It is not that there is not truth in this observation. There is a lot of beauty to be experienced as we draw closer to who we really are. There is a lot of stillness and emptiness to be found as we learn to calm our restless mind. There is also a lot of joy to be had as we learn to be free of so many of those obstacles inside us, which imprison and restrict us, and as we learn to become more dis-identified from our attachments.  There is also huge freedom as we learn to open our hearts more to life and thus have a deeper connection to the qualities of love and wisdom and truth, and eventually awaken to the realisation that we are not only part of that unity but who we are is that unity. Jesus himself told us that those who ‘Drink of the living waters’, that is, who learn to connect to, and live from, their true source, ‘Will not thirst.’, implying that we will no longer experience lack but will instead savour abundance of being.

However, to believe that this is all we experience on the path, and that there are no downsides to the journey, no struggles to be had, and that attaining this abundance of joy and freedom, is as easy, somehow, as falling off a log, and once attained, is there for ever, is to be guilty of polly-anna-ism in the extreme. Even the great saint Sri Ramana Maharshi, a true spiritual virtuoso, who spontaneously ‘woke up’ to the realisation of his divine nature when he was still in his teens and with no Master to induct him - even he had spent years previously tortured by the huge fear of death, and died in great physical pain, of cancer.

As I hope to demonstrate here, the process of genuine spiritual awakening is not something that is achieved easily. Or not ordinarily. It takes a lot of inner work, courage and determination. There aren’t many short cuts; it tends to be a slow process and we need to discover how to do it by actually doing it. Very often, just as we think we have some kind of handle on what awakening means, we discover that the rules of the game will have radically shifted, because we will have shifted, and therefore nothing we will have done in the past is going to work for us in the future! Indeed, making the transition from living our lives literally - not bothering to see any underlying meaning behind what transpires for us - to living it symbolically, where we are continually trying to root after deeper meaning and uncover symbolic significances, is not something that happens without considerable effort. And further, there are never any ultimate answers. In Jung’s words: ‘The serious problems of life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to live not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly….’

So while I want to encourage the seeker to understand that there really are huge benefits to be reaped as he or she inches closer to their soul life, I also want them to understand that these gifts do not come for free and that one must expect to work for it and that some of that work will be tough.

LIVING WITH ABUNDANCE
However, the fact that this may be the case, is no reason why the spiritual journey cannot be lived joyfully and abundantly. Indeed, how each of us experiences our lives is not just about what happens to us; it is about how we choose to experience what happens to us; it is about our attitude. So merely because we may be experiencing difficulties of one form or another, is no reason to hold life as being burdensome or to give in, say, to feeling victimised. (1) Indeed, if we can learn to open our heart to our spiritual unfolding, and let our heart guide and instruct us, even though we may at times, get lost in dark forests, sink in slimy swamps and feel abandoned in strange wastelands, abundance and fullness of being can always be our close companion. Even in our greatest despair. (.2)

As seekers, then, we need to learn that that space of consciousness or context, out of which we experience the content of our lives, is as, if not more, important than what actually happens to us, and that the more we choose to connect to our hearts and souls, the more we will have a direct line to a source that can empower us with joy, fullness of being and love, no matter what may be going on for us externally. Indeed, it may well be that one of the main purposes of our lives being problematic at times, is to help us make the effort to connect more powerfully to that abundant source.

BEING INITIATED
There is no doubt, however, that the Tibetan Buddhist Master Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche was speaking a truth when he suggested that being on a path was analogous to ‘Licking honey off a razor’s edge.’ For the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assigioli:

‘Spiritual development in a person is a long and arduous adventure, a journey through strange lands, full of wonders, but also beset with difficulties and dangers. It involves deep purification and transformation, the awakening of a number of formerly inactive powers, the raising of the consciousness to levels it has never reached before and its expansion in a new internal dimension. We should not be surprised, therefore, that such major change passes through various critical stages and these are often accompanied by neuro-psychological and even physical and psychosomatic disturbances.’

