.
How is it after I have crossed it? Many people I speak to about this are concerned about the simple joys and mundane enjoyment of life and happiness. Joy and happiness are now entirely possible for the first time. You will begin to experience them without their opposites out of increased awareness and devotion, because you are authentic and natural, like a flower opening to the sun. Your every action, feeling, thought, and motivation is brightened by divine love, divine feeling, divine will, and increasingly dedicated to enlightening the world about you.
After the threshold, inner and outer, like yours and mine, become increasingly diminished as you orientate yourself to the heart. Why? – because in the heart perceptions like inner and outer, yours and mine, merge in the reality of Truth and the authenticity of Existence.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Harvey’s book Your Divine Opportunity.
Share this article
This article was published on this site in February 2025.
