Every so often, I feel the tug to repeat something that’s important and bears reflection. I feel that desire reading a passage from Aisha North’s latest message, if you’d permit me. Aisha’s sources say:
“The light is there to help you see better, but the light cannot tell you what to do, or even, what to see. For that is you and you alone who are able to understand the signals and the not so discreet hints coming your way that will point you in the right direction. But it is your choice to open up to what you see, and to act accordingly.” (1)
I think it would be hard to understand that passage without remembering the purpose and design of life.
The purpose of life is for us divine sparks to recognize, remember or realize the truth of our nature – to remember that we are God. As one well-known guide said many years ago: “The whole purpose of incarnation is this slow evolution of the spirit, its awakening in matter, to self-consciousness and God consciousness.” (2)
The process that allows us to achieve that purpose has three steps: (1) discriminating between the Real and the unreal, (2) detaching ourselves from the unreal, and (3) devoting ourselves to the Real. I think of this as the basic spiritual discipline.
The light is there to help us see better, to be sure. But the purpose of life wouldn’t be served if the light actually showed us what to do. If that were the case, then discrimination would not result. Life would be an automatic process of us seeking the light and the light doing our work for us by sitting in for our own native though undeveloped powers of discrimination.
Krishna discussed the situation we face in the Bhagavad-Gita. What he describes is what life is like when we fail to follow the three steps. This is the opposite, I think, of what we might think of as the spiritual life.
“Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse the mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.” (3)
Here “sense-objects” represent the ephemeral, the unreal. Grow attached to sense-objects and we forget the purpose of life. When we become addicted to the unreal, we forget the primary lesson of experience: that no addiction to anything unreal lasts long or satisfies us completely or forever.
Buddha called our lives an endless cycle of desire. We fasten on one desire and follow it until it pales and then replace it with a new desire. Round and round this circle we go, seemingly forever, pulled onward by the subsensible longing for God but not recognizing it for what it is. (4)
Our answer to the longing is to fill it with sensory objects and experiences. But these fail to satisfy us completely. Only the experience of God can do that.
We can know what it’s “right” to do, spiritually speaking, and still prefer the pleasurable. Why is it so hard to do the right thing? Exactly because the “wrong” pursuits bring pleasure.
The Upanishads suggest: “The wise prefer the good to the pleasant; the foolish, driven by fleshly desires, prefer the pleasant to the good.” (5) We can find ourselves caught in the desire cycle.
It’s said that we cannot escape our addiction to sense-objects until it falls away of itself through total satiation with the pleasurable in life. Once our thirst is slaked and our hunger is satiated, we begin our search for a more permanent form of satisfaction.
The student being ready, the teacher will arrive and learn why life was created. We may then ask ourselves how to fulfill the purpose for which life was created.
At that point, the three steps to liberation – to discriminate between the Real and the unreal, to detach ourselves from the unreal, and to devote ourselves to the Real – become known to us and important. They offer the means of escape from the wheel of life. We’re now ready to master them. We can say, with Buddha:
“I have been wounded by the enjoyment of the world, and I have come out longing to obtain peace; I would not accept an empire free from all ill even in the third heaven, how much less amongst men?” (6)
Nothing is lost by spending more time amid the sense-objects and pleasures of the Third Dimension. Except the bliss and fulfilment available to us on the higher planes of life. For some life sees slow progress and for others more rapid progress. But no judgment attaches to either.
The light now helps us but it won’t take the place of or usurp our own choosing.
Even now, as the light quotients rise on the planet, we see that people are left to open to the light or not, as they choose. Ascension isn’t forced on anyone. Those who don’t choose Ascension will spend more time in Third Dimensionality and then be presented with the choice again.
Footnotes
(1) “Aisha North: The Manuscript of Survival – Part 312,” May 20, 2013, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/05/aisha-north-the-manuscript-of-survival-part-312/
(2) White Eagle, Wisdom from White Eagle. Liss: White Eagle Publishing Trust, 1983, 49.
(3) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 42.
(4) See “The Longing for Liberation” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-longing-for-liberation/
(5) Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, trans., The Upanishads. Breath of the Eternal. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1957; c1948. , 16.
(6) Buddha in E.B. Cowell et al, trans., Buddhist Mahayana Texts. New York: Dover, 1949; c1894 , 119. The “third heaven” is the third subplane of the Mental Planes. The Mental Planes are the afterlife equivalent of the Fifth Dimension.