The analogy I would give is that the path has both roses and thorns on it and that you can’t have the one without the other, that is, we cannot reach the roses without also having to confront the thorns. And sometimes they can prick us rather hard. The art is that while being pricked we take care not to move away from and so lose touch with, the fragrance from the roses!

My experience is that the more we progress towards the light or the more we begin opening to the sacred and begin accessing abundant states of being, the more spirit seems to want to test us, and the tougher our tests can become. At the start of our spiritual journey, it hardly seems as if we are being tested at all. We seem to get away with making mistakes and going down many blind alleyways. However, the ‘rules of the game’ change quite radically when we begin to make a little headway, and what in the beginning of our journey may be a small deviation and therefore not of great significance, can, if repeated later on, become a big one and with potentially huge consequences.

What I have also learned is that if we see ourselves as a seeker after truth, a searcher after the Holy Grail, or as someone engaged in the’ Hero’s Journey’ (all different names for the same thing) then we are continually engaging in a process of initiation, which Mircea Eliade defined in terms of our ‘Becoming another’…Initiation, he tells us, is ‘ Equivalent to a basic change in our existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possesses before his initiation.’ For the Tibetan Master, Dwaj Khul, Initiation is ‘Essentially a moving out from under ancient controls, into the control of more spiritual and increasingly higher values.’

We cannot be on a path then, without facing certain ordeals. And they all evolve around how effectively we are able to embrace our soul identity and separate ourselves from those ‘ancient controls’ of our egoistically oriented nature. However, towards this end, spirit doesn’t seem to care much about how uncomfortable we may feel! (As we will be seeing, if it seems to be appropriate for our spiritual growth that our egos need to undergo a severe bruising, then that may be exactly what will happen!)

NO GUARANTEES
Indeed, just because we might be sincere in our aspirations, is no guarantee that good fortune will always come our way! Tragic things can happen to lovely people. I think of wonderful Ram Dass, with whom I had the honour to study with, being ‘stroked’, as he called it. Having served others all his life, this most compassionate and wonderful teacher was struck down by a most debilitating stroke at quite a young age. He talked about his experience as being a fierce form of grace! This allowed me to understand that grace not only comes to us as an amazing soother-of-sorrows, which, as the song tells us, can also ‘Calm our woes and drive away our fears’. It also has its more savage manifestations. The divine, we must understand, has a dark as well as a light side, and the paradox is that it is often through our experience of its darer face that we are best assisted to awaken to our deeper self!

The reality of this last point came home to me again very poignantly some years ago, when another man who had also been my teacher and mentor for many years - again a person of deep humility and wisdom, and one of the kindest people you could ever imagine - lost his new wife in a car crash after just a few weeks of marriage (after telling me how blessed he felt in at last having a soul mate after so many years of loneliness). Again, I couldn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to such a lovely man, just as I couldn’t believe that someone like Ram Dass should also have had to endure such suffering.

’God tests us very strongly’, my old friend told me a little later. ’Being on a spiritual path is a damn tough undertaking, but we have to surrender to it. And keep our heart open all the time. In fact, once we are on it, there is no turning back’ (Trungpa said the same thing), ‘And we have to accept whatever it is that God puts our way. There is always a higher purpose, a deeper meaning to things, which we may not ‘get’ for a long time. Often, new understandings take a long, long time to percolate through. I am going to choose to use my loss to help me grow, not shrink.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW MILLENIUM
So if being on a path is anyway challenging and requires a lot of courage on our part (4), I believe it is even more challenging given that we are doing our spiritual seeking at this particular time in our human history, where circumstances are asking us to deepen our soul lives as never before. (33) Today, we are living at a time where one age is trying to die and a new one is doing its best to be born, and this makes for a lot of turbulence and confusion. In part, this is because while many of our old ways of doing things – and this also includes our spirituality –no longer work, those innovations that will replace them have not yet come into being. In a talk entitled ‘The New Heaven and the New Earth’, the late Bulgarian Spiritual Master Peter Deunov made the following observations:

‘We find ourselves at the end of the decline of one culture and the dawn of another, which is rising, developing and already imposing itself…From now on a radical transformation is progressively occurring in human consciousness – in their thoughts, feelings and actions as well as in all the organization of human society…"

