If your life includes things you profess to hate, yet you continue to do them anyway, that too, indicates self-betrayal. For example, are you always complaining about being overweight, yet you continue to be? Do you fail to exercise, go back to school, change jobs, confront your dead marriage, get a date, get a hobby, or deal with the pain of abuse or neglect that has scarred you since childhood? If so, you can’t possibly be living in concert with who you were originally designed to be.

~Dr. Phil McGraw

I imagine that you have bought a brand-new computer and have just taken it out of the box. It comes from the manufacturer all shiny and fresh, with hardware and software that has been perfectly and purposefully designed specifically for that computer. Then over the years, you continue to add after-market hardware and software, which was never intended to be integrated with your system, including downloaded information off the Internet from total strangers. Pretty soon, you have a malfunctioning computer, but you continue to endure the problems because beyond the obvious inconvenience, you believe it is less costly in both time and money to live with the problems than it is to restore the machine to its factory specs. I know this can happen because I am describing my own experience.

So it is with life also: You and I came from the manufacturer all shiny and fresh, perfectly designed to be the authentic being God intended us to be. Then, over the years, we are downloaded with “programs” designed by others that cause our operating system to malfunction. Yet we continue to let these programs run long after we are aware that they don’t really serve us well. Dr. Phil refers to this as us  as living a life of self-betrayal. The obvious question we must ask is, Why would anyone choose to continue to betray themselves by living a life that is not only unrewarding but, in many cases, is downright miserable? Is their programming that powerful that they would choose to live in a manner that actually dishonors the authentic being they were originally designed to be? Of course, the answer is “yes,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. What does it take then to live a life in concert with who the Master Designer, God, originally intended us to be? It requires the willingness to reprogram ourselves, to delete all of the downloaded, erroneous information given to us by family, friends, and even strangers, which we mistakenly embraced as the truth about ourselves. It may require letting go of outdated “hardware” (e.g., relationships, jobs, addictions, habits, etc.) that do not serve us in living a life that honors the authentic being we were sent here to be.

This computer analogy works well for me because I can see how for the first thirty years of my life, I was operating with more than a few faulty programs and outdated pieces of hardware, which caused me to painfully live a life of self-betrayal. I share it with you, because if I can upgrade my “operating system,” demonstrating a life of wholeness and inner peace that honors the divine designer, anyone can. When I have a computer problem I can’t handle, I call on Jeff, my local computer wizard. When I have a challenge living in concert with who I came here to be, I call on a practitioner, minister, or a trusted friend who will help me remember who I really am. It is never too late to choose to be who you came here to be.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.“

The motif of birth in a cave is also very ancient. This symbol is associated particularly with the winter solstice, when the sun has traveled to its far- thest point away from the tilted earth and the light is in the nadir of the abyss. That is the date of the birth of the god Mithra, who is lord of light. He was born we recall that his mother is the Earth-holding a rock- hewn weapon in his hand. Mithra was the principal competitor with Christianity, in the period of the first three centuries. The Christmas date was placed on December twenty-fifth, which was the solstice time, in order to compete with the Lord of Light, Mithra. No one really knows when Christ was born. It was settled on December twenty-fifth for mythological, not historical, reasons,

The cave has always been the scene of the initiation, where the birth of the light takes place. Here as well is found the whole idea of the cave of the heart, the dark chamber of the heart, where the light of the divine first ap- pears. This image is also associated with the emergence of light in the be- ginning, out of the abyss of the early chaos, so that one senses the deep resonations of this theme.

There are two explanations_

One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground has come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.

They are elementary ideas, what could be called “ground” ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. “Archetype” is the better term because “elementary idea” suggests headwork. Archetype of the unconscious means it comes from below. The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious and Freud’s complexes is that the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime.