Hello friends. I hope you’re all well and making progress in your chosen paths, wherever you happen to be wandering.
It sure did get deathly quiet around here - I feel like everyone sank into solitary contemplation at around the same time. But a pandemic is as good an excuse as any to touch base and see how everyone’s going. I don’t have anything groundbreaking to share so I thought I’d do a quick where I’m at post. I’d love to hear where you’re at as well.
For my own part - I finally acknowledged to myself that the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and power is the abiding and sole focus of my life, and has been, really, from as early as I can remember. I relieved myself of a lot of unnecessary guilt in coming to terms with this. It’s not that I don’t care about other things, or other people - but I perceive them differently now, as fitting within the framework of my pursuit, not in competition with it. They’re sub-headings, not a whole different essay.
To this end, I made a lot of changes, rearranging things so that contemplation and practice were at the centre of my life. What did this achieve?
Well. Lol. Things never move as fast as I want them to.
I’m always engaged in “kicking the walls of reality,” so to speak. I feel like this is less skilful practice and more frustration-driven destruction - but seeing the occasional crack appear in the plaster of our physical experience is satisfying! Even if it doesn’t happen nearly enough. Some strange things happened. I saw what I can only describe as a “cloaked” spider walking across the ceiling of my house one day, only to have it disappear when I got up and examined it closely. A bunch of standard “haunted house” stuff started happening around me - being held down in bed while wide awake, doors opening of their own volition, yadda yadda.
None of it was frightening nor, I think, particularly meaningful (well… the spider DOES make me stop and think from time to time). Basically if you randomly kick walls you’re going to randomly cause destruction and that’s probably all there is to say about that - but I mention it because it’s mildly interesting.
Contemplation-wise, the nature of self, personality and identity continues to hold my attention. I had a lucid dream recently - one of those gift from the gods types, where I hadn’t even been trying to LD but wham! There I was, with a high degree of lucidity.
In this dream I was fully aware of this life, of the body in the bed dreaming the encounter. What made this LD novel for me though was the sense that I was emotionally attached to and detached from that dreamer’s life at one and the same time. I wasn’t quite occupying the position of omniscience and omnipotence that I aim for, but I was in a “higher” state than in waking life because I had more choices. The emotional attachments and things I find important in this life felt real and vital but they did not feel urgent. There are other dreams - infinite other dreams - with attachments and concerns of their own and there is time (or no time) for all of them. It was nice to experience, if only for a brief moment, something that we theorise about a lot here. It’s a good state, I now know, to inhabit. Worth striving for.
Worthiness continues to plague me. This is an unhealthy recurrent pattern for me. u/mindseal has a great post somewhere here about the trap of feeling as if you have to gain confidence through overcoming challenges. Right now I’m stuck between knowing this is true and knowing this is true. If anyone has tips or tricks they’ve used to tackle this particular hurdle, feel free to send 'em my way!
Other than that - over to you guys. I hope your travels have brought you something you think worth sharing!
I think that’s probably an optimistic take on the radio silence, but I hope you’re right.
This is no small feat. The chasm between “spiritual advancement as a hobby” and “spiritual advancement as the overarching theme of existing” is an absolutely monumental one, even if it feels like just a small step. It’s like going from linear to exponential growth. Might seem like “What’s the difference between 1, 2, 3 and 1, 2, 4?” But pretty soon one has 10 and the other has 512. I will say though, there’s always room to refine that goal. Is “pursuing wisdom, knowledge, and power” the best way to conceptualize it? On such an abstract road as this one can be, the clarity of your goal is precisely the clarity of your path.
Oh, something tells me neither what/when/how you kick nor the consequences are very random :)
Having been there is about the best starting position to be in if you want to make a map to get back. No need to wait around for it to come back to you.
His abrupt absence is probably not unrelated to how quiet it’s gotten around here.
Try examining your own experiences more closely and observing all of the ways they disprove the underlying logic here. A really common mistake in occult traditions of all kinds is the belief that power or wisdom work necessarily in a very building-block way, but I think most people who’ve spent any time working in them have observed, if they take the time to realize it, how untrue this is. Undoubtedly, sometimes, skills and tools and knowledge are best acquired this way, and at least can be. For example, to develop a strong meditation practice, you may wish to focus exclusively on watching your breath for a long time, then watching your thoughts for a long time, then dwelling in spacious awareness for a long time - and each skill builds upon and relies upon the last.
But so too are we capable of skipping steps all the time. You didn’t first learn to manifest a tiny dot on the ceiling, then a bigger dot, then some forms, then a spider. You just manifested that spider. You didn’t first learn to have very brief lucid dreams, then slightly longer ones - sometimes, wham, there’s a huge, revelatory lucid dream that just showed up! The path is less of a straight road and more of a complex labyrinth full of shoots and ladders and tunnels and secret doors. I think often the feeling of unworthiness comes from believing that you’ve got to chug through a massive, linear path of challenges and that it’s all pure labor. The truth is, even quite passively, we often glide through shortcuts and, completely accidentally, stumble down staircases that skip us ten steps ahead. Without a doubt, the posts on this sub and its predecessor have allowed me to leapfrog obstacles from time to time.
And it probably goes without saying that, much as anxiety is best destroyed by studying it, or how the self is dissolved by staring at it, you should dive deep into that feeling of unworthiness before you just try to transcend it. There are lessons in there aplenty.
Good to hear from you. Glad you’re well.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2020-04-23 19:37:05 (fo9y2e6)