All earthly beings will be subjected to the great purification of the Divine Fire in order to become worthy of the new epoch…. A powerful magnetic current with a force of millions of volts is already reaching our earth…Those not ready to encounter it will undergo nervous shock, physical imbalances and different psychic disorders. The only thing now is to know how to put oneself in harmony with this wave of new life which is descending on Earth…’

TOWARDS NEW THINKING
What also complicates things is that many people with spiritual aspirations no longer feel attracted by their religious traditions, which they experience to be more focussed in the past and therefore no longer relevant to this new current. Many of us today feel called to be more eclectic in our approach to the sacred and to break loose from all forms of institutionalised religion. (5)
However, this means we are challenged to branch out on our own and thus no longer having the supporting power of thousands of years of tradition behind us.  Also, in the past, many spiritual people would go to have their initiations outside of society; they would leave the ‘real world’ and go into caves and temples and pyramids to do their transforming. Today, things could not be more different. Today, we are being challenged to undergo our initiations within society, that is, do our ‘spiritual growing’ right in the very middle of civilisation and all its many turbulences and discontents.

And this is tough since it implies that our spirituality has to be much more fully incorporated into all areas of our lives, which in turn means that we need to be   dealing simultaneously with many more dimensions of being. One could say we are being challenged both to bring a higher awareness down into our secular culture and at the same time, to try to raise the vibrational quality of that culture  (or, metaphorically speaking, to bring heaven ‘down’ to Earth, and Earth ‘up’ to heaven!) And this is a challenging assignment as the general tone of our society is hardly a quiet and gentle one.
Also, in the past, the seeker was primarily concerned with his or her own personal evolution as an end in itself. He could get away with being an ‘island unto himself’. No longer. Today, we are all much more interconnected. With the Internet, instantaneous communication from one end of the world to the other is now possible. Indeed today, man and planet have grown increasingly close to one another, and hence the seeker’s agenda has also to include consideration of what will serve the well being of the larger whole. Put simply, today, the seeker must realise that how well he fares is very much affected by how well his society fares and that his own personal development will actually be curtailed unless he also takes into consideration the need to honour and respect the well being of those around him as well as that of his planet as a totality.

ADJUSTING TO DARK TIMES
And if  all this is not enough, we  also need to remember that these times are  singularly dark.(6) We face crisis in almost every single area of our lives. In part, this is because  newness tends  initially to signal its presence by casting its shadow in front of itself. (For example, the Women’s Movement began by angry suffragettes throwing bricks through the windows of the Houses of Parliament!)
And dark times make people feel afraid. A client of mine in therapy summed up how many people  feel today when she began a session by saying: ‘ I admit I am scared.  I feel we are living in a dangerous world and if a Tsunami doesn’t get me, then a terrorist or a street mugger will. All the things which used to be safe in the past, no longer are. I admit I am scared by the threats posed by the possibility of a total financial collapse, global warming, biological warfare and the shortage of water? And what happens when our oil supplies run out…..’
All this external insecurity, therefore,  makes it very important that the seeker learns to build a quiet, strong  and secure centre within his being , so that no matter what  kind of storms erupt outside  of himself , he  may remain calm and unruffled internally and not succumb  to the many fear currents swirling around him, which if he does, can open the gate to all sorts of  other negative mental states. Erecting such a centre, however, is not easy. In his play ‘The Sleep of Prisoners’ , Christopher Fry expresses the challenge of our times as follows:

‘The frozen misery of centuries
Cracks, breaks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows.
Thank God our time is now
When wrong comes up to face us
Never to leave us
Till we take the largest stride of soul man ever took….’

All the old crystallizations of our past, then, all those arenas where humanity has become rigidified , are beginning to split open, to spill their contents. And this can be highly disturbing. The spiritual seeker, therefore,  needs to understand the connection between the sum total of his past karma  coming up to stare him in the face  - everything that humanity has never effectively  resolved, all the patterns of hatred, violence, dishonesty, corruption -  and the necessity that he stretch himself  further into realms of soul  than he has ever done before.   He needs to appreciate the connection between these two facts and  realise that very possibly, without the intensity he is currently experiencing, he may lack the necessary impetus to make that required vast soul stride. Thus, we face many tough challenges. Many today believe that  the state of the world is such that we may not, as a species, survive the next hundred years.

