We have the opportunity to choose whether we want to hang on or let go of emotional upsets. We can look at the cost of hanging on to them. Do we want to pay the price? Are we willing to accept the feelings? We can look at the benefits of letting go of them. The choice we make will determine our future. What kind of future do we want? Will we choose to be healed, or will we become one of the walking wounded?
Author: Susan Hawkins
A Workable Goal
Q: What is a workable goal?
A: To verify spiritual truth experientially and to become it rather than just conform to it. The process is an unfolding of discovery resulting in greater happiness and diminution of fear, guilt, and other negative emotions. The motive is inner development, evolution, and fulfillment of potential, which is independent of the external world. Life becomes progressive rather than just repetitive. All experience is of equal value and innately pleasurable so that life stops being an endless sequence of alternating pleasure and displeasure. With inner progress, context expands, resulting in greater awareness of significance and meaning, and, therefore, gratification of potential.
Q: Inner spiritual work seems to require discipline and endeavor.
A: These requirements are activated by intention. There is an innate gratification in spiritual growth and the evolution of consciousness itself. Progress is the consequence of clarification and greater understanding that arise from the expansion of context. Recontextualization then results in transcending the distortions of perception.
From: “Discovery of the Presence of God” (2006), Chapter 2: The Inner Path, pp. 56–57
Sage Advice
Q: What is your advice to a spiritual aspirant who is serious about realizing the state of enlightenment?
A: Spiritual commitment simply means to recontextualize the goal and meaning of one’s life. This needs to be done totally, all inclusively, so that life does not become segmented into spiritual work versus ordinary life. All life now becomes spiritual practice because context becomes the priority that encompasses every act, thought, or moment. This poised point of view already results in a degree of nonattachment.
From this viewpoint, the emphasis in practice is to observe all the content of evolving life without making any comment, criticism, or judgment. The prevailing attitude can be stated as “That is how it seems to be.” The observer/witness becomes detached from commentary about life and is then capable of transcending opinionation, likes, dislikes, aversions, attractions, arguments, or objections.
Life unfolds of its own and does not need commentary. The habit of editorializing about what is witnessed needs to be voluntarily surrendered to God.
From: “I: Reality and Subjectivity” (2003), Chapter 17: The Inner Path, p. 300
In the World but Not of It
There is great freedom in the realization that I ‘have’ a body and a mind, rather than I ‘am’ my mind or body. Once the fear of death is transcended, life becomes a transformed experience because that particular fear underlies all others.
Q: To choose to pursue Enlightenment is uncommon in our current society, with its emphasis on worldliness and the dominance of the media that in turn focus on the contentious or glamorize the superficial. What true value can be derived from worldly life?
A: The world can be seen as an optimal stimulus for inner growth as it is merely a projection of the ego in overt dramatic expression. It is best to learn from it rather than to be seduced by its illusions or entrapped by them via identification or attachment.
… Q: How can one simultaneously participate yet not get attached or involved? Does that not lead to avoidance?
A: It is the motive that determines the effects of participation. Activities are merely what one ‘does’, but not what one ‘is’. All seeming events present learning opportunities. One can participate and at the same time experience phenomena from the level of the witness/observer and watch what arises from within the psyche. It is important to differentiate detachment from nonattachment. Detachment can result in avoidance or withdrawal, whereas nonattachment allows for participation without taking a stake in the outcome.
Q: How then should one best relate to the world?
A: To be ‘in’ it but not ‘of’ it. The world is a means and not an end. Nonattached interaction reveals habitual styles and attitudes that are consequent to inner ego positionalities.
The Game of ‘Victim’
Q. What does it mean to be a victim?
A. To be a victim, is to be a victim of the ego.
The ego gets a grim pleasure and satisfaction from suffering and all the nonintegrous levels of pride, anger, desire, guilt, shame, and grief. The secret pleasure of suffering is addictive. Many people devote their whole life to it and encourage others to follow suit. To stop this mechanism, the pleasure of the payoff has to be identified and willingly surrendered to God. Out of shame, the ego blocks out conscious awareness of its machinations, especially the secretiveness of the game of ‘victim’.
… That is the secret about secrets. The payoff is a gain of a pleasurably satisfying reward. The ego has learned to be very clever in order to survive. It is capable of resorting to any lengths or ruse of self-deception and camouflage. The world we witness is merely the drama of the collective egos acting out on the perceptual stage of form and time.
