An Introduction to the Vertical and Horizontal Axes
I began my path with self-awareness around the age of 27. I had already been struck at an earlier age because of a number of events that highlighted for me that there had to be something more than what I was experiencing. What I was experiencing around the age of 18, I didn’t want to have any part of. It made no sense to me that life as a human being could be summed up into “get a job.”
I remember that summer when I was leaning on an upright shovel in 95 degrees with sweat pouring off of me, hauling gravel one shovel at a time from a large mound over to the narrow irrigation trenches that were part of the new green system on the new golf course. We only had 5 more greens to go.
It made no sense to me that life as a human being could be summed up into “get a job.”
I had been accepted to NC State but I didn’t want to go. Having led a highly disciplined routine for the previous two years at an Episcopal boarding school, I wanted some time off. But as I was leaning on the shovel, I weighed my options and realized, there was no choice. If I go to school, I’m going to be miserable. If I stay here and keep digging ditches, I am going to die. Being miserable was clearly a better alternative to dying.
As time went by, I drifted into reading more of the existentialist works of Sartre and Camus and found a home in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Dust to dust ashes to ashes, I thought. I developed a nihilistic point of view and became cynical and inconsolable. By the time I was 22, I was beginning to flirt with Buddhism and a couple of years later I essentially left the church realizing that I was not going to find God there.
Five years later in 1977, I would attend a workshop at Farr Associates in Greensboro, NC, where I would meet my first teacher, Dr. Tony Speed. My life changed at a significant level the very hour of that workshop.
The reason I share these memories with you is that I realized twenty-five years that it was not luck that had caused me to find myself at that fortunate turning point, but that it was the deep aspiration inside of me that created it. I found Tony Speed because I was looking for Tony Speed. I knew there had to be more. I knew there had to be a greater life than the ones I was living.
My intention in these messages is to help you create the bridges that are necessary to cross into a greater life and the beginning step is aspiration. Aspiration contains the preposition “to.” Inspiration contains the preposition “by.” It’s great to be inspired by something but it’s even better to aspire to something. One is passive and one is active.
Aspiration is upward. Aspiration is the energy of ascent, even without knowing exactly what it is that has to be ascended. Without aspiration, there is killer of human endeavor, inertia.
Aspiration allows you to create a new beginning without needing any credentials, proof, or letters of recommendation. Aspiration is a rejection of the old way and prepares the mind for the possibility of something more. Aspiration is the language your heart uses to speak to the heart of God, to the heart of consciousness. It is, as Aurobindo terms it, the “wordless hymn to the ineffable.” Aspiration creates a reservoir of endurance because now, your mind has hooked into something outside of itself. So, the beginning steps to greater consciousness begin with aspiring to a greater life, to a greater knowing.
I can’t express this strongly enough when I say that you do not have to know how your life will improve because that’s what it provides. That’s what it does. But it is helpful to know what you want to improve. It makes it easier for the taxi cab driver to know where he’s supposed if you know where you’re going. But if you don’t, that’s OK…it’s important to aspire, to seek.
Consciousness knows the movement of each thing and consequently, knows what you’re looking for. Now, you may not know but at least, somebody does. And what you’re aspiring to may not be what consciousness, the vertical, desires for you, but that’s OK. So, how will you practice? How will you implement aspiration into your daily life? How much time will you dedicate each day to this practice?
Without sounding like a purist or tapping into my own fault-filled JBOPPP system, the only recommendation I would make to you is
Within the field of consciousness, there are no obstacles, no limits. There are no laws, only being. Your aspiration can tap into that energy and awaken that which has been dormant inside of you. Let’s not try to solve the greater mysteries and parachute into greater consciousness because some of your lower energies need to be cleansed and harnessed.
And speaking of lower energies, I want you to notice something. I want you to notice that when you are engaged in the lower energies, like having sex or getting high, you forget who you are. The sensory fulfillment of your desires or cravings deafens your hearing of the higher calling. Now, this doesn’t mean that the lower energies should be avoided or judged. It simply means that it’s easy to get trapped in the horizontal, in a daily life of seeking only the fulfillment of your mental, physical and emotional needs and ignoring the spiritual necessity that lies inside of you.
While aspiration is such a vital force in making progress in your life, it is not the main topic of this message.
To aspire to something, to aspire to become something, these ideals are essential.
But it’s so important to understand that you are in the process of creating a daily life in which fertile ground can be prepared and through that preparation, a new life can emerge. Again, you don’t have to know how.
