The Perilous Path Towards Awakening (3)

 

by Bernhard Guenther

Read the second part of the article

To be „awake” it is also the state wherein we are not subjected to any attacks or interferences of the occult hyper dimensional forces, since we find ourselves resonating on a higher frequency, beyond their vibrational realm, i.e. we have truly transcended the Matrix.

 

The “reality” we subsequently experience is of a much richer and more subtle impression, not bound to the illusion of linear time, hence there is no pressure to do, no hurry, no impatience. Will-full doing dissipates, to be replaced by an embodied responding to what is – and what life brings – that is uniquely tuned to our soul lessons and talents; it guides us from an embodied inner place without expectations and attachment to outcome.

Goal setting and ambition are replaced by a quiet aspiration with intentions but without expectations or need to control. Making choices and decisions don’t stem from a thought process anymore or any head-centric analysis of “should” or “shouldn’t”, but emerge from a gut-level of nonverbal intuitive knowing. Life becomes like a dance in the river of life as we don’t fight the current anymore, being in the “zone”, locked into the rhythm of life (Tao).

Contrary to popular beliefs, this awakened state is not a constant feeling of “bliss” or ecstasy (even though there can be peak experiences like that), nor is it a “feeling” of love or happiness. It really transcends anything we usually experience in ordinary consciousness states that are related to emotions and feelings. Ultimately, it transcends the duality of pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering. There is a deeper, silent contentment, a grounded calmness and sense of peace, not depending on any external circumstances… a sense of slowing down and simplifying.

It’s a place of true freedom. Thoughts may still come and try to attach themselves, but it becomes easier to detach from them – to release from believing in them or identifying with them. This sense of detachment is, however, not an intellectual form of dissociating, but an embodied recognition of one’s true nature in contrast to the illusion of thought (and who we “think” we are). One recognizes that the mind is just a tool, a servant, but not be looked upon as the master/guide. It’s not about demonizing the intellect either, for it needs to go through its own transmutation to become an instrument for the Divine, accessing higher knowledge (Gnosis).

We can also still “use” it in practical ways to live out our daily routines, since we didn’t just “check out” of our existence here on Earth; on the contrary, we are more involved with reality – more fully-embracing of life – and whatever this dance may bring in full conscious participation with the rhythms of life, we will participate in… without attachment and will-full doing.

“All of us, in our own process of awakening, will visit the limitation of our personal will. Most of us will visit it several different times, on deeper and deeper levels, until it is fully extinguished.

The loss of personal will isn’t really a loss at all. It’s not as if we become the doormat of humanity, that we stop knowing what to do or how to do it. Quite the opposite happens. By surrendering the illusion of the personal will, a whole different state of consciousness is born in us; a rebirth happens. It’s almost like a resurrection happens from deep within us. This resurrection is very hard to explain, like many things in spirituality, but in essence we start to be moved by the completeness and totality of life itself.

The depiction of this kind of movement is very vivid in the Taoist tradition, which focuses on the expression of the Tao, or the truth, through us. If you read through the Tao Te Ching or look at some of the Taoist teachings, you start to get a feel for how willfulness is replaced by a sense of flow.

When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier – it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the ‘me’ is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.

As their sense of personal will diminishes, people often say to me, ‘I don’t even know how to make a decision anymore.’ This is because they are operating less and less from a personal point of view. There is a new way of operating, and it is not really about making this decision or that decision, the right decision or the wrong decision. It is more like navigating a flow. You feel where events are moving, and you feel for the right thing to do. It’s like a river that knows which way to turn around a rock – to the left or to the right. It’s an intuitive and innate sense of knowing.

This kind of flow is always available to us, but most of us are too lost in the complexities of our thinking to feel that there’s a simple and natural flow to life. But underneath the turmoil of thought and emotion, and underneath the grasping of the personal will, there is indeed a flow. There is a simple movement of life.” ~ Adyashanti, The End of Your World

 

Personally speaking, over the past few years I’ve had more glimpses into that state of ‘flow’ being, and started to increasingly experience life and “reality” on a different level that is hard to even put into words. I’m more and more grounded in the present moment, unconcerned about the past or future. As mentioned before, by no means do I claim to have fully “awoken”, let alone achieved a real state of “enlightened” existence, but there have been internal changes within me – which reflect my “outer” reality – that are undeniable (which have also resulted in an exponential increase in positive synchronicities).

