The question shows a sense of despair in being unable to accelerate or cause a desired spiritual outcome. Perhaps we’ve compared ourselves to others who are ‘awakened’ and have experienced a sense of failure. Perhaps the question arises out of a deeper, repeating theme of not being good enough.
Both the traumatized sense of despair and the sense of failure can only spiral through inner conflict. The conflict around helplessness resists helplessness with the insistence that it must be possible to “do” something to accelerate awakening. The conflict around not being good enough resists the judgement of failure by splitting the psyche into two: one side perpetually tells the other side that it’s not good enough. This whole movement of splitting is of course also ‘not good enough’, so the dense energy of failure accumulates.
“When we condemn the feeling of being bad, we increase the sense of badness. When we despair at our despair, despair increases. When we reject our inner conflict, we add the energy of conflict to conflict.
The shift of liberation occurs when we let ourselves radically agree with whatever feeling or emotion is arising, even if that sensation is a numbness. Only with this soft agreement can the melting begin – of our own perceptive source into the contraction and of the contraction back into the source of itself.”
Between attending a myriad of workshops and gambling on divine grace, there is another movement, which is in receptivity. Workshops, teachers and therapists are all around us. Spiritual information floods the internet. But we need to be ready to receive it – to open up and let it in. Likewise, grace is everywhere – even within a contraction or a conflict. But we need to be ready to open to it and receive it.
This is the death valley of the psyche, because in order to open to receive what we perceive as good and rewarding, we need to also open to precisely that which we have spent ions avoiding. To open to grace, we need to also open to our sense of despair, and to let our sense of despair open and unfold through our awareness. To open to the positive effects of a training or therapist, we also need to allow receptivity, opening to our sense of helplessness – even sharing our sense of helplessness – that intimate, dangerous, shameful vulnerability which has formed the ground of our personality.
“Universal power can only arise through the clear, open space of radical powerlessness.”
Think of the psyche as a pipe. It’s awaiting the promised influx of grace that will reform it from the inside out. But the pipe has all kinds of filters and blocks. These block are conditions on receptivity.
We’re ready to ‘receive’ divine blessing, but not if it comes with personal despair. We’re ready to receive powerful teachings, but not if they arouse a sense of helplessness.
The pipe simply can’t channel the grace of universal resources unless it’s ready to allow what appears unendurable – the prospect of our worst nightmares. These fears, and the underlying sense of sadness and badness are never as awful as we dread, when we actually allow them to move through us. The suffering of fear is simply fear. It’s not inherently connected to other flavors of experience. Fear is nervous energy. When we fear nervous energy, we deny it, which creates an uncharged voltage in which we suffer more.
A third factor in awakening that is often overlooked (in the dichotomy between effort and grace) is hidden in plain sight. This is the tremendous power of connectivity. The question of how to find awakening is so often based on a continued belief in an ultimately separate self (a disconnected self that seeks individual awakening). Yet we’re not separate. We share emotions, atmospheres, thoughts, states of being and also the pure existential absence of all these. In the realm of Nondual Qualities (such as love, peace, care or freedom) differentiation disappears. The transmission of Nondual Qualities is easily possible if we allow it, both locally and from a distance.
This means that when a therapist or teacher is empty enough to allow universal resources to move through them, the whole field will be affected, including clients and students, near or far. Therapeutically seen, it’s enough just to hold a client’s presence in the heart during meditation, to feel the movement of qualities rushing through the channel of the psyche as a motion of need. Here, one of the key blocks to the channel of the psyche is the belief that it’s not possible. But have we ever checked it out? Have we ever dared risk opening to the great presence of another and truly, deeply, unconditionally allowing them inside?
In this natural interconnectedness and interdependence, there is both grace and learning. The effort required is again in the area of receptivity, the unconditional shift to allowance of whatever comes forward in thought, feeling or sense perception – as if each spark of experience were returning home to the great fire of being.
Not an affliction, but a blessed reunion.
