We have this tendency to conceptualize and contextualize our experiences. We want to know why what is happening is happening. So we go out and seek answers, whether it’s about emotions, thoughts, specific aspects of spiritual awakening, or other experiences.
I’m aware of this because I have been on both ends. I’ve spent a lot of time seeking answers and trying to find a reason why I was experiencing what I was experiencing. And now, I receive a lot of questions on a variety of topics around awakening and emotional issues (all issues are essentially emotional issues).
Although I always try to answer any question to the best of my abilities and try to discern what the questioner might benefit from hearing, there is something I don’t often add because it’s something I tend to forget. It’s also something that most teachers, guides, and gurus either forget to add or are unaware of.
Everything anyone ever tells you about your experience and why it is happening and what you need to do is at best a good approximation.
Even If someone is where you want to be, they can at best be a lighthouse. This person can look back at their journey and say, “This is what I did before I reached my goal so you might want to try this.” But there is no assurance that this will lead you to your goal. In the end, we never know what exactly has led us to where we are.
The reason why we ask questions is that being in uncertainty and not-knowing is often a very uncomfortable place to be in. Actually, it’s not a place. It’s when we are in no place, when we have no context.
So by asking questions and receiving answers we hope to put ourselves into a box that makes us feel protected and safe. And sometimes this box can be the idea of breaking out of the box.
Especially, in the spiritual playground there is a tendency to believe that by adopting ideas about consciousness and non-duality we have broken out of a box.
That’s not true.
Spirituality is just a somewhat larger confinement where we barely see and feel the walls. It can offer many benefits that some smaller confinements like being career-focused don’t offer. These benefits can range from a deeper sense of community and more hope to extreme emotional highs and extrasensory perception.
Spirituality is a confinement where we can spend our whole lifetime feeling like we’re progressing toward some more complete, elevated, or enlightened state. For some, this is enough. It’s fulfilling and provides them with exactly the life experience they seek.
But the simple fact is that you can’t be free in confinement. And yet, this is only relevant when no matter how vast and beautiful and limitless your confinement feels, it feels oppressive.
Perhaps you are at this point. Perhaps you can’t remain in any context no matter how much sense it seems to make. Well, then maybe this message is for you.
There will be a lot of suffering and confusion. There will be many shifts and changes. And you will feel a strong urge to reach out, to grab on to anything that can help you.
But you need to know that anything anyone ever tells you that may be able to help you is made up. This doesn’t mean that all help is useless or you shouldn’t ask for help. It means no amount of help is the final solution. Use the tool that can help you and then move on.
Think about how often you have come upon a piece of information, a tool, or a practice that seemed to really work. You start to feel better and think, “This is it!” You feel like you’re “making progress,” until, suddenly, everything starts to go downhill again. This is the cycle most of us are in. We assume we have to progress toward well-being in this cycle.
It doesn’t work like that.
Do you remember how often you have reached for something that seemed helpful only to later abandon it again?
This is the key — abandonment.
Use anything at your disposal but know that you must abandon it. Realize the utter helplessness you find yourself in. See that the uncertainty and not-knowing is not something you have to dispel but plunge into.
And then, you’re in the vicinity of the final and liberating abandonment — the abandonment of your self.
Luka
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