There is also more joy and simple contentment and gratitude in my heart, as well as humility for the mystery of life; a deeper trust and faith in the here and now and the “universe”… a sense that I’m being “taken care of” and “supported”. Yet, my personal emancipation and embodiment process continues, and there are always more lessons to learn. I still have my days when I get stuck in the head, get disconnected, reactive, project (and my ego gets the best of me), melancholic, down on myself, or caught up in a thought loop, but it’s not even close to the state of Being I was in a few years back.

Many of us experience glimpses or subtle impressions of what I described above, but most of the time they don’t stay with us, and aren’t permanent by any means. That is normal as well, so even when the “light” diminishes and we get caught up into our thought loops and mechanical behavior once again, we must not despair. Much is happening behind the veil, as Spirit is busy doing its work.

The Awakening process is not a linear process. Many factors come into the journey as it is so very different for each of us. From a broader perspective, we all are where we need to be when it comes to soul evolution. The trap is to compare ourselves to anyone else, or get caught in the mindset of what “should” be happening, or where we “should” be with regards to our inner development, or become bogged down in our mind’s idea of “success” and “failure”, all of which most often results in anxiety, depression, impatience, frustration or anger.

When I find myself in such a state (especially when a thought of “should/shouldn’t” comes up), I use it as a feedback signal that I’m currently dis-embodied (not in my body) and disconnected from my true self/spirit (in the absolute sense, we are never disconnected, of course) and I don’t attempt to make any decisions from that state. Instead of fighting it, acting out of desperation, or forcing myself to get out of it, I surrender to it – meaning that I don’t avoid these feelings, nor act upon them, but simply accept and observe them. Usually, I go into meditation to fully feel them in my body (other times I’ll dance or take a walk in nature) and also inquire deeper into any thoughts associated with these emotions, since there is usually a feedback loop between thought and emotion – one triggering the other.

As I surrender to what is, an underlying (false) belief from the past (based on conditioning/wounding) – which the thought is associated with – usually comes to light… or I sometimes sense an archonic thought injection, bringing it into conscious awareness through simple inner perception without identifying with it, which helps to dissolve the thought, i.e. metaphysical detachment. Sometimes this also results in emotional processing (without resulting judgment) by “loving what arises” and just feeling into it with unconditional acceptance. Self-love – as in wholeness, accepting the “dark” and “light” within, without judgment – is a key ingredient in this process.

Traps on the Path towards Awakening

Let’s look at some of the traps on the journey towards awakening, and also examine some of the pitfalls we can fall into in the wake of experiencing a glimpse into the profound “other-ness” of an awakened (if still impermanent) state. All traps described below (this is merely a selection of the main ones I have observed in myself and others) can happen at any given stage of the awakening process, and many can occur simultaneously. Personally speaking, I’ve fallen into many of these traps in the past (and learned the hard way), and some of them still creep in here and there if I don’t “catch myself”.

Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual Bypassing (first coined by John Welwood in 1984) is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. We engage in spiritual bypassing when we bypass necessary basic psychological work, believing ourselves to be more (self) aware than we actually are, and thus over-estimate our state of being. It relates to intellectualizing higher spiritual truths, ideas, and concepts, and thereby distorting/diluting them in order to avoid facing our blind spots and conditioned personality.

 

Spiritual Bypassing also reveals itself when we judge harmful emotions as something “bad”, “un-spiritual” – a virus to be avoided… believing that “being spiritual” means to always be nice, positive, smiling and non-confrontational (resulting in a lack of boundaries and reality-avoidance).

