The answer is, fear says so. The part of you inside that’s not okay with itself can’t face the natural unfolding of life because it’s not under your control. If life unfolds in a way that stimulates your inner problems, then, by definition, it’s not okay. It’s really very simple: that which doesn’t disturb you is okay, and that which does disturb you is not. We define the entire scope of our outer experience based upon our inner problems. If you want to grow spiritually, you have to change that. If you are defining creation based upon the most messed up part of your being, what do you expect creation to look like? It’s going to look like a frightful mess.
As you grow spiritually, you will realize that your attempts to protect yourself from your problems actually create more problems. If you attempt to arrange people, places, and things so they don’t disturb you, it will begin to feel like life is against you. You’ll feel that life is a struggle and that every day is heavy because you have to control and fight with everything. There will be competition, jealousy, and fear. You will feel that anyone, at any moment, could cause you disturbance. All they have to do is say or do one thing, and the next thing you know there’s disturbance inside of you. That makes life a threat. That’s why you have to worry so much. That’s why you have all these dialogues going on inside your mind. You’re either trying to figure out how to keep things from happening, or you’re trying to figure out what to do because they did happen. You are fighting with creation, and that’s what makes creation itself the most frightening thing in your life.
The alternative is to decide not to fight with life. You realize and accept that life is not under your control. Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it. Instead of living life, you’ll be afraid of life. But once you’ve decided not to fight with life, you’ll have to face the fear that was causing you to fight. Fortunately, you don’t have to keep this fear inside of you. There is such a thing as a life without fear. In order to relate to this possibility, we must first have a deeper understanding of fear itself.
When you have fear inside of you, the events of life invariably stimulate it. Like a rock thrown into water, the world with its continuous changes creates ripples in whatever is held within you. There’s nothing wrong with that. Life creates situations that push you to your edges, all with the effect of removing what is blocked inside of you. That which is blocked and buried within you forms the root of fear. Fear is caused by blockages in the flow of your energy. When your energy is blocked, it can’t come up and feed your heart. Therefore, your heart becomes weak. When your heart is weak it becomes susceptible to lower vibrations, and one of the lowest of all vibrations is fear. Fear is the cause of every problem. It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness. If you had no fear, you could be perfectly happy living in this world. Nothing would bother you. You’d be willing to face everything and everyone because you wouldn’t have fear inside of you that could cause you disturbance.
The purpose of spiritual evolution is to remove the blockages that cause your fear. The alternative is to protect your blockages so that you don’t have to feel fear. To do this, however, you will have to try to control everything in order to avoid your inner issues. It’s hard to understand how we decided that avoiding our inner issues is an intelligent thing to do, but everybody’s doing it. Everyone is saying, “I will do every single thing I can to keep my stuff. If you say anything that disturbs me, I will defend myself. I’ll yell at you and make you take it back. If you cause any disturbance inside of me, I will make you so sorry.” In other words, if somebody does something that stimulates fear, you think they did something wrong. You then do everything you can to make sure they never do it again. First you defend yourself, and then you protect yourself. You do whatever you can to keep from feeling disturbance.
Eventually, you become wise enough to realize that you do not want that stuff inside of you. It doesn’t matter who stimulates it. It doesn’t matter what situation hits it. It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense, or whether it seems fair or not. Unfortunately, most of us are not that wise. We’re really not trying to be free of our stuff; we’re trying to justify keeping it.
If you truly want to grow spiritually, you’ll realize that keeping your stuff is keeping you trapped. Eventually you’ll want out, at any cost. You will then realize that life is actually trying to help you. Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth. You don’t have to decide who’s right or wrong. You don’t have to worry about other people’s issues. You only have to be willing to open your heart in the face of anything and everything, and permit the purification process to take place. When you do this, the first thing you’ll see is that situations will unfold that hit your stuff. But, in truth, that’s exactly what has been happening your entire life. The only difference is that now you see it as a good thing because it’s an opportunity to let go.
The stuff that holds you down periodically rears its head. When it does, let it go. You simply permit the pain to come up into your heart and pass through. If you do that, it will pass. If you are sincerely seeking truth, you’ll let go every time. This is the beginning and end of the entire path—you surrender yourself to the process of emptying yourself. When you work with this, you start to learn the subtler laws of the process of letting go.
There is a law you will learn very early in the game because it is an unavoidable truth. You will learn it early, but you will fall many times while trying to adhere to it. The law is very straightforward: When your stuff gets hit, let go right then because it will be harder later. It won’t be easier if you explore it or play with it, hoping to take the edge off. It won’t be easier to think about it, talk about it, or try to release only part of it at a time. If you want to be free to the core of your being, you must let go right away because it will not be easier later.
