Odysseys with Wholeness

Nicola Mary Christensen-Johnson

An Odyssey with Wholeness

Chronicles of the journey of falling upwards into wholeness

A Pilgrimage

An Odyssey with Wholeness is a collection of three volumes calling us to fully engage in the journey of the second half of life, and to initiate the pilgrimage summoning us to wholeness and oneness.

The narrative no longer features the bravura of the hero’s journey crammed with conquests and achievements, battles and wars fought in the name of love and justice, events and circumstances where we celebrate divine love, condemn oppression and injustice, and, regardless of all the dramas, relentlessly continue to imagine life-giving alternatives to bring into a world of immeasurable suffering.

An odyssey is a slow homebound journey, slipping back into the originality of it all. For the odyssey to unfold in its completeness, a compelling call needs to arise, followed by repeated questions as to who is being called, and who is calling, questions which we relentlessly follow up through the various inquiries that present themselves to us.

Rather than recount the perils of the journey, the odyssey dives into the intimate relationships with higher orders of consciousness which flower as we tumble upwards into wholeness. It celebrates the conversational nature of reality. It praises the indivisible reality of love. More crucially, it honours the indwelling presence of boundless goodness which effortlessly expands and flourishes for all women and all men who dare to venture beyond the rims of intelligibility so as to realise their own odyssey with wholeness.

A Cosmology of Wholeness

The collection crafts a cosmology of wholeness for apprehending the developmental nature of consciousness and understanding how consciousness unfolds unto itself following the evolutionary thrust of the implicate order made explicate. The unveiling of the cosmology is pursued by diving into the experience of being human. The inquiries we are drawn towards impel us to explore the nature and purpose of being human, in incarnate form, in the physical world which, despite its dense physicality and jagged edges, remains profoundly spirit-based and imbued with qualities of love and beauty to be uncovered throughout our journey.

An Odyssey with Wholeness tells of the trials and tribulations of becoming fully human, focusing in particular on the thresholds of our contradictions and paradoxes, there where all dualities can meet and converge. Becoming fully human asks us to recognise, and celebrate, our essential nature, that is, who we are in sovereign selfhood, in essence both human and divine. The inner work invites us to courageously embrace all the aspects of the human experience we have exiled and held separate, denied and forgotten, so that we may restore them to wholeness.

Three Embedded Stories

The collection brings together three stories embedded within each other like Russian dolls.

The first volume – An Archaeology of the Personality – begins with the ‘Me Story’, a self-disclosing investigation travelling back through time and space to my childhood where I unearth the genesis of the structures of my personality and the features of its egoic operative system.

The second volume – Pathways to Selfhood – embraces the collective story of humanity, the ‘We Story. It charts the unfolding movements of human consciousness expanding into wholeness as we become ever more conscious of our capacities and honour the essence of who we are in the wholeness of our selfhood. The explorations track down the qualities summoned and the capacities developed at each stage of the odyssey and reveals a map towards unitive consciousness and wholeness.

The third volume – From the Wholeness Perspective – takes us through the looking-glass and releases us into the cosmology of wholeness. There, we look back on the odyssey and cherish the matters of the heart revealed on our journey of falling upwards towards wholeness. Then, weaving together the ‘Me Story’ and the ‘We Story’, we begin to tell the ‘Big Story’.