‘ AS WISE AS SERPENTS AND AS HARMLESS AS DOVES’
Over two thousand years ago, Jesus was aware that his disciples would have to confront a lot of resistance and darkness. He therefore suggested that in order to succeed in their spiritual mission, they needed to be  ‘As wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.’ I think  the same requirement holds true for the seeker  of today who, as he gradually evolves,  may well find himself facing  not dissimilar problems. For, like it or not, in our role of trying to stand for, or pioneer new ways to be more fully human,  we seekers are inevitably an integral part of the process of renewal happening in the world. Hence, we will  inevitably confront a lot of resistance, not only  from inside ourselves, but also from those who want  the world to stay the way it has always been! Unless we are able to generate  a strong spiritual light  inside ourselves, and maintain it  steadily in the face of those  opposing forces belonging to the status quo, we may not do especially well in our initiations.

So what does being wise and harmless entail? For me,  it entails embodying a new kind of spiritual power as a consequence of embracing contrary traits  inside ourselves.  For Martin Luther King, it meant being  tender hearted and tough minded , as opposed to the way most people are today,  which he saw as being soft-minded and hard hearted. For King, the soft minded/hard hearted person was the rigid person devoid of intellectual rigour,  always opposed to change, perennially unwilling to question things,  and wholly unable to feel  genuine love or compassion, and hence devoid of heart qualities  which our world has so much need of. For King, what was important was that love and logic would fuse,  that the wisdom of the heart  might enter the mind, while at the same time, a person’s mental strength  could serve to toughen their heart. And I agree. Creating such a synthesis inside ourselves, however, does not just happen overnight!
I  once heard  a story about a snake who wanted  to become more spiritual, and  who went to visit a guru for advice, who told him he needed to go out into the world and send love to everyone he met. This the snake did, but he got very battered for his efforts, as everyone threw things at him. He returned to his master rather dejectedly, saying that he had given love but had got wounded for his efforts. ‘Ah’, the Master replies, ‘ But I never told you not to hiss’!

TOUGH LOVE
And this is a very important point. If the seeker is to be effective in his spiritual journeying today, there  can be nothing passive and  gooey about the way he chooses to love. Indeed, there will be times when we will need to practise what is known as ‘tough love’. This implies that we  be able to take powerful stands for truths we believe in, yet  do so  in a tender  and gentle way where no one is harmed in the process. ( Being harmless, we remind ourselves, is not being ineffective. On the contrary. Things get achieved, yet not at the expense of anyone or anything being damaged.)

The art, therefore,  is for the seeker to be accepting and loving  of himself . This means    not putting himself down for his mistakes and vulnerabilities – or for not being perfect -  a terrible habit which does nothing to assist his development, yet at the same time,  also be  firm and self-disciplined. This means that he does not let himself ‘get away’ with doing things in an unconscious way , or  that he does not  abnegate responsibility for his life  or blame others for his shortcomings. If he can be this way with himself, then he can relate to others in a similar way. And this in turn implies  his beginning to operate from  a  very different kind of power source. In a  recent lecture on  Spiritual Empowerment, I made the following observations of this ‘new kind’ of power, which I would like to quote from here.(XXX)

CELEBRATORY POWER
‘If the human race is to survive to the end of the century, we need to learn to be powerful in a new way…Ordinarily we see power as something personal, as belonging to us. This is power only at an ego level. It is power over others…And it is essentially about en-weakenment not empowerment… as all too often this power is achieved at the expense of a diminishing or an injuring  of,  another. This use of  what I call hard power  often conspires to reduce life in one way or another.
The new power I am talking about is not hard and  has nothing to do with ego and in actuality, only becomes available to us once our egos are no longer dominant and our hearts are more open.  In fact, it comes directly from the heart. This power can truly empower because it doesn’t aim to control  or dominate other people so much as help them  be a space  or an opening where they can celebrate themselves.  Thus I’d call it celebratory power.

