Anything more magical than that?

“Most people in this world are far too focused on finding success and avoiding failure. Much too little time is given to actualizing an awareness of what really matters in this life––what it really takes to get through the day and live in the joy and the glory of a perfect existence. These people believe that worldly success is all that really matters. This is an extremely limited belief…

Think of Van Gogh. He was not a financial success in his life… Could we look at it from a soul’s point of view? In that instance, success may be measured by how much integrity one had or developed in one’s lifetime, or how awake one became, or how much humanity we had, or how generous we were. These are qualities of the heart…

I am interested in awakening you to the dangers of your attachment to success ––success sought at a very superficial level, and money being one of the forms that it takes… If you had the eyes to see beyond the conditioning, you would see how the Divine cultivates and tempers your spirit and educates your being with little experiences, until your shining soul is bare and passes naked through life, lost in the ecstasy of an illumined existence. Ah, if you could just open to the synchronicity of it all!

As you learn to live more from your heart, you will allow the feelings of appreciation to be there for yourself and others to enjoy. Life’s real meaning is the cultivation of the garden of love, and you are the shining, holy gardener… What a creator the Mother is! How painstakingly she cares for all of us. Such amazing attention to detail! I’m sure that you have had moments of seeing through the pressures of life to this level of magic ––yet why are you not always able to sustain that state? In the main, it is because of a whirlpool of mind stuff which swirls through your awareness constantly ––all the conditioned concepts, ideas, desires, fears fantasies and limitations that your life imprinted upon you ––most of them quite without reason but happening anyway, disguised with an aura of logic because this is the way of the world you were born into.

An example would be, “All businessmen are sharks”. Heavy and strong thought forms have you in a gridlock, mostly in the unconscious, which are based on limited viewpoints, gross generalizations held by the culture and society into which you were born. Some of the areas where we have huge numbers of concepts are politics, families, the business world, the rich and the poor, and foreigners. We also have huge concepts or beliefs about ourselves, who we are, and how we should live, and these concepts drive us forward on the treadmill of life.

For the seeker, there are concepts born of experiences in early childhood and also from past lives. These past-life experiences are known as “samsara.” The samsaras are tendencies in the psyche, habits based on events from other lives which were repeated often enough that they are now overlaid onto current events happening in the present. Often they are of a pessimistic, negative and threatening nature, and they hold us in a deadlock. When this happens, we are living by rote, and there is never any way that we can be fresh and innocent in the moment, allowing the moment to bring whatever it will… As well as being a doer in the world, we have to learn to become a receiver––a receiver of Shakti, the primal energy or flow, and of the sweetness of perpetual renewal. We have to open to the amazing synchronicity of the cycles of nature, aware of the infinite variations within the play of existence…

Very often… the “yang” cycles where we express our inspiration outward in creative projects which fulfill us and bring us the satisfaction of having made something in physical form which can be seen by all––whereas the cycles of dissolution are associated with the “yin” energy and appear to be cycles of decay because the yin energy is an inward-turning energy. They are only decay if they are seen in terms of productivity in the world. The yin cycles are times of enormous growth. As we turn inward, we are renewing our being, often on unconscious levels, and in our culture this is regarded mistakenly as a slump or a cycle of non-productivity. We feel useless when we are in an inner cycle. This is a great mistake!...

When there is a discussion of dissolution, the subject of fear always comes up, especially for the beginner. The old pro has learned that the fear is not to be taken seriously, that it is part of the process of dying or dissolution––but the beginners, when they find themselves dissolving, may become swept away by the fear… It is my considered opinion that all fear has as its root the fear of death… In fact, in life, any situation where you lose power––even the smallest incident where you feel a loss of your energy reserves or power––will cause you to become most defensive, contracted and ready to fight. You are fighting to defend your life… every decline in energy, if it progresses to its furthest extreme, will end in death––this is what the unconscious belief tells us. So, we go on red alert the moment something takes our energy… As we learn to dissolve, we allow fear to pass through without creating a reaction and a pulling back. We begin to realize that fear is a frequency, not a necessity or a reality...

“Risks are nothing other than a moment in time when we confront our fear of death.” You open to the Void and allow Divine Providence to support and take care of you. Call this state “skywalking.” The reason that it is scary is because we feel that without total control we are facing our death. The idea of universal support is not part of the worldly paradigm; therefore, letting go of control, as in risk-taking, is facing death, rather than perceiving it as facing god. As we open to the Void, we’re facing God… from our limited state, creating ourselves to fear God because of our wrong-seeing…

Emotional energy always has a way of seeming especially real… “If it exists in the physical, it must be real”––this is our belief. Nothing is a more convincing a reality than physical symptoms, like pain in the body, sores, sickness and other forms of physical deprivation. In risk-taking, we have the emotional, mental, and physical evidence that we are breaking some unseen boundaries, and this appears to us to be terrifying. There is no reason to suppose that it truly is––if we let the universe support us––but we are not accustomed to doing this.

