The Real Problem with an Exotic Vacation

Consciousness

Oct 26

Imagine an exotic, round-trip vacation to somewhere you’ve never been. Drunk with excitement and anticipation, you can hardly wait for the moment of departure. Having arrived, you don’t pay much attention to time...too many things to do, to enjoy, the one thing you know about time is that you don’t have enough of it here in your temporary paradise.

At the end of sensory ecstasy, it is time to go home, back to what people commonly refer to as reality. The daily grind is reality and the time away from the daily grind must be the opposite, whatever you call that. Reality apparently sucks and non-reality doesn’t. Physical life without a spiritual life or foundation is a lot like that. Satisfaction is temporary, fulfillment is non-existent, happiness is elusive, the only way you feel OK about your life is by not being in your life but somewhere else.

Now, let’s go back to the exotic vacation part. You choose to take birth and essentially, you descend from the non-physical into the physical. Now, that’s pretty exciting...at least for a while. I realize this can be hard to accept...the issue of choosing to take birth... for a number of different reasons. But if there is one single event that has happened in your life that has been against your will, then evolution is truly nothing more than the survival of the fittest. In that case, there’s no need for me to speak any more about the science of living because that would be a fantasy. How could anything be against your will? Now, against the ego’s will...every day! Against the soul’s will...never.

Now, that doesn’t mean that when bad things happen to you that you’re aware that you drew those circumstances to yourself. That’s what your evolutionary process is all about. Waking up. And when you do become conscious of that, you will not require to learn through suffering and pain as you did before. I think that the idea of being the author of your life whether you are aware of that or not can be quite appealing because it means that if it’s true, it means that you can change anytime you’re ready and that is totally up to you and not somebody else. It means that nothing is done to you without your soul’s design.

Now, please remember that you, your soul is eternal, unthreatenable, unalarmed by anything because it knows who it is. If you took the position that you are the author of your life, then why would you author pain and suffering into your experience? In fact, you wouldn’t. You would author in joy and love and fulfillment to name a few. This would replace the old reality of the daily grind. You’d be so excited about these newfound circumstances, you would barely be able to sleep you were so excited! And you didn’t even have to go anywhere! You created the exotic vacation right in the middle of your dumpy apartment...and that makes you powerful.

But as long as you’re not aware of that, then seeing life as a struggle or a constant uncertainty, crammed with injustice and meaninglessness works out pretty well. The mind thinks it is the way it is because of what is happening outside of itself, in the world.

So, let’s go back...you’ve decided to take birth and you come into physical form, individualized, personality and all, not knowing what’s going on. It’s like agreed-upon amnesia that allows you to forget what you’re doing here. Your evolutionary journey is the process of remembering who you are.

In his book, “The Art of Transformation,” Durckheim states,

“Birth signals that the divine has moved into form. Essentially, the invisible has become visible. In this state, the person develops an ego whose purpose is to confront and master the world. The ego views life solely as a matter of establishing, mastering and sustaining the rational, sensory world from a limited fixed point: the individual mind.”

Now, the negative ground of being is born. Life, being a moving process, does not tolerate anything static. In the world of duality, the negative ground of being is nothing more than our personal delusion that separates us from the divine ground of being and establishes our customized pattern of suffering. Now, your mind is a lower instrument that can only manifest that which it considers itself to be. The outer circumstance is a mirror image of the inner condition. But, of course, your mind doesn’t know that.

So, first, the mind has descended into form. This physical life does not desire to evolve. It does not desire to give, to expand. It desires to receive. To have its irrational needs met and to have control of its environment, as well as others that also reside in that environment.

The second part is that over the course of a lifetime, there will come a time for you to ascend, to aspire to a greater truth of who you are and the fulfillment of your destiny. This will not be done by your mind but by you. In spite of the objections and resistances offered up by your mind, you will train your mind to subordinate itself to a greater cause and journey. It is through this understanding that you can now see that although you are nothing but the spirit, nothing but a version of the Divine, that you, yourself, are eternal, you can now see that you are born spiritual but do not function spiritually. To choose the spiritual path, to live a spiritual life will be a choice that will require ascension. That’s part three, following the ascent.

But even the ascension will not complete the trip because that is only a one-way trip. The return to the horizontal, to spiritualize your daily life represents the roundtrip part of the journey. So, you choose a descent into birth, you choose an ascension back into truth-consciousness, and then you choose a return back into the horizontal. That’s part 4.