And celebratory power is the power of life itself… It’s a befriending kind of power. It is a power we are able to access as  our hearts begin to  melt open and we make the choice to fuse with life and cooperate with where we intuit life needs to flow.’
I believe that much good can be done in the world through an exercise of this kind of power and that  the seeker is challenged to try to develop it in himself. Indeed, when  he allows mind and heart to begin to fuse or when the seeker can learn to marry the masculine and feminine parts of himself,  and this new power begins being generated,  a new wisdom space can  begin to open up inside him, allowing for great natural magic to happen. The seeker’s ability to accelerate the process of his own transformation through aligning himself  more effectively with the will of God so that more and more he can be part of the solution to the problems of the world as opposed to being part of them,  becomes enormously enhanced.

FACING DIFFICULT TRUTHS IN OURSELVES AND OUT IN THE WORLD’
An integral part of our sacred journey  then, requires that we   have the courage to face the darkness  not only at the bottom  of our own hearts but also within the heart of our world. Or  as a character in a Thomas Mann novel once said, ‘If a way to the better there be, it lies in our taking a full look at the worst!’

However, doing this requires   that we be both open hearted and tough minded. Without this new kind of ‘heart power’,  it can be  too frightening. Normal man (who, as we’ve seen, tends to incline more towards  soft-mindedness and hard heartedness)  never does this. Rather, he prefers to project  his own darkness outside of himself all the time,  that is, to accuse others of possessing characteristics he refuses to acknowledge inside himself. For him , all the problems of the world are other people’s/nations/ organisations fault, and have nothing to do with him. The more innocent he remains (in his own eyes) the more  his own and our  world darkness is permitted to grow bigger.

The seeker, however, whose mission  is to find the spiritual gold hidden in this darkness,   or, as St Francis would put it ‘To bring light into the darkness’ , is challenged  to engage  both with the light and with the dark  at much greater depths. We could say he is challenged to confront the worst within himself and within his world from the perspective or viewpoint of what is best!
From a place of heart, then, we are challenged to  open to the injustice, insanity, inequality , violence and sheer human stupidity that characterises so much of life today. We need to  do this in the recognition that, as part of that whole, aspects of ourselves are also part of  this insanity, part of this dangerous  and conflict-ridden society,  part of this world run by greed and fear, where we over-consume, where global warming threatens our survival, where millions die of AIDS , feel marginalised and disenfranchised (especially women) and  where the poor continue to get poorer as the rich get richer!

As spiritual  seekers, we  need to  recognise how soulless  and superficial we as a species have become, how addicted so many of us are to drama, drugs, war and destruction and violence in all its many forms and that  today, there exist many fanatical people, more in love with death than with life,  who wish to destroy the world  in the name of God. We  also need to acknowledge  how much our world is still  in the thrall of the military-industrial complex and how much our world economy  depends, for its survival, upon our spending  more and more money (which could be used to alleviate disease and  poverty) on  manufacturing more and more weapons so we can destroy ourselves more and more barbarically  by fighting more and more wars (‘Perpetual war for perpetual peace!’)
If we are to be authentically spiritual, we cannot ignore such truths!

DON’T CURSE THE DARKNESS BUT BE THE LIGHT
And it is tough : allowing ourselves to see   how far we seem to have journeyed from our deeper calling.  Yet, as I said,  if we  can see all these things through the lens of a  tough mind and a compassionate heart, new understandings will grow in us and out of them, new ways of  confronting and dealing with these insanities will emerge. The old way  of operating, for example, is to believe one can  eradicate evil by attempting to kill it off, as in fighting wars against it. This, of course,  not only does not work but results in  even more darkness being  generated in the process, as those who are the protagonists of such policies, turn into the very ‘evil enemy’ they are battling against.
(See my long CDs on ‘ Terrorism, the Shadow and the spiritual path’ and ‘Spirituality and the Dark Side’).

