The Untethered Soul (9 page)

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 holding you down can become a powerful force that raises you up. You just have to be willing to take the ascent.

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.”

So now you’ve got a whole life built around this thorn, and you’re proud of it. You keep the woods thinned out, and you wear the apparatus to bed at night. But now you have a new problem—you fell in love. This is a problem because in your situation, it’s hard to even hug. Nobody can touch you because they might touch the thorn. So you design another kind of device that allows closeness amongst people without actually touching. Eventually you decide you want total mobility without having to worry about the thorn anymore. So you make a full-time device that doesn’t have to be unstrapped at night or changed over for hugging and other daily activities. But it’s heavy. So you put wheels on it, control it with hydraulics, and install collision sensors. It’s actually quite an impressive device.

Of course, you had to change the doors in the house so that the protective apparatus could get through. But at least now you can live your life. You can go to work, go to sleep, and get close to people. So you announce to everyone, “I have solved my problem. I am a free being. I can go anywhere I want. I can do anything I want. This thorn used to run my life. Now it doesn’t run anything.”

The truth is, the thorn completely runs your entire life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you’re comfortable with, and who’s comfortable with you. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you can live in, and what kind of bed you can sleep on at night. When it’s all said and done, that thorn is running every aspect of your life.

It turns out that the life of protecting yourself from your problem becomes a perfect reflection of the problem itself. You didn’t solve anything. If you don’t solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it ends up running your life. You end up so psychologically fixated on the problem that you can’t see the forest for the trees. You actually feel that because you’ve minimized the pain of the problem, you’ve solved the problem. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to avoiding it. It is now the center of your universe. It’s all there is.

In order to apply the analogy of the thorn to your whole life, we will use loneliness as an example. Let’s say you have a very deep sense of inner loneliness. It’s so deep that you have trouble sleeping at night, and during the day it makes you very sensitive. You’re susceptible to feeling sharp pangs in your heart that cause quite a disturbance. You have trouble staying focused on your job, and you have trouble with everyday interactions. What’s more, when you’re very lonely it’s often painfully difficult to get close to people. You see, loneliness is just like the thorn. It causes pain and disturbance in all aspects of your life. But in the case of the human heart, we have more than one thorn. We have sensitivities about loneliness, about rejection, about our physical appearance, and about our mental prowess. We are walking around with lots of thorns touching right against the most sensitive part of our hearts. At any moment something can touch them and cause pain inside.

You have the same two choices with these inner thorns as you did with the thorn in your arm. Surely it was obvious that you would have been much better off taking out that thorn. There’s no reason to spend your life protecting the thorn from getting touched when you can just remove it. Once the thorn is removed, you are truly free of it. The same is true with your inner thorns; they can be removed. But if you choose to keep them without being disturbed by them, you must modify your life to avoid the situations that would stir them up. If you’re lonely, you must avoid going to places where couples tend to be. If you’re afraid of rejection, you must avoid getting too close to people. If you do this, however, it is for the same reason that you thinned out the woods. You are attempting to adjust your life to make allowance for your thorns. In the earlier example the thorns were outside. Now they are inside.

When you’re lonely, you find yourself pondering what to do about your loneliness. What is it that you can say or do in order to not feel so lonely? Notice that you aren’t asking how to get rid of the problem; you’re asking how to protect yourself from feeling it. You do this either by avoiding situations or by using people, places, and things as protective shields. You’re going to end up just like the person with the thorn. The loneliness will run your entire life. You’ll marry the person who makes you feel less lonely, and you’ll think that’s natural and normal. But it’s exactly the same as the person who is avoiding the pain of the thorn instead of taking it out. You have not removed the root of loneliness. You have only attempted to protect yourself from feeling it. Should someone die or leave you, the loneliness would again disturb you. The problem will be back the moment the external situation fails to protect you from what’s inside.

If you do not remove the thorn, you will end up responsible for both the thorn and everything you pulled around yourself in an attempt to avoid it. Should you be fortunate enough to find someone who manages to diminish the feeling of loneliness, you will then begin worrying about keeping your relationship with this person. You’ve managed to compound the issue by avoiding the problem. This is exactly the same as using the apparatus to compensate for the thorn; you have to adjust your life accordingly. The minute you allow the core problem to stay, it expands out into multiple problems. It wouldn’t dawn on you to just get rid of it. Instead, the only solution you see is to try to avoid feeling it. Now you have no choice but to go out and fix everything that affects it. You have to worry about how you dress and how you talk. You have to worry about what people think of you because that could affect your feeling of loneliness or need for love. If someone is attracted to you, and this eases your feelings of loneliness, you wish you could say, “How do I need to act in order to please you? I can be any way you want. I just don’t want to feel these periods of loneliness anymore.”