The unique part of this yoga, this path, is that you are doing all of this while in a physical body. Heaven is attained by most religions by an escape from the horizontal into the ethers of “a better place.” It advocates an escape from the physical. Heaven in this practice is attained right here in the middle of your previously sloppy, undisciplined, screwed-up life...and that makes you powerful.

Spirituality is learned, it is gained through aspiration, discipline, and dedication. It is unlikely to happen on its own...although it does happen. But until that happens in your life, the old mind stays true to its lower nature, and your life will reflect that. But your mind’s true nature, its purpose to live out that which you are, a microcosmos of the macrocosmos called truth-consciousness or God. And your mind’s true function is to engage in a process by which the joy of receiving is predicated upon the joy of giving, the joy of loving is predicated upon loving another, the joy of having is predicated upon causing others to have, the joy of being is predicated upon causing others to be. In demonstrating the path, you become the path.

I want to stress the concept that the reason for ascension is not to escape from daily life but that its true purpose is to return. It’s the descent. Do you understand? The reason for becoming conscious is to create a conscious life, the reason for reaching the top of the mountain is to return to the valley below and conduct yourself in the lowest arenas of life through the highest knowledge that you have been able to attain. The reason for ascending to the mountain top is not to stay on the mountaintop. The reason for taking an exotic vacation is not to stay there...that’s an escape. The reason for returning is to transform your horizontal, daily life, through having reached the vertical. It is the divine force inside of you seeking to divinize physical matter itself. And there’s no better place to do that than your daily life, right where you are right now, good or bad, broke or flush, in a relationship or single. Notice, I didn’t use the word alone because that is another human condition that is an illusion.

The reason for ascending to the mountain top is not to stay on the mountaintop.

In spite of all of the limitations and barriers that you face in your physical, horizontal world, you will achieve mastery by no longer dividing and separating the events of your life as good or bad but by unifying every event in your life as part of truth-consciousness, part of the Divine, part of God. For everything here is a tool of truth-consciousness, including you. Rising above the irrational content of your mind, rising above the endless demands of your physical body, and rising above the addictive hungers of your emotions, you will unify your mind, body, and emotions by unifying all parts of the physical world and creating a unified perception of the world and your Self.

In doing so, you will learn to embrace all events in your life, seeing them as tools of your development and awakening. This takes courage and certainty, knowing that what befalls you along the journey is a precise, perfect mechanism for your spiritual growth. And can that be painful and difficult? Yes, but it doesn’t have to last. The mundane has suddenly become the exotic and each day is not just a vacation but a privilege to live. To have the opportunity in the physical body to realize the divine that lies inside of you is a privilege. You are learning to see what seers know how to do...to see the essential. If you don’t look at it that way and life is nothing but an act of survival, then check your calendar and schedule another exotic vacation to escape the horizontal, the world of suffering and ignorance. But that trip, too, will only provide a temporary fix.

And this reveals the greatest problem that you and face. It’s not the problems that make life so difficult, it’s not being able to resolve the inner, unstoppable impulse and drive you to have to live free of those problems.

As Aurobindo says, “Mine is the labor of the battling Gods,” the battle of the spiritual with the physical. Pain is joy’s chrysalis. Pain is the womb of bliss waiting to be transformed at any given moment. And it can be so hard at times and I understand that. You have to learn to hook your mind back into the experience of being on top of the mountain and remembering in the middle of the process what the event is all about.

This is a brief quote from “Savitri”:

“A friend and inmate of our secret self; It hid behind our minds and fell asleep; And slowly wakes beneath the blows of life; The mighty daemon lies unshaped within, To evoke, to give it form is Nature’s task.”

And that is your task...to give that impulse, that yearning, form, to give it a home. Each individual is seeking to fulfill themselves through the mind, the body, and the emotions...which cannot be done. The fix is temporary and the next time, it takes a little bit more to get your fix. It never ends. But the underlying force of truth, of consciousness, which seeks to know itself in the physical presses forward and the great battle continues lifetime after lifetime. As above, so below. The outer is a physical representation of the inner. The micro is the image of the macro. As the consciousness is, so will the force be. And throughout your life, you attempt to fulfill the inner yearning, of finding the you that was contained in the seed of your birth and experience in the physical body the potential that was contained in that seed.

Consciousness seeks a unity by which it knows itself in the many and that the many know themselves as the one. This inner impulse cannot be denied because it is the reason for your birth. It is consciousness, God, seeking to realize itself in physical form. Until then, where this understanding is absent, submerged under the weight of the horizontal and daily life, under the daily assault of expectations, family, jobs, child-rearing, and paying bills, your mind blindly seeks to fulfill itself through luck, accident, and prayer, until one day in one lifetime you will have no choice but to turn to the truth that lies inside of you because until you do, you will not rest.

