The way of this world, the way of the ego, is not the real way. There is another and it is hidden beneath the passing clouds of thought which obscure both reality and identity.
It is interesting that something that is always there, like the sun, is so hard to reach and how our lives are sent off, sometimes for lifetimes, down tributaries and cul-de-sacs where we may or may not learn out intended lessons.
It is easy to get stuck and remain stagnant, but we have to act and keep on moving into what the great mystics call the river of loving.
I was fortunate enough after many years of seeking in the outer world to find a path that could wake me up to my true nature and fulfil the parts of me this world never could, and never can. Many of us are dying of thirst in a world the mystic Andrew Harvey says ‘is destined and designed to break you.’
Imagine that: this world is actually designed to break us until we surrender to a completely different way of being, one not driven by harshness, ambition, fear and desire, but one where we can rest in love and peace, knowing we are always and already home.
That takes some shift and to get to the point where - as it says in the 12-step fellowships - we are sick and tired of being sick and tired we must have done the world to such an extent we recognize each new experience as the same old but with a different face.
But first we have to go through all the games of success and failure, gain and loss, highs and lows, births and deaths, this physical world does so well.
Adyashanti, a modern mystic puts it perfectly and jolts the reader awake:
‘Make no mistake about it — enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.’
To realize ourselves as soul only happens when we take our focus off the outer and put it on the inner. At some point, we have to turn our attention within and start building another sort of muscle.
We could call it heart muscle. As we allow ourselves to be disillusioned by this world of reflected light, the glitz and glamour, which is simply a passing show, and focus our attention on the true light, that light begins to grow in us.
Finally, instead of being the weakest element here, it becomes the strongest and the mind with all its fears begins to lose its grip on us. As every mystic knows, the whole universe lives within the heart and as Einstein indicated, the optical illusion of life starts to transform.
This reality cannot be discovered through the mind or by reading spiritual books. We have to commit to going within and working it. We have to do the work, not wait passively for an unknown god to do it all for us.
As my teachers told me, He will throw down the rope, but we have to pull ourselves up. Those religions which need to keep us under their control might wish to render us passive, but we have to do our part.
There are numerous mystics who were sacrificed as heretics on realizing the highest spiritual truths are beyond any form or structure belonging to man.
We all want to be special yet we mistakenly think by being someone important in the world we are miraculously conferred with specialness. If we become successful in men’s eyes, are seen to be important that somehow we have made it.
Great men weigh less than a breath, it says in the Psalms, and we shall all soon return to dust yet few of us think about our forward journey.
I was laughing with a therapy client this morning about the madness of investing our whole lives in that which is doomed to perish while ignoring death, our one certainty, and failing to invest in the state of our souls.
It is not our fault, that is how we are conditioned. Childhood repression of painful episodes completes the picture, rendering us split off from our real selves and then mistakenly looking in the world for restoration.
This can never work. How many rich people have lain on their deathbeds and realized they have made the most common and most tragic of mistakes?
Rumi, the 13th century Sufi, now widely read, showed us what we have to do:
There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.’
This one thing is to achieve soul union – to reunite with what we essentially are – then we know without effort our specific task in this world. How many people are lost yet looking in the wrong direction for their answers?
More success, fame, money, food, sex – whatever is your particularly poison (and we all have one) – will never, can never provide the answer. It would be like putting some ointment on a broken leg, entirely the wrong remedy for what ails, and what ails us is alientation from Self,
We have forgotten who we are.
Nisargadatta, the great sage of Bombay, puts it perfectly:
“All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well...desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to deceive oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.”
In one sense, we have all the time in the world for the soul is eternal, in another, life is short, our evolutionary task pressing.
I spent many years looking all over the world, in people, places and things, for something that was never there.
My hope is you can save yourself all that pain and bother.
There is a Better Way of Living