The human form is a system of controls. Actually, it is the appearance of control at a limited level of ego. Just think of it: as a baby you have no control at all. You cannot control your mouth ––the food runs out, and it’s difficult to swallow. You have no control of your bladder and bowels, no control of your emotions. This is something that your parents or an adult has to guide and initiate you into. Your parents actually teach you about control… “Don’t cry, don’t whine, don’t talk back, don’t have sex, don’t say what you think”...control... control...control. Then there are threats: “If you don’t do what I say, then... you fear for your survival should you transgress…

This whole process successfully locks you into your human form, making it extremely difficult to escape. In fact, one is often so locked in that even the tiniest crack in the shell is likely to make us fear for our lives, often only on an unconscious level. As I said earlier, fear––all fear––has as its root the fear of death. And the loss of control is the greatest threat to the ego. So the belief develops that our ability to control our lives and the circumstances in which we find ourselves is paramount to our well-being and survival… This belief states that “I am in charge. If I don’t take care of myself, then I will die”––or “If I cannot take care of myself, then someone else must do it or I will die”… All these beliefs are erroneous.

And then, of course, there is the great “unknown”. What this means is that we soon come to realize, before we’re too old, that we’re not able to control everything in life. There is always some unforeseen circumstance which comes out of left field and completely surprises us, showing us quite clearly that we have not gained the full control of everything. We have been conditioned to believe that it’s right to control everything as precisely as we can. In fact, we are addicted to controlling everything, and then life has this other side which consistently reminds us of our helplessness by regularly throwing us a curved ball. Our polarized minds, so addicted to control, become completely fearful of what we perceive as its opposite––chaos… All of these dynamics which I have mentioned are the reason we are locked into addictions of competing and success and superiority. But I would like to say here that all is not lost––we are not stuck with our old selves. There is another level of our being, beyond the human form, beyond the ego––a much more expanded level.

This expanded part of us is more aware of being linked into the whole universe, more connected with all the different aspects of existence. It is more subtle in its nature, more fluid. It has a much larger notion of control. This is us as the Divine Mother. We are connected to the Source. We are not alone in the universe as we are taught to believe in this world. We are part of a much larger whole which nurtures us and protects us––known as the Higher Self… The letting go is giving control to Spirit willingly. There is a sharing of the control here with Higher Intelligence… mastery comes in allowing the Divine to participate by abandoning oneself to her power, the divine creative force, while retaining your own technical skills… The breath of inspiration comes from God––mastery is letting it in…

Change takes place through Grace. It is not possible for the ego to change itself––it doesn’t have that power. It is designed rather like a computer program which can only run according to what it was coded to do. What it cannot do is rewrite itself and do something different… So we become a seeker, and we wish to institute a new, more enlightened paradigm of awareness. Before the new changes take place, there has to be a dissolution. After the dissolution, there can be a rebirth––a reforming in the new way. How does the practical application of change happen? It begins with the strong force of desire, and the desire leads us to making a deep and sincere commitment to do the work required to transform our life, our perceptions, and our belief systems. The Superconscious responds to us on the basis of the commitments which we’ve made. Without these commitments, nothing much happens.

The ego is a pattern designed to protect itself from anything which seems to threaten its survival… The ego does not really have, in its design, the desire to know God… It’s happy with its illusions. So the ego has to be coaxed into agreeing to the commitment to self-realization. It would help everything along if you could get the ego’s agreement to participate in the whole process. It would bypass a great deal of resistance.

There are a number of ways to achieve a dissolution. The least threatening is to sit with a teacher who can go into Samadhi who will attune you to the Light of God… If you continue to sit with a teacher in Samadhi, you will be able to change in ways that you could not achieve if you meditated alone. As you sit with the teacher, you are also learning to reach Samadhi yourself. This Samadhi, or Unity Consciousness, will happen when much of your baggage has gone––through continuous dissolution and rebirthing… It is important to remember that as you re-form, you must try to be neither attracted nor repulsed…

As you begin to re-form, all of your old desires and all of your old fears rise up in your face and try to reassert themselves, trying to lure and tempt you back into the same old pattern… If you can stay awake at this time they will leave you forever. You will be rebirthed in a much more centered way.

It takes a bit of practice, but as your Observer gets stronger, you will be able to do it. The art of being neither attracted or repulsed leads eventually to the freeing of your ego from all of its extraneous baggage. As the rigid, polarized old ego begins to disappear, fluidity––a new form of ego––takes its place. It is a malleable and flexible ego, one that is in tune with the Superconscious. As we complete the stage of learning to let go easily, a door opens to a new level of study. At the new level, we’re able to move very quickly through our clearing process by allowing the experiencing of repeated dissolutions and rebirths, moving very quickly toward our own experience of Samadhi. So the journey continues, the awakenings continue––could there be anything more magical than that?”

~ Leslie Temple-Thurston, DISSOLUTION AND REBIRTH
Spiritual Warrior II - Class One (Transcript) ©1995