The Pain of Separation and Duality

When one is involved in a spiritual practice, such as: hallucinogens, meditation, yoga, tantra, etc.  One will come to a difficult point in their practice where they begin to see wrong throughout all aspects of their normal life.

One may have trouble relating to friends, parents, teachers, romantic partners or neighbors.  It may feel like all of these people are against one's self and are hindering one from progressing spiritually.

One may find fault in their daily routine such as their job or usual pleasurable habits.

The desire to "renounce the world" and go practice in seclusion may begin to enter one's mind.

This part of the spiritual path is often referred to as, "The Dark Night of the Soul."  It can be a dark time indeed and can truly feel like all is wrong in one's life.  One may question their whole spiritual practice, as they believed spiritual practice would help them feel, "good".  At this point one may feel anything but good.

The thing to do when one hits this wall is not to cut-off contact with all personal relationships, quit their job, or renounce the world.  But, rather, realize that the pain one is experiencing stems from their inner-realization of separateness and duality within their experience of reality.

One is actually just realizing how painful the false duality we impose on reality is, but, the mind tries to blame this intense feeling on aspects of our daily life.

The only remedy for this is trudge through the pain, not make any hasty decisions or lash out at others, but, to continue practicing and see through the false duality binding us to a world of pain.

KEEP PRACTICING and you will come out the other side.

Living without Meaning

After realizing our self's inherent nature as the void or nothingness a gap begins to form between our mind full of desires, and our actual mystical experience.  Our whole life is spent chasing different desires down numerous paths that all eventually bring us back to our naked empty self.  Once one sees that meaning in life is self-created then we can begin to direct and star in an epic of our choice.  The despair that may occur once one realizes that there is no inherent meaning in life can be filled with self-created meaning that benefits both our self and others.

I know I've spent months paralyzed by the lack of meaning or direction in my life but these downs have slowly transformed into ups.  I no longer utilize effort to achieve my goals but rather, I get out of the way and life happens.  This new mode of living frees up willpower from its usual occupation as a controller of self and allows me to use the will for creative endeavors.

Rather than an all encompassing meaning overlaid over my life each moment presents its own unique meaning to my self.

Losing your Mind and Coming to our Senses

The mind is often called the final obstacle to enlightenment by many mystics and masters.  Attempting to fight the mind into submission only brings a stronger mind to bear.  The actual path towards freedom from uncontrollable chatter of the mind is a letting go of effort to subdue the mind and the allowing of the natural mystic merging that existence permits.  Osho, as always, describes the slipping into no-mind clearly...

When satori happens or when drilling stops and mind functions no more you may feel for a single moment that you have gone mad, but in fact there is now no possibility of going mad because only a mind can go mad. Now that the mind is no more you cannot go mad. For a moment the idea of madness may come to you -- because you have lived with the mind so long and suddenly it has stopped. You will be in an emptiness. That emptiness is very, very scary. It is like death. You are disappearing, losing identity. It is very paralysing -- for a single moment.- Osho

Thinking of this experience I am reminded of the scene in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey near the end of the film where dave shuts down Hal-9000's mainframe slowly but surely.  Hal slowly loses mental capacity before finally regressing into a childlike memory.  "I'm Afraid, Dave...I'm Afraid."  The fear that occurs during this experience is extraordinary yet coming out upon the other side, like Dave, we become something else...

Witnessing the Soul

Everything is happening automatically.  Choice exists only in the fleeting moment and can only be utilized to change the direction of our self and its desires.  Once the self is changed it operates autonomously until another change is made in the present.  We are not the doer but are rather witnessing the experience changer(soul) from an even higher perspective.  When one isn't changing experience consciously but is allowing their experience to change naturally as it progresses they are sitting outside the soul as a witness.  Most people never even become consciously aware of their soul's power to change their experience and live life like a plastic bag caught in an updraft.  Many homeless people live the life they do because it is the only life where the self(soul) can be free to transform experience according to its will by constantly traveling, using drugs, seeking food and comfort, and meeting new people.  Much of modern society prevents the soul from coming to prominence since people live in a state of comfortable apathy they never seek to change their experience.  To awaken the soul one must find their self in a disagreeable experience and will to change it.(Career change, kicking addiction, changing locales)  Once the soul is activated people  then seek to "come home" to non-duality which is achieved after a time once the self is completely understood and transcended.

Chasing the Self

Once one finds oneself firmly embedded in the present either through self-work, exercise(body-work), or as a natural state of being, the next spiritual pinnacle to reach becomes the experience of self.  The self is a slippery thing to get ahold of because when one believes they have attained it it slips right through their fingers and they find they are actually more or less than they  previously believed.  This slippery aspect of the self originates from the fact that the self can never be complete in of itself at any one time.  The self we were yesterday is not the same as today and the same is true of even twenty minutes ago.  One continuously creates the self through experience which arises from the ever-changing self interacting with the ever-changing outside world.  This synthesis of variables coalesces into a state of being where one is experiencing every unique moment through a unique self.  This paradox underlies spiritual living and the growth inherent in it.  The self is continuously created through a lifetime, not achieved all at once.

I believe the true-will is the influence our future self (from the end of our life) has upon the present moment.  The self that has already experienced our life paradoxically influences the path our present life goes through.  This "ultimate" self may not just have experienced our current life path, but, all possible life paths we could have chosen based on any conscious decision we made throughout our life.  So this "ultimate" self which influences us through intuition or conscience knows us better than any present self could.