Spiritial awakening and self-confidence

Originally Posted by Intuire

Yeah, it's how I see it too. Unless I find a way to integrate and actually use everything I've learned on this journey it's all in vain. I'm also not too excited about the enlightement itself. The idea of reaching that goal and finding all the answers scares me, what happens after that? I'd much rather not know and take my time in the journey itself.

"For me there is only the travelling on the Paths that have a heart, on any Path that may have a heart.
There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length.... looking, looking, breathlessly."
Carlos Castaneda
The Teachings of Don Juan

And since you like Alan Watts -
"Paradoxical as it may seem. the purposeful Life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless Life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."
Alan Watts

As he also says, we "thingify things," we make them into things - such as enlightenment. So many want to reach enlightenment but how many are quite sure of what it is, how do you actually measure having reached that goal, what criteria can you tick of to say you have achieved it? And if you are enlightened, what are you enlightened to?

You are the Journey.

Originally Posted by Intuire

Do you think it's possible to accept everyone's skeletons or only those people whose skeletons are as dark as our own? There are limits to what I can keep a non-judgemental attitude towards, and I am not sure I had much saying in it. If I'm being non-judgemental to a person causing serious harm to others, I feel like I am abandoning all those being harmed in that process, like I am an accomplice even.

Everybody has their limits, and sometimes we're standing somewhere between the very human feelings that come from judgement and what is considered as Spiritual ideology. Everybody has skeletons and you have less say in what you choose than you think - what you become conscious of is only the very tip of the iceberg of your total conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious. Forgive yourself for being human, forgive yourself for having feelings and forgive yourself for having empathy.

The ideology says we shouldn't judge but it's a very human thing to do and really, everybody does it in one way or another. Respect is judgement too, by the way. Discrimination because of that judgement, however, is a very different matter and that is a choice. In your situation, the question is what do you have the power to change? If you can't change the person who is causing the harm, then what? Can you do something to comfort the victim? From a Spiritual perspective at least you are aware of your feelings so that's a good sign, because it means you are in touch with yourself. Are there pre-incarnation agreements going on between the aggressor and the victim perhaps, between you and the victim?

Originally Posted by Intuire

What do you mean by 'solid' here? As in grounded, non-abstract? I've checked Matt Khan too, he seems more aligned with Tolle's path. My first impression was 'ah, a lightworker'. I don't think I fully resonate with a single spiritual teacher (perhaps with Alan Watts), probably because different parts of me resonate with different people/views and it's hard to find all of that within a single person.

What I like about Watts is that he puts (or used to put) focus on his words rather than personality, as if he's speaking from a non-personal perspective. There's just a lot of drama involved with Teal, and drama and enlightenment seem like a paradox to me. I've also heard a lot of insightful and wise words coming from her, so it's not all black and white.

What I mean by 'solid' is that they are very grounded and have had their own Life experiences. Both Matt Khan and Real Swan come from backgrounds which weren't all sunshine and roses, and their teachings are about experience rather than ideologies and theologies. I don't resonate with a single teacher but I tend to pick and choose, they all work for me after their own fashion. I tend to go with what works at the time depending on what I feel in that moment. I guess there comes a time when it's easy to have celebrity worship even for gurus.

Every Spiritual teacher comes from their personality and Alan Watts is no different, how he comes across - as in non-personal - is his personality. Most of Alan Watts stuff I've seen has been just words but if you listen carefully you can find the personality. Teal Swan has had a very different background and is a very different person, but if you look at both of them you'll see their backgrounds coming through.

How is a Spiritual teacher supposed to look and sound like? If you can't get past the surface layer?

Originally Posted by Intuire

I'm curious, how do you make peace between psychology and spirituality? Is your therapy aligned with your spiritual path? I've spent a couple of years now reading about psychology, yet I find spirituality to be much more accepting of everything that is potentially wrong with a person. There is no definition of normal in spiritual terms, perhaps that's why.

I don't make war with my Spirituality and psychology, it's as simple as that. Often when people so all this "I am awakened and am a Spirit on a human Journey" thing, they're actually coming from a psychological perspective rather than a Spiritual one. Similarly with a discussion on ego or so-called 'ego mind', all that decrying of the ego and turning it into the bad guy is ego mind at work. Denial isn't a good foundation for Spirituality.

