I used to ask myself, day after day, why is it so hard to do the right thing?
And finally I got an answer that fit, that resonated with me. The reason was that doing the wrong thing felt so good.
Lust. Mmmmmm…. Loooove it.
Greed. Hee hee hee hee. All mine. Love it too.
Arrogance. I’m better than you are. Got him good, didn’t I? Heh heh heh.
But the results of all of them – long term and often short term – were uniformly miserable and sometimes catastrophic.
One who lusts wears the face of lust after a while, I’m told by women. Everyone knows the glint of greed in the eye. Arrogance drives people away in droves.
We try these states as kids, get feedback from the environment, and let them go. It’s called “growing up.”
Even after growing up, we still remember what they feel like. Our humor often allows us to experience them for a moment under the guise of jokes and comedy. All mine. I’m better than you are. Mmmmmm….
It’s my understanding that these early-learned, deep, and persistent memories will only be erased in the fire of Sahaja. Until then, it’s my belief that they’ll arise and that they, unto themselves, are no cause for alarm, self-judgment, or resignation.
What we do with them may present a hindrance to us at this late stage of the game. But like everything else we can let them go – if we want.
If we identify with them and don them like a suit of clothes, we may seem a little behind the wave. With the intensifying of the incoming energies, the baseline of spirituality seems to be rising along with the emotional floor. Calmness and balance seem to increase as a result.
If we flirt with the denser emotions and attitudes at this late stage of things, I think we stand to lose out from a portion of the experience of gradual ascension. It’ll be watered down a bit. Not fatal, but a moderate loss. It won’t be the full magnificence.
I go in and out of this new space of mastery, from which decision-making is straightforward and easy. I learn more and more about it every day.
However, the situation is the same as what Werner Erhard used to say about truth. It makes no difference that we told the truth yesterday. We have to tell the truth again today. There’s no shelf life to truth-telling.
By the same token, living from the space of mastery is not something which, if I did it yesterday, I don’t have to recreate or call it forth again today.
We can’t put “mastery” in a bottle and take it out whenever we need it. We can’t deposit it in our savings account and make a withdrawal later. We’re either in it or we need to recreate it.
How do we recreate it? That calls forth information I haven’t thought about in a while.
There are several ways I’m aware of to presence the Self. They also fit with the path of mastery.
I’ve tried all these techniques and, when I work with them with consciousness and commitment, I experience a deepening of my understanding and experience. Each is like a love bomb, removing a little more of the overburden or actually calling the Self forth for a time.
(1) Tell the truth, including sharing all withholds.
(2) Make a difference in someone’s life.
(3) Be with our experience until the truth reveals itself.
(4) Process our vasanas and conditioned behavior.
(5) Make a declaration, a promise, a commitment.
(6) Take a stand.
(7) Complete something.
(8) Breathe up the love from our heart and come from that.
These now need to be my tools.
The thing I glimpsed today was the possibility associated with the space I call “mastery” to integrate the knowledge gained from different experiences, aspects of myself, pieces of the puzzle.
Hold the Maltese Falcon. (1) The Humpty Dumpty Man (2) is closing in on the Self.
Footnotes
(1) The prized treasure in a Humphrey Bogart classic of the same name.
(2) See “Putting Humpty Together Again – Part 1/3,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/07/18/putting-humpty-together-part-13/ for an account of my fifty-year dissociation.
If you insist on more: “Putting Humpty Together Again – Part 2/3,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/07/19/putting-humpty-together-part-23/ and “Putting Humpty Together Again – Part 3/3,” https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/07/20/putting-humpty-together-part-33/.
Now Humpty zeroes in on the target: re-integration of the being and the recovery of balance.