You now have this burden of worrying about the relationship. It creates an experience of underlying tension and discomfort, and it can even affect your sleep at night. The truth is, however, the discomfort you’re experiencing isn’t actually the feeling of loneliness. It’s the never-ending thoughts of “Did I say the right thing? Does she really like me, or am I just kidding myself?” The root problem is now buried under all these shallower issues that are all about avoiding the deeper ones. It all gets very complicated. People end up using their relationships to hide their thorns. If you care for each other, you are expected to adjust your behavior to avoid bumping into each other’s soft spots.

This is what people do. They let the fear of their inner thorns affect their behavior. They end up limiting their lives just like someone living with an external thorn. Ultimately, if there is something disturbing inside of you, you have to make a choice. You can compensate for the disturbance by going outside in an attempt to avoid feeling it, or you can simply remove the thorn and not focus your life around it.

Do not doubt your ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside of you. It really can go away. You can look deep within yourself, to the core of your being, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to be free of this. You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need for them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need to avoid your inner problems.

How do you free yourself? In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself. You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things. Because your consciousness is separate and aware of these things, you can free yourself. To free yourself of your inner thorns, you simply stop playing with them. The more you touch them, the more you irritate them. Because you’re always doing something to avoid feeling them, they are not given the chance to naturally work themselves out. If you want, you can simply permit the disturbances to come up, and you can let them go. Since your inner thorns are simply blocked energies from the past, they can be released. The problem is, you either completely avoid situations that would cause them to release, or you push them back down in the name of protecting yourself.

Suppose you’re sitting at home watching TV. You’re enjoying the program until the two main characters fall in love. Suddenly you feel loneliness, but there’s no one around to give you attention. Interestingly, you were fine just a few minutes ago. This example shows that the thorn is always in your heart; it’s just not activated until something touches it. You feel the reaction as a hollowness or a dropping sensation in your heart. It feels very uncomfortable. A sense of weakness comes over you, and you begin thinking about other times when you were left alone and of people who have hurt you. Stored energy from the past releases from the heart and generates thoughts. Now, instead of enjoying TV, you’re sitting alone caught in a wave of thoughts and emotions.

What can you do to solve this besides eating something, calling somebody, or doing something else that might quiet it down? What you can do is notice that you noticed. You can notice that your consciousness was watching TV, and now it is watching your inner melodrama. The one who sees this is you, the subject. What you are looking at is an object. A feeling of emptiness is an object; it is something you feel. But who feels it? Your way out is to just notice who’s noticing. It’s really that simple. It is much less complex than the protective apparatus with all its ball bearings, wheels, and hydraulics. All you have to do is notice who it is that feels the loneliness. The one who notices is already free. If you want to be free of these energies, you must allow them to pass through you instead of hiding them inside of you.

Ever since you were a child, you’ve had energies going on inside. Wake up and realize that you are in there, and you have a sensitive person in there with you. Simply watch that sensitive part of you feel disturbance. See it feel jealousy, need, and fear. These feelings are just part of the nature of a human being. If you pay attention, you will see that they are not you; they are just something you’re feeling and experiencing. You are the indwelling being that is aware of all of this. If you maintain your center, you can learn to appreciate and respect even the difficult experiences.

For example, some of the most beautiful poetry and music have come from people who were in turmoil. Great art comes from the depth of one’s being. You can experience these very human states without getting lost in them or resisting them. You can notice that you notice and just watch how experiencing loneliness affects you. Does your posture change? Do you breathe slower or faster? What goes on when loneliness is given the space it needs to pass through you? Be an explorer. Witness it, and then it will go. If you don’t get absorbed in it, the experience will soon pass and something else will come up. Just enjoy all of it. If you can do this, you will be free, and a world of pure energy will open up within you.

The more you sit in the Self, the more you will begin to feel an energy that you have never experienced before. It comes up from behind, rather than in front where you experience your mind and emotions. When you are no longer absorbed in your melodrama but, instead, sit comfortably deep inside the seat of awareness, you will start to feel this flow of energy coming up from deep within. This flow has been called Shakti. This flow has been called Spirit. This is what you begin to experience if you hang out with the Self instead of hanging out with inner disturbances. You don’t have to get rid of loneliness; you just cease to be involved with it. It’s just another thing in the universe, like cars, grass, and the stars. It’s none of your business. Just let things go. That’s what the Self does. Awareness does not fight; awareness releases. Awareness is simply aware while everything in the universe parades before it.