So if you've read a lot of psychology, how has your psychology played its part in your being Spiritual? Are you Spiritual because of or despite your psychology? How does your psychology affect your Spirituality and vice versa? If you are Spiritual and there is no definition of 'normal', how does that appeal to you in the context of your lack of confidence? And what makes your lack of confidence not acceptable or wrong?

I could go on for days about how my therapy is directly aligned with my Spiritual Path, but then it depends on your definition of 'Spiritual'. I've gone through a lot of Past Life exploration and much of it has been around tying up 'loose ends', both in terms of meeting people and things left unfinished. The therapy is in line with that because it feels as though it's closed the book on this Life and made sense of it all in so many ways. It's kind of like being a method actor and dropping the character when you come off the set ready to go home. It's all the perceptual stuff that has been built up over the years, the residue of experiences - the dragging the Shadow Self into the light as it kicks and screams for its own survival. It was liberating, it was a weight off my shoulders but it sure wasn't easy to go through.

The conclusion I'm left with is the questioning - did I Love myself enough to give myself this experience and did I love others enough to be here for my part in their experience? I wouldn't change a thing even if I had the choice to go back to the beginning.

Originally Posted by Intuire

This seems to relate to what we previously discussed, the dilemma between following the light and fighting the dark:

Light and dark are avatars of the collective unconscious, if you've been reading Jung's work. It's a survival mechanism from our days as prey for lions and tigers and bears, oh my, but start a thread on light vs dark and watch how much eloquent Spirituality spills forth. What makes the dark dark, and what makes the light light? If there is a dilemma it's your perceptual reality that creates it. The dark is nothing more than our imaginations filling in for own lack of consciousness, and if there is no relationship between at least the psychology of understanding ourselves and the escape of Spirituality then there is only the creation and perpetuation of the dark. Not many enlightened people seem to understand that.

Hi, I would say it is quite normal. This is , after all a major change in your existence. Think about things you have maybe done in "normal life"... I:e ..moving house, starting new job etc. All quite daunting. Moving house or new job however are things we choose to do as humans and therefore take a risk. A spiritual awakening, as far as I am concerned is a blessing given to you because it's your time. You will adapt to the new "you" .. and your confidence will grow as you continue on your journey and grow in confidence. Best of wishes..

[Jyotir]

Originally Posted by Intuire

Thank you for your input and support. :)


If I understood correctly, you suggest not tackling one's Shadow at all? And that, by following the light (instead of fighting the dark), it will dissolve by itself? Doesn't the practice such as meditation automatically assume working on one's shadow (releasing blocks, negative emotions, memories, etc)? I do occasionally wonder how deep the shadow might go and whether one is to go all the way down or simply stop at a satisfying point and turn around. For Jung it semeed to have lasted his whole life..
Could it be that following the light leads to enlightenment, while focusing on shadow work leads to a healthier life and relationships? Meaning those two ways have slightly different final goal?

Fundamentally, darkness, shadow, etc., has no original inherence in the created existence.

They are derivations of the cosmic physical we incarnate into, by which Spirit has conditionally involved Itself within the mute inconscience of matter (darkness), as a potential for the purpose of emerging out of it; for the evolution of consciousness out of that darkness to eventually discover and know the truth of Self as Spirit, Divine, infinite and eternal Light and Delight. For human beings “awakening” means the recognition of this possibility in and through any individual life.

The “dark” “negative” manifestations of pain, suffering, confusion, while they are essentially divine, and really infinite eternal light, are consequent upon an instrumental mis-reception of that light (the symbol of truth) and the essence of Reality by those various conditionally deficient, limited, partial, distorted instruments in the being.

This is the conditional nature of the physical existence and its potential, e.g., an ignorance of true Self/Spirit, a conditional apparent polarity of that which is infinite, eternal, and unconditional. As part and parcel of these cosmic conditions of ignorance, we incorrectly identify with the material, sensual, objective “separate” self, the false self, with darkness, the unreal, illusory, maya, in and through these very conditionally limited instruments of reception in the being such as ego-mind, which conditionally and superficially veil the Real, the Truth, the Divine, including within, and especially as self..

This is the reason why we experience pain, suffering, confusion, and dissatisfaction in this life. We do not know who we truly are essentially. We do not utilize the truth of who we are instrumentally to know who we are as identity (Being) and dynamically (becoming). We see ourselves falsely through the darkness of this ignorant separative cognition. To evolve out of this is why we are here.

