The Jigsaw Puzzle Analogy
By Ted Strauss

In a recent sitting, I found myself finally clarifying an analogy I’d been searching for in my attempts to describe the healing process that occurs during we call the Wakedown Shakedown. This is my attempt to convey the mind-blowing breakthrough that Saniel has discovered in answer to humanity’s ancient cry for true healing and fundamental wellness of Being.

For each of us, our Being is like a big jigsaw puzzle that has somehow been shattered into a million pieces. During the First Birth, in our efforts to heal this painful and confusing split at the core of our selves, we have tried to solve the puzzle as best we could. We have grabbed ahold of various pieces, analyzed them, and searched for their place in relation to other pieces, and in relation to the Big Picture. The problem has been that we didn’t really know what the Big Picture was exactly. Nor did we know what or where all the parts were. In fact, we hardly knew what was going on at all beyond the fact that we were here as human forms of Being, and that we felt shattered.

Still, we made the best of a bewildering situation. We tried to "get it all together" so that we would somehow feel whole. We studied some psychology or engaged in psychotherapy to try to understand or improve our mind. We tried emotional release therapies to grapple with our tangles feelings and the confusing morass of relationships. We tried yoga, breathing, and other physical disciplines to heal the body and to find its place in the Grand Scheme of things. We tried meditation in our efforts to locate the great Source of All or to realize our Higher Self. All these efforts were like desperately trying to force ill-fitting pieces together. Which is not to say that some didn’t actually fit, it’s just that for many of the pieces—well, we ended up scotch-taping them together, using superglue, or hammering the pieces together until they looked like they fit.

But after decades of such piecemeal efforts, what did we really have? For some of us, a total mess of a puzzle that felt not only unsolved, but fundamentally unsolveable. For others (like myself), something far worse happened. Through tremendous dint of sheer will, we got the puzzle together-looking enough, that we had ourselves pretty well convinced it was solved. Believe me, this is a very dangerous configuration.

During these investigations, you may have encountered the gut-wrenching realization, perhaps one day while flipping though the pages of a spiritual marketplace magazine or while pondering the thousands of titles in the local spiritual bookstore, that perhaps there is no end to all this. For me, the shock of it came as an unformed, unnameable series of questions which sounded something like, "to really know myself, will I have to read every spiritual book in the world, learn every technique, and visit every realized master? That’s not possible! How can I ever find myself? What principle can I follow in my great quest? Who or what should I, or can I, believe in? Am I just crazy? Is this even possible? Or will I die like this?"

At this point in my process, I not only felt the hopelessly shattered pieces of my own Being, but the equally hopeless and apparently endless shattering of the solutions being offered. Could I really persist in going about my healing process one issue, one book, one seminar, or one technique at a time? After having spent nearly 25 years of my adult life, including all my time, money, and most of my serious attention on my own healing and awakening, I began to permit myself a painful reality check. At the rate I was going, I would clearly be dead before a radical healing might actually occur. Ouch.

It was time for a change in my whole approach. I began to recognize my need for help in a very personal way. I began to invoke an awakened mentor, someone who would really understand me and my personal issues. Someone who would spend time with me, and help me come to a genuine awakening. And then, quite miraculously, I found Saniel.

What Saniel has found for himself and has taught me is perhaps the most amazing miracle ever discovered: by relaxing into the pain and confusion of the separation at the core of your Being, within the forcefield of an awakened mentor, you very directly realize the Big Picture of your own Being. It’s a though you realize the boxtop of the jigsaw puzzle—you see and know yourself to be the fully integrated, seamless picture of your own Reality. Suddenly, you become the picture-perfect template of your own, perfectly whole Being. Suddenly, you realize the long-sought fundamental wellness and integration at the core of your existence. What an unspeakable relief! It is most indescribable.

But soon enough, it becomes clear that this is not the end of the long journey of healing. Paradoxically, although you find yourself (at the core level) being the perfect wholeness you once searched for, you notice that you are not magically healed in the rest of your Being. Somehow, your issues and conditioning remain to be conformed to your realized integrity and wellness. And so, sometime within a few moments, weeks, or months of your Second Birth, a momentous event begins to move in your Being. Saniel calls it the Wakedown Shaedown.

It’s rather like the earthquake you’ve always feared must eventually happen. The puzzle pieces begin to be magnetized to their rightful place in the realized picture of your ultimate wholeness. They being to shake and quiver and jitter their way toward the spot where they know they belong. The hardest parts are with the pieces you have hammered, taped, and glued together. The glued pieces start coming suddenly unglued; the forced parts start forcibly tearing themselves apart; the tape spontaneously rips off. It is a spectacle not unlike the weird scenes that happen in science fiction movies when the UFO flies over a house, and everything in the house comes suddenly unglued.

Of course, all of this is necessary for each piece to find its way into its proper position in your Being. So, although it’s a great thing in the long run, in the short run life is bizarre, to say the least. In the short run, you feel like you’re going crazy. You wonder what this "realization" really is, whether it’s really worth it, and if it you’ve even had it at all. You wonder if there isn’t still some escape route you may have missed… only to find that, no, this is it. There’s nowhere to go. There is only this painful and sobering reckoning with your own reality. It is time to finally permit this healing to take you over entirely.

In time (we’re talking years), after much in your being has been fundamentally rearranged and has found its proper position on the template, life is different than it has ever been before. You begin to find a sort of "bottom", a place where you can actually rest. It’s not that the whole world is fixed, it’s not that all your problems have gone away. It’s just that you are left standing as an autonomous (yet fully connected), grown-up adult. You are simply here, being who and what You are. And that, at least in my opinion, is worth the price of admission. At this point, you can finally get on with your life.

© 1999 Ted Nathan Strauss

 

Ted Strauss
  Ted’s Bio and Acknowledgement of Saniel
  Ted's Birthday Letter to Saniel
  Ted's Bio
  Gazing
  The Ball of Yarn
  The Realization of Pain
  Two Kinds of Pain
  The Jigsaw Puzzle Analogy
  The Self You Didn’t Want To Realize
  The Titanic Analogy: That Sinking Feeling
  The Lunar Module Analogy: Whose Truth Is True?
  Mutuality
  The Search for Nirvana
  Innocense
  The Black Hole Analogy
  Trust
  The Responsibility of Seeing and the Fear of Being
  Sex and the Spiritual Man
  The Paradox of Multiple Onlyness
  Letter To An Enlightened Being
  Excerpts From a Letter to One Confused in Relation