The White-Linen Sutra

A sutra is a thread of wisdom—short enough to remember, slippery enough to spend a lifetime trying to understand.

Walk with those who can run beside you, says the Tao, but don’t dam the river when their road turns toward another home. The Buddha might add that companionship without clinging is one of love’s cleaner forms, while Jesus simply sends people onward with go in peace. Bless the meeting, bless the parting, and don’t try to nail either one to the floor.

I recently dreamed I was wearing the blue suit I used to wear when I did depth therapy, dreamwork, and life-issue processing with patients in my brick-and-mortar office before COVID. It was a good suit. It fit the man and the work of that time. Then everything changed, and we went virtual. To my surprise, the work often deepened. No driving through traffic, no parking, no meeting people outside the building, no shuffling through hallways carrying the static of the day. We simply touched a button and—voilà—entered the liminal zone of the deep psyche.

Something about the relative stillness of it allowed us to settle into psychic depths we hadn’t imagined. The outer room disappeared, and the inner room enlarged.

In the dream, though, I was again wearing the blue suit and realizing that while it had been right for then, it was no longer right for now. That kind of professional identification was no longer necessary. It had served the work, but the work—and my vocation—no longer required it.

The message was simple: Don’t mistake the garment for the soul.

Jung’s individuation gradually loosens the persona from the Self. Hillman’s soul-making keeps us faithful to the peculiar images of our own lives rather than forcing them into respectable shapes. Corbin’s Angel of Light whispers that what truly matters becomes incarnate rather than advertised. The soul doesn’t need a billboard, a credential hanging from its neck, or a blue suit proving it has somewhere important to go.

In the dream, I walked on and saw young people “finding Jesus,” collecting their Bibles, bright with the fervor of discovery. I understood where they were and appreciated the searching, the finding, and even the certainty. They would find, then lose, then perhaps find again in another form. If they remained alive to the journey, new revelations would carry them through their dark nights of soul, and unfamiliar lights would shine upon paths they could not yet see.

Lao-tzu would probably smile and keep walking. Rumi would dance past the arguments. Meister Eckhart would empty himself of the whole damn question—God, life, truth, and all our grand answers about how to live—so that something living might finally enter.

Psychologist Michael Eigen belongs comfortably among these crazy mystics. He tells us, in his own way, not to sanitize the wounds, flee the darkness, or turn suffering into theory. Stay alive enough to feel Life happening through it. Faith is not always certainty. Sometimes it is the capacity to remain emotionally present while the floor gives way and another kind of ground, less visible but more real, begins to hold us.

So, in the dream, I moved on. I was now wearing loose, white linen clothing and sitting in a restaurant, ready for lunch. Beside me was a woman whose face carried weather. She needed to speak about what she had endured. I listened and offered kindness without making her my patient, my project, or someone whose suffering I was responsible for healing.

That may have been the heart of the dream: I wasn’t to confuse being desired in the moment with needing to possess; being needed for a time with needing to rescue; being knowledgeable with needing to explain; or having a vocation with having to perform it every waking hour.

White linen isn’t retirement from the soul’s work. It is the work after it has stopped insisting on looking like work.

The Upanishads say what you’re looking for is already here. Zen says eat when you’re hungry. Twain would probably advise against taking any of this too seriously. Hermes, laughing at the crossroads, reminds us that every identity eventually becomes luggage if we refuse to put it down.

The old psychologist needn’t disappear. He simply becomes transparent enough for the man underneath to walk around in white linen.

Walk together when it’s time to walk. Wave when the roads divide. Listen when suffering speaks. Leave when the conversation is finished. And, for heaven’s sake, as Zhuangzi might say, when lunch arrives, eat it while it’s hot.