Signs of spiritual bypassing:
• exaggerated detachment (intellectual/stuck in the head)
• emotional numbing and repression
• overemphasis on the positive
• anger-phobia (most often resulting in passive aggressiveness and a “make nice” mask)
• blind or overly-tolerant compassion/weak boundaries
• lopsided development (cognitive/intellectual intelligence often being far ahead of emotional intelligence – lack of embodiment)
• debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow side
• devaluation of the personal/physical relative to the spiritual – separation illusion
• delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being
• forceful efforts to kill/eradicate the ego, or judging it as “bad”
• using statements (absolute/higher “truths”) such as “everything is perfect”, “it’s all an illusion”, “we are all one”, “love is all there is” as philosophical (intellectual) concepts to avoid dealing with the not-so-pleasant aspects of everyday life in this 3D duality (bypassing responsibility and lessons of our 3D incarnation)
• using spiritual practices in a superficial manner to escape unpleasant emotions; for example, using meditation to dissociate from emotions, rather than transmute them.

“When we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat. And when we’re caught up in the grosser forms of spiritual bypassing, we’d usually much rather theorize about the frontiers of consciousness than actually go there, suppressing the fire rather than breathing it even more alive, espousing the ideal of unconditional love but not permitting love to show up in its more challenging, personal dimensions. To do so would be too hot, too scary, and too out-of-control, bringing things to the surface that we have long disowned or suppressed.

But if we really want the light, we cannot afford to flee the heat. As Victor Frankl said, ‘What gives light must endure burning.’ And being with the fire’s heat doesn’t just mean sitting with the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.

Spiritual bypassing is largely occupied, at least in its New Age forms, by the idea of wholeness and the innate unity of Being – ‘Oneness’ being perhaps its favorite bumper sticker – but actually generates and reinforces fragmentation by separating out from and rejecting what is painful, distressed, and unhealed; all the far-from-flattering aspects of being human.

The trappings of spiritual bypassing can look good, particularly when they seem to promise freedom from life’s fuss and fury, but this supposed serenity and detachment is often little more than metaphysical valium, especially for those who have made too much of a virtue out of being and looking positive.

A common telltale sign of spiritual bypassing is a lack of grounding and in-the-body experience that tends to keep us either spacily afloat in how we relate to the world or too rigidly tethered to a spiritual system that seemingly provides the solidity we lack. We also may fall into premature forgiveness and emotional dissociation, and confuse anger with aggression and ill will, which leaves us disempowered, riddled with weak boundaries. The overdone niceness that often characterizes spiritual bypassing strands it from emotional depth and authenticity; and its underlying grief – mostly unspoken, untouched, unacknowledged – keeps it marooned from the very caring that would unwrap and undo it, like a baby being readied for a bath by a loving parent.

Spiritual bypassing distances us not only from our pain and difficult personal issues but also from our own authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality. Its frequently disconnected nature keeps it adrift, clinging to the life jacket of its self-conferred spiritual credentials. As such, it maroons us from embodying our full humanity.

Cutting through spiritual bypassing means turning towards the painful, unwanted, scary shadow elements of ourselves. To do this we must cut through our numbness and defenses, approaching it with as much care as we can. If doing so seems to heal our heart, we are on the right path. When heart heals, it opens and expands, not shatters. When we denumb and become more comfortable with our own comfort we see what drove us into spiritual bypassing. This is a challenging journey to say the least.

True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state. It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible; something radically alive and naturally integral; something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as something to dabble in here and there.

Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness, not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness, not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of liberation, an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat and light for the healing and awakening we need.” – Robert Augustus Masters, Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual Bypassing also ties into Spiritual Materialism, coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and defined as “a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality” where we “deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.” It relates to getting “addicted” to spiritual teachings and practices, with people continuously looking for the next workshop, the next teaching, the newest guru in town, going from one seminar to the next, traveling all over the world to find “truth”, going from healer to healer, “master” to “master”, in the hopes of someone healing them or bringing them “enlightenment”.

Spiritual Materialism also shows itself by building a library of spiritual techniques that their ego likes to “show off” to prove their worthiness – to reveal how much of a “properly spiritual” person they are, and how much they have read, “know”, and practice.

Read the fourth part of the article

 

yogaesoteric
June 26, 2019