In order to live by this law, you have to understand its principles. First, you must be aware that there is something within you that needs to be released. You must then be aware that you, the one who notices the stuff coming up, are distinct from what you’re experiencing. You are noticing it, but who are you? This place of centered awareness is the seat of the witness, the seat of Self. That is the only seat from which you can let go. Let’s say you notice that something in your heart gets hit. If you let go and stay in the seat of awareness, what you are noticing will pass. If you don’t let go, and instead get lost in the disturbed feelings and thoughts that arise, you’ll see a sequence of events unfold so quickly you won’t know what hit you.
If you don’t let go, you’ll notice that the energy that got stimulated in your heart works like a magnet. It’s a phenomenally attractive force that will pull your consciousness into it. The next thing you know, you won’t be there. You won’t maintain the same perspective of awareness that you had when you first noticed the disturbance. You will leave the seat of objective awareness from which you saw your heart begin to react, and you will get involved in the shifting energies coming from your heart. Some time later you’ll come back and realize you weren’t there. You’ll come back and realize that you were totally lost in your stuff. Then you will hope that you didn’t say or do anything you’ll regret.
You’ll look at the clock, and five minutes will have gone by, or an hour, or even a year. You can lose your clarity for quite some time. Where did you go? How did you come back? We will address these questions shortly, but what really matters is that when you’re seeing clearly, you’re not going anywhere. You’re simply sitting in the seat of centered awareness watching your stuff get hit. As long as you’re watching, you’re not getting lost in it.
The key is to understand that if you don’t let go immediately, the disturbing force of the activated energy draws the focus of your consciousness. As your consciousness gets immersed in the disturbance, you lose your clear seat of Self. It happens instantaneously. There’s no feeling of going anywhere,
any more than there is when you leave the room by getting absorbed in a book or TV show. You simply lose the fixed point of consciousness from which you were objectively aware of your surroundings. Your consciousness leaves the centered position of witnessing the many energies around you, and you get sucked into focusing on just one of them.
This leaving the seat of Self is not generally a willful act. The laws of attraction will cause it to happen. Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object: the bumped toe, the loud noise, or the hurting heart. It’s the same law, both inside and out. The consciousness goes to the place that distracts it the most. That’s what we mean when we say, “It was so loud it caught my attention.” It drew your consciousness to it. When a blockage gets hit, this same attraction takes place, and the consciousness gets pulled to the source of discomfort. That place then becomes your seat of consciousness. After the discomfort settles down and lets you go, you’ll naturally drift back toward your higher seat of awareness. This is where you sit when you’re not distracted by disturbance. But as important as this higher seat is, it is equally important to see what happens when you are distracted by disturbance—your seat of consciousness falls down to where the disturbance is happening, and the whole world looks different.
Let’s analyze this fall, step by step. It begins when you get pulled down into the disturbed energy. You end up exactly where you don’t belong. The last place you want to put your consciousness is down there. But that’s where it will get pulled. Now, as you look out through your disturbed energy, everything is distorted by the haze of your disturbance. Things that looked beautiful now look ugly. Things you liked, now look dark and depressing. But nothing has really changed. It’s just that you’re looking at life from that seat of disturbance.
Each of these shifts in your perception should remind you to let go. The moment you start seeing that you don’t like the people you used to like, the moment you start seeing that your life looks really different, the moment it all starts getting negative—let go. You should have let go before, but you didn’t. The trouble is that it’s more difficult now. You could have taken one breath and let go when it started. Now it takes serious work to get your previous seat of consciousness back without going through the whole cycle.
The cycle is the time it takes from the moment you leave your seat of relative clarity until you come back. This period of time is determined by the depth of the energy blockage that caused the initial disturbance. Once activated, the blockage must run its course. If you don’t let go, you get sucked in. You are no longer free; you are caught. Once you fall from your seat of relative clarity, you are under the mercy of the disturbed energy. If that blockage is stimulated by an ongoing situation, you may stay down there for a long time. If it happens to be just a passing event, and the energy released by the blockage dissipates immediately, then you’ll find that you drift back up quickly. The main point is that it’s not under your control. You lost it.
This is the anatomy of falling. When you’re in this state of disturbance, your tendency will be to act in order to try to fix things. You don’t have the clarity to see what’s going on; you just want the disturbance to stop. So you start getting down to your survival instincts. You may feel that you have to do something drastic. You may want to leave your husband or wife, or move, or quit your job. The mind starts saying all kinds of things because it doesn’t like this space, and it wants to get away from it any way it can.
Now that you’ve fallen to that point, here comes the crème de la crème. Imagine that while you’re lost in the disturbed energy, you actually do one or more of the things that your mind is telling you to do. Imagine what would happen if you actually quit your job, or if you decide, “I’ve held this in long enough. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.” You have no idea how big a step down that is. It’s one thing if the disturbance is going on inside of you. But the moment you allow it to express itself, the moment you let that energy move your body, you have descended to another level. Now it’s almost impossible to let go. If you start yelling at somebody, if you actually tell someone how you feel about them from this state of nonclarity, you have involved that person’s heart and mind in your stuff. Now both of your egos are involved. Once you externalize these energies, you will want to defend your actions and make them look appropriate. But the other person will never think they were appropriate.
