John: I’m thinking about the process of spiritual development, triggered by the sequence of teachings in my recent dreams (see The Ultimate Responsibility). What’s interesting is how things can open up in us. Sometimes they’re based on what we’re content with – through our comfort zone. Other times things emerge based on our having to sort out something that bothers us.
Those seem to be the typical ways that things unfold for most people. It can also happen in a situation where we’re swept off our feet, or amazed by something. When that happens, our usual perceptions are put on hold while we experience something new.
As a consequence of these shifts, we’re energetically affected. In that new flow is a lot of insight, which can naturally be there for the heart to catch.
So the development process works both ways. For a long time we make our steps by trying to sort out the inner disturbances, and mannerisms, and the shadow energies; all the stuff that we think protects us, but that actually prevents us in our human purpose.
But ultimately we start to see the flow. We start to see the interconnection of things, and then we have to let go to that. When we do, that’s when we start to have a process of realization and inner knowing that opens up, because that’s actually closer to how we’re meant to be. Then we’re no longer totally separate (from the whole).
But in order to catch up with that flow, we have to break out of our-self consciousness, because that is a type of separateness (within the collective). In our self-consciousness, everything moves about and causes us to react and adjust accordingly. But we have to get to a point where we can sense, and see – on an inner level – that there’s a way of letting go that enables us to access the flow. This flow then opens, and reveals, and sweeps us up, and we have an inner dynamic that unfolds along with it.
A deeper way of saying this is that we’re affected and changed by catching up with this dense side of our nature, which is a darkness that we suppress. It’s all the traumas and wounds and inner psychologies and defense mechanisms that we’ve created – and we have to face all that because our outer life is a constantly-created reflection of those inner aspects.
We don’t “solve” these issues, we just need to become conscious of their outplay in us and keep certain patterns and cycles from repeating – and which get us nowhere. The unawakened life is a type of trance where we are completely caught up in our own moods, attitudes, and judgments, i.e., the veils between us and what is real.
At the same time, if we get to a point where we’ve set enough of that aside (emptied ourselves), then we have to allow ourselves to be “filled” in some capacity. In other words, we develop the ability to be able to take something in.
In the taking of that something in, to begin with it’s too much, and it becomes limited by defense mechanisms that have to do with synaptic responses that still get in the way.
Ultimately, if we get beyond things like that getting in the way, then we get swept up into a whole other realm of recognition and realization. This is how the overall linkage is meant to work and unfold in us. In that there are no secrets; all is, more or less, revealed. A human being with personalized attitudes, biases, and moods is still holding on to secrets.
But when we get to the point where we can just let ourselves go, then we can be almost shocked by what’s able to come through. If we’re able to not be scared or shocked by what’s able to come through, then we’ve reached a state where it’s like a type of light coming through, which reveals ever more.
So we need to be able to work in both directions simultaneously. One direction deals with the density of us, and another direction deals with the free flow and openness of us in all things. They work simultaneously: we have to deal with the density of ourselves in order to make space for the higher, and we have to let go of the lower in order to connect to the free flow of the universe.
So we have to play with both of these aspects as a way of developing a greater composite in the whole – that composite being us.
