A 20-year-old forum member related on Gaia Scene how she felt ostracized and isolated by friends and family for her beliefs, found university uninteresting, and didn’t know for sure how to handle the situation.
I’m sure she won’t mind if I share a part of that discussion here. This version is slightly expanded.
GaiaScene is the place to go to if you feel isolated, invalidated or fatigued and want spiritual companionship around the campfire.
I actually would like to say a bit more on the matters you raised, R.
Two things.
One: On Awareness.
Given that so many of us have been ridiculed and ostracized by our friends for our beliefs, we often find ourselves alone. There’s one spiritual path that works well for people who find themselves in that position and that’s the awareness path. I could almost call it the self-awareness path.
Might I recommend it to you as a way of taking the lemons of social ostracism and making lemonade out of them?
On the awareness path, we make of ourselves an object of awareness and track our mood shifts, thoughts, response patterns, etc., over time. We listen to ourselves chattering away. We observe the way we react to things. And we remember whatever patterns we find.
We remain in touch with ourselves, making of ourselves an object of enquiry.
The question on this path is: What am I aware of now? The response might be: I’m aware of, I see, I hear, I hear myself saying, I fantasize, I wish, I sense, I know. All the time we’re maintaining the thread of self-awareness.
We move from unconscious awareness over time to conscious awareness. That in itself is a great blessing and evolutionary stride forward.
Krishnamurti said over and over again that those who wish enlightenment need to seriously begin to observe and reflect on the ways of the self (the mind, the ego). That’s what the awareness path does.
There are many articles on it on the site in the Library under “Spiritual Essays – The Path of Awareness.”
Two: On Emergence.
The second thing I wanted to say was to offer a point of resolution, a condition of satisfaction, a modality of enlightenment for people on the awareness path.
The resolution I look for from this path I call “emergence.” We emerge from our shell, from our constructed self, from our root vasanas, core issues, and false grids.
We can facilitate emergence by getting in touch with our personal power. We can do that by using certain forms of communication that call the Self forth: making a declaration, making an assertion, taking a stand, making a promise, committing ourselves – all these ways of speaking and being have the effect of calling it forth. They help us emerge.
We can emerge from our vasanas and grids and when we do peace reigns and love flows freely inside us. This is a wonderful marker of progress.
So you can say that the fact that others who cannot yet grasp the magnitude or form of the events happening on Earth now have more or less isolated you is at once a great sorrow but it’s also a great blessing – it gives you time to make a study of yourself.
Given that the purpose of life is for us to know ourselves at the very deepest level (as God), is this line of study not something more productive than anything the university offers? I think it is.
You’ve said that you don’t find university satisfying. Neither did I.
The university as I knew it in the late 1980s was bound by the paradigm of empirical materialism – only what can be seen, heard and touched is considered real. University folks may be the last group of people to find out about many of the things happening today because they don’t believe in the reality of much of it.
I left university for the last time in 1987 because I had a spiritual experience, a vision of the journey of an individual soul from God to God. After that I had to study enlightenment and the university would not allow me. My choice was clear and easy and I’ve never looked back.
So welcome to the world where we ourselves supply the love that we need, the inspiration, the excitement, the everything until such time as the rest of society catches up.