It is true that as your being grows each day through greater knowledge and the refining of your life through enriched experiences, including exotic vacations, you will make progress. But the progress can be slow. This opposition between those two, your mind and the truth that lies inside of you, is your labor. This is your path, your struggle. This is the problem of life to which you will go to great lengths to resolve...why? Because it’s really the only thing going on. The real problem is not outside of you, in the sensory world, in the daily life of surviving. The real problem lies inside of you in how you will choose to resolve the vertical impulse that cannot be fulfilled through the horizontal, material world.

The material world IS the vacation spot and there are going to be times when that will be hard to accept because of the difficulties that you, and me, and all others will face over the course of their journey. The descent into the physical body, the ascent to knowledge, the descent back into daily life. This is the way. This is the permanent exotic vacation.

As the journey to awakening begins, look inside yourself and if you don’t approve of yourself and find reasons to be self-loathing, critical, or ashamed, become a sculptor. Peel a little over here, cut a little there, get rid of the superficial, add some glow, some light, balance what is unbalanced, labor and chisel, sandpaper and refine until it’s ready, and then, see the beauty of who you are, shining, eternal, letting go of what never was, laying down the sword, and lighting a lamp.

Here is another quote from Durckheim’s “The Way of Transformation”:

“As the seeker progresses on the path to enlightenment, he begins to discern signs and sees that his inner attitude has the power to move outer circumstances either way for good or bad. When he is in a state of harmony and his actions conform to the deeper truth of his being, nothing seems to resist, even "impossibilities" dissolve as though another law came to supercede the "natural" one. He begins to enjoy a royal freedom.
But when there is inner disorder, whether mental or vital, he finds that this disorder irresistibly invites negative outer circumstances, an accident, or illness. Only when the finite mind is annihilated, is blown out like a flame of acandle by the breath of divine wisdom, and nirvana is realized, can there be true knowing of mind. Here we have reached the frontier of the realm of terms; and progress beyond it is for the fearless, for those who are prepared to lose their life that they may find it.”

What life are you losing? It is the life that is the source of your discomfort. And what is the real problem associated with that discomfort? The real problem is that the internal, unending, always present impulse that you have that ceaselessly seeks fulfillment, grace, peace, forgiveness, security, or whatever your unique being calls for, can only be fulfilled, not in the external, not in the physical, not in an exotic vacation, but in the merging with that which is, consciousness itself and that can only be realized through the vertical, through the spiritual.

I can’t stress enough that this is not a mental condition, a dogmatic set of beliefs, but a lived experience of having realized the vertical and then transforming your horizontal, daily life.

As you begin to move from the periphery to the center of your being, each advance you make creates a new understanding, a new consciousness that accompanies that advance. There are, indeed, many levels of consciousness. This is what is meant in the bible in John 14 2-3, when Christ states, “My father’s house has many rooms.” And each step will be better than the last. As each rung in the ladder, search step in the staircase is climbed, there is a corresponding vibration and response in your outer world.

As Durckheim says, “He begins to discern signs and sees that his inner attitude has the power to move outer circumstances either way for good or bad. When he is in a state of harmony and his actions conform to the deeper truth of his being, nothing seems to resist, even "impossibilities" dissolve as though another law came to supersede the "natural" one.”

And once again, you understand that it is not the outer that is the problem. The problem is not your outer, chaotic life. The problem is having become lost in your outer life, in your horizontal, in the chaos, and thinking that by a miracle, by winning the lottery, that all will be well. It will not.

God cannot save you from your fear because fear does not exist.

God did not make fear. You did.

Move as best you can from the outer to the inner, to the center of your being and it is there and only there that your inner drive for love, for stability, for meaning, for peace, will, at last, be fulfilled. It is so important, of course, to talk about strategy, for concrete suggestions for undertaking such a journey but will have to wait for another time.

I do examine this in a blog called, “Meditation, Relaxation, and Laziness,” in which I discuss some of those strategies. The bad news is that through the lens of the horizontal, in the world of mutual devouring, competing in the survival of the fittest, as you see all around you in the world today, the outcomes are grim. Through the lens of the vertical, through the ascent to Truth, and the descent back into the horizontal, the good news is that you find everything you have spent your whole life looking for, dying for, suffering for.

And you will realize that it was not only in you the entire time, but that it is you and you is it.