Now even more forces are keeping you down. First you fall into the darkness, and then you manifest that darkness. When you do this, you are literally taking the energy of the blockage and passing it on. When you dump your stuff into this world, it’s like painting the world with your stuff. You put more of that kind of energy into your environment and it comes back to you. You are now surrounded by people who will interact with you accordingly. It’s just another form of “environmental pollution,” and it will affect your life.
That is how negative cycles happen. You actually take a piece of your stuff, which is nothing but deeply seated disturbance from your past, and you implant it in the hearts of those around you. At some point it will come back to you. Anything you put out comes back. Imagine if you got upset and fully released your disturbed energies onto another person. This is how people ruin relationships and destroy their lives.
How far down can you go? Once you’re weakened, another blockage could get hit, and yet another. You can fall all the way down until your life is an absolute mess. You can reach a point of total loss of control and completely lose your center. In this state, your previous seat of clarity may drift by once in a while, but you can’t hold it. Now you’re lost. Do you doubt that a single blockage getting hit in your heart could cause a fall that lasts a lifetime? It has been known to happen.
What if all you had to do to avoid all of this was to let go in the beginning? If you had, you would have gone up instead of down. That’s how it works. When a blockage gets hit, it’s a good thing. It’s time to open up internally and release the blocked energy. If you let go, and permit the purification process to take place inside, that blocked energy will be released. When it’s released and allowed to flow up, it becomes purified and merges back into your center of consciousness. This energy then strengthens you instead of weakening you. You begin to go up and up, higher and higher, and you learn the secret of the ascent. The secret of the ascent is to never look down—always look up.
No matter what happens below you, just turn your eyes upward and relax your heart. You do not have to leave the seat of Self in order to deal with the darkness. It will purify itself if you let it. Getting involved in the darkness does not dispel darkness; it feeds it. Don’t even turn toward it. If you see disturbed energies within you, it’s okay. Don’t think that you don’t have blockages left to release. Just sit in the seat of awareness and never leave. No matter what goes on below you, open your heart and let it go. Your heart will become purified, and you will never know another fall.
If you fall along the way, just get up and forget it. Use the lesson to strengthen your resolve. Let go right then. Do not rationalize, blame, or try to figure it out. Don’t do anything. Just let go immediately, and allow the energy to go back to the highest center of consciousness it can achieve. If you feel shame, let it go. If you feel fear, let it go. All of these are the remnants of the blocked energy that is finally being purified.
Always let go as soon as you’re aware that you didn’t. Don’t waste your time; use the energy to go up. You are a great being who has been given a tremendous opportunity to explore beyond yourself. The whole process is very exciting, and you will have good times and bad times. All sorts of things will happen. That’s the fun of the journey.
So don’t fall. Let go. No matter what it is, let it go. The bigger it is, the higher the reward of letting go and the worse the fall if you don’t. It’s pretty black-and-white. You either let go or you don’t. There really isn’t anything in between. So let all of your blockages and disturbances become the fuel for the journey. That which is h
olding you down can become a powerful force that raises you up. You just have to be willing to take the ascent.
9
removing your inner thorn
The spiritual journey is one of constant transformation. In order to grow, you must give up the struggle to remain the same, and learn to embrace change at all times. One of the most important areas requiring change is how we solve our personal problems. We normally attempt to solve our inner disturbances by protecting ourselves. Real transformation begins when you embrace your problems as agents for growth. In order to understand how this process works, let’s examine the following situation.
Imagine that you have a thorn in your arm that directly touches a nerve. When the thorn is touched, it’s very painful. Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem. It’s difficult to sleep because you roll over on it. It’s hard to get close to people because they might touch it. It makes your daily life very difficult. You can’t even go for a walk in the woods because you might brush the thorn against the branches. This thorn is a constant source of disturbance, and to solve the problem you only have two choices.
The first choice is to look at your situation and decide that since it’s so disturbing when things touch the thorn, you need to make sure nothing touches it. The second choice is to decide that since it’s so disturbing when things touch the thorn, you need to take it out. Believe it or not, the effects of the choice you make will determine the course of the rest of your life. This is one of the core-level, structural decisions that lay the foundation for your future.
Let’s begin with the first choice and explore how it will affect your life. If you decide you have to keep things from touching the thorn, then that becomes the work of a lifetime. If you want to go for a walk in the woods, you’ll have to thin out the branches to make sure you don’t brush against them. Since you often roll over and touch the thorn when you sleep, you’ll have to find a solution for that as well. Perhaps you could design an apparatus that acts as a protective device. If you really put a lot of energy into it and your solution seemed to work, you would think that you had solved your problem. You’d say, “I can sleep now. And guess what? I got to go on TV to give a testimonial. Anybody who has the thorn problem can get my protective device, and I even get paid royalties.”
The Untethered Soul Page 8