Consciousness is the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent invisible, unmanifest of life. But Time, hang on now, Time is consciousness omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent manifest in your life. Time is a tool of the Divine to enact the process of evolution, the process of your unfolding, of your becoming. So, in the unmanifest, in the vertical, in the eternal, it doesn’t really matter what you do or don’t do. Really, it doesn’t matter.
But in the manifest, in the horizontal, what you do or don’t do might be of great interest to you because of the immediate consequences.
To suggest to you not to waste your time is crammed with implications because the horizontal is finite and you may run out of Time. Time is the gift of God to provide you the opportunity of experiencing who you really are in a physical body. So, aspiration is your foundation. The deeper the foundation, the greater the height to be reached.
Time is the process you use to journey. Time is a tool of the soul. When the journey is enjoyable, time flies. When the journey is painful, time crawls to a halt. So, imagine that this center of your effort, the foundation of your aspiration and Time as the vehicle by which the unfolding occurs, is the nexus of your individual cosmos, it is the nexus of both the vertical and horizontal planes.
The vertical axis represents the contracting force of consciousness, of the unified whole, the one existence, God, the pressures of Time, your existence. The horizontal plane is the ever-widening plane of space, of your becoming, moving through all of the extraordinary experiences. When your life is going well, you move outwardly in the horizontal in an expanded manner. When your life is going badly, you move inwardly along the vertical in a contracted manner. But both the horizontal and the vertical are interwoven and are not separate.
As the contracting forces over not just a single lifetime but many lifetimes are exerted on your being, the distance between you and THAT, God, lessens until some point in the vertical / horizontal / time-space continuum, the space between you and God disappears and you become IT, realizing that you were always IT.
You have now not just created a center but you have become a center that can hold in the middle of the storms of life. You have touched the fulcrum of existence, the foundation upon which to erect your horizontal dreams and desires…not because you need to but because you choose to as an expression of who you are…and not to be kidding around but because you have time on your hands!
In this center which I will speak more about later, everything is just unfolding. For every level of this process, of this becoming, there is a different consciousness that essentially defines it. Said differently, there is a different reality that takes over. But you still get up in the morning and go about your business. You take out the trash. You pay the bills. You govern your horizontal doing through your vertical being. You still experience the stupidities of life, the ignorance of life. And yet, everything has changed.
Now imagine that experience. The fertile ground that was produced through your aspiration has led you to the center of your being. Your experiences are being replaced by your existence. You see through the sensory event and you see the essence of the thing. The thing! The thing! It’s all about that thing! That oneness, that unfolding, the Divine, God, and are you ready? YOU! You see you and you is it. Heaven on earth. Right here. Right now. What reality is now real? Which reality is now concrete?
The physical mind and all of its trappings veils the beauty, veils the truth. I template the earth with its fears and catastrophes, its ideologies and laws, its systems of control and systems of unhappiness. The mind cannot see but you can. The mind is meant to organize the truth of this process which we call knowledge and use that knowledge as the primary reference point for all cadicut: c-a-d-i-c-u-t: Choices, Actions, Decisions, Ideas, Concepts, Understandings, and Thoughts.
It’s not your belief in stuff that is holding you back. It is your belief about stuff that is holding you back. Your beliefs about stuff, including God, love, yourself, the universe, wellness, it’s your belief about them that are the problems because they are not real. Your unconscious cadicuts create unconscious and unintended outcomes. Your conscious cadicuts create intended outcomes. Which one do you want?
Don’t lose your passion for the lower levels of life but invest in your aspiration to a greater knowledge, a greater consciousness. Stop trying to investigate and understand your past and start investing in your future. The mind holds your past experiences, your body holds your present experiences, your soul holds your future. You are not your mind. You are not your past. You have a mind, you had a past but you are neither. So, stop operating as if today was yesterday.
So, here you are at a place in your life and you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you may even have great fear about your future. It’s OK…create a discipline, even 5 minutes a day to aspire, trust yourself, and when the moment comes, even if it takes years and that moment will come because no effort goes unrewarded, have the courage to follow your heart for this process will eventually in one lifetime take to the center where the distance between you and God will evaporate and you will be home.
At TruthSpring, we remain seekers ourselves of this greater unfolding and we view truth not as something that you say or preach but that truth is what you are. We understand clearly that truth is not something that we or anyone creates; truth is something that has always been there right in front of you. You find what has always been there.
This is a quote from the velveteen rabbit:
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Through the contracting and expanding events and forces of your life, you move through the person thinking to the person being. Aspiration is a magnet, connecting you to a greater life.
It is a force that helps you begin to connect your horizontal and vertical axes.
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