Meanwhile, all of these limited partial painful and distorted experiences and actions - the results, the precipitation of ignorance of true self , are not destroyed. All experience is retained in the subconscious as residual of the misreceptions - those results of the incomplete, distorted, limited approximations of The Real, of truth /light due to our inability to identify fully with that truth /light - experienced in and through the those very same ignorant instrumentations of reception. They simply persist in dimensions native to or commensurate with their own intrinsic limitation (you could call this “shadow”), and continue to seek expression in and through the being. Even though they are limited, distorted, partial etc they are still ‘real’ in their own native condition and seek to express in the physical as part of the universal urge for emergence. This is why bad habits and self-created debilities or more pervasive patterns of darkness within successive incarnations in maya, ignorance, samsara - are hard to break, detach from, or transcend.

What we call “shadow” is simply the accumulation of ignorant experience in life, even throughout many incarnations.

We cannot transcend these except by identifying with, invoking, and utilizing the higher principle within, such as light, truth - which is the express purpose of spirituality in human culture - otherwise we simply continue to trap ourselves within it by repeated false identification, equivocation, and misguided focus on the “unreal”, the negative, the unprogressive, the limited conditional reception and action in darkness, of an otherwise infinite eternal unconditional true reality, the truth of which is embodied and symbolized by Light.

In the domain of intellectual culture, the curiosity and fascination with, de-construction, concentration, analysis, and mental “understanding” of shadow is deemed acceptable and well conformed to as esteemed (academic) convention because of the dominance of mind in human beings; it is seen as necessary, even though a recycling of the self-same limitation (why it never ends).

But in spirituality, which is the deliberate consecration of life/life-energy to the practical search for, devotion to, and service to the Divine - the Real, the Light and Truth within oneself - - that intellectual approach is counter productive of real sustainable authentic progression. It is a circular trap and a dead end, because mind itself is an instrumental limitation of the ignorance. Mind - a form and means of darkness itself cannot by its nature or its utilization transcend its own systemic ignorance. This is well founded in many traditions within human spiritual culture.

Further...
There is an occult maxim that: “energy follows thought”

To pursue and address “shadow” by an incessant equivocation of it with light, by elevating darkness to the status of light, paying attention to it, examining (and in some cases even obsessing on it) we are simply preserving it, generating a false equivalence that leads to a schism of reality by addressing and energizing it with the same faulty instruments that indirectly generated those limitations, bondage and enslavement to falsehood in the first place, by creating more of it, that at some point may actually oppose the spiritual.

This is also why many who argue for the approach of equivocation are often so utterly confused, because everything, darkness and light is a relative equivalence that is convenient for mutual substitution - simply an incessant shuttling back and forth between polarities - self-exhausting in the denial of true self by that false equivalence and compromise (speciously seen as "balance") with false-self.

The most effective spiritual way of transcending darkness, shadow, falsehood, is simply by a cultivated practice of disinterest, concurrent with a cultivated practice of utilizing what transcends it. If you are in a squalid condition and want to live in a better condition, you don’t stay where you are and lament and focus on poverty and decrepitude - you detach from the current or past dissatisfying condition and seek fulfillment in better, by some effective vehicle of transformation. Transformation by nature does not preserve what it transforms. That would be and is absurd - and dysfunctional. It’s really a simple, self-evident, effective (and unlike many obtuse defenses in these discussions), utterly uncontroversial - except for an (often perverse) existential need to argue for the attachment to the unsatisfying past….because it’s “there.” Of course it is, and there is an acceptance of that as a precursor to transformation - but not as a false regressive focus of energy, as means or vehicle of transformation which can only preserve what we seek to transform.

Spiritual progression is and requires from life the devotion and dedication to focus on, to invoke, to utilize, to serve light, truth, the Divine - not the focus and service to the not divine, the undivine, or (unfortunately in some very persistent cases of unconscious confusion or conscious defiance) the anti-divine.

The Divine, the Truth, the Real, the Light is quite capable of dispatching shadow in any being. To think otherwise is sadly and utterly mistaken. Yet that is an option within the conditionally limited freedom we are provided with. But... why deliberately choose that limitation when we really unconditionally have and are all-freedom?

~ J

Originally Posted by Jyotir

means the recognition of this possibility in and through any individual life.

~ J [/color][/indent]

IOWs, yours is a faith based belief.

If you were only talking of what happens in our mind, as Jesus indicated, ----

John 6 ; 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

Luke 11:52 Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

Mark 7:13 Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

Then I would agree. It does not sound like you are though.

Regards
DL