THE POWER OF LIGHT
The seeker needs to understand, therefore,  that darkness is  best handled, not by being hated and attacked, but by  his learning to bring    wisdom, truth and light into it.  In Mother Theresa’s words: ‘Don’t curse the darkness, instead light a light’. However, this is only possible if we  know how to do this, that is,  if we are ourselves,  carriers of spiritual light - if we know how to ignite the light inside ourselves. Put simply, this  kind of work cannot be done without  this light which begins to grow inside us  only as  a result of  much effort on our part to purify ourselves. ( Indeed, we can say that the purpose of the spiritual journey is to try to be more and more of a space so that the divine, light-filled sacred us  is allowed to emerge.) Light  is terribly empowering. If we will have learned how to be that light which we are, then we may be able truly to exercise a transforming effect on the darkness around us as opposed to our  being overwhelmed by it.

TOWARDS MULTIVIDUAL-HOOD
Therefore, unless our path is to be  that of the recluse , one of our great challenges today is to choose to take  powerful  loving heart/ tough mind stands for light , truth, harmlessness and  innovation, in whatever area or areas of our dark  world we feel called upon to address.  So if, for example, we are a teacher, we may need to bring  a deeper understanding of heart and mind – a new vision - into the educational system. If we are  in politics, we might take a  stand on   behalf of a new spirit of honesty or on behalf of  a  new solution to those world problems that we believe are most pressing. If we are an ecologist, we  might choose to spread the message on behalf of  greater planetary sustainability. And so on.

Hence the great Boddhisattwa vow to the end that ‘So long as one of my fellow humans is not free, then I am  also not free’,   and which in the past, used to be understood only at a personal level, now has to be  ‘understood’ and ‘lived’ at a planetary level. Today, it is only by  our taking on the whole world or expanding the sphere of our responsibility to  include more and more dimensions of our planet, that  we will be able to grow into our deeper humanity and thus come  to realise that  who we actually are is  not an individual but a multividual - a universal being! So when Plato told us that each of us contained the qualities of everyman and everywoman and that both what is best and  worst about man - his  capacity for sainthood, sage-hood and genius, as well as his destructiveness and  murderousness-  lies inside  each of us  - from this  ‘new’ place, his words can  begin to make sense!

Making this quantum leap into this new awareness state, however, is not easy, simply because, as a species, we  have tended to become  so fixated into our  old,  limited and (often endarkened) beliefs about who we think we are , that we find our old identities hard to let go of. (Who would we  really be if we let go our old limited sense of self?) Many seekers describe  feeling marooned between the  old, personal  consciousness pulling them back and the  new universal one stretching them forward. On the one hand they have not  yet managed to let go the past, while on the other hand, they have not yet been able to embrace the new, emerging  more light-filled’ them!
Some seekers, beginning to navigate these higher reaches of human awareness a little more effectively, may find themselves not only having to work through their own ‘personal karma’, but also at times, having to   ‘take on’ aspects of the karma of humanity as a whole. They have described  themselves having experiences of becoming Everyman being tortured or Everyman being persecuted or  Everyman being  abused, raped, victimised or murdered.  In his excellent  book ‘Dark Night, Early Dawn’ , Chris Bache develops this theme most  poignantly.
So just as the beginner on the path attempts to work through his own personal ‘deficiency’ spaces by entering into them and experiencing them and, as a result, finding them gradually  begin to evaporate to reveal deeper  and subtler layers hidden underneath, so the same thing happens with more advanced spiritual seekers, only  here they may be challenged to ‘take on’ and work with, higher-order deficiency patterns which  pertain to universal man!  There may  well be times when we are  - quite literally - not just one person struggling in agony, but  entire battalions of people doing so! And  again, all this can be pretty tough .

STILL TOUGH AFTER AWAKENING
I mention this in order to offset the myth that the more advanced we are, or  the more we enter into universal levels of consciousness and beyond ,  that the more we are guaranteed perpetual joy and bliss and the easier our path becomes. As mentioned earlier on, I think this is illusory. Certainly my experience of having worked with many people transiting into these subtler realms, is that the more they travel into the light, the denser seems to be the darkness  that they are called upon to confront. Or as Jung put it: ‘The tall tree casts a long shadow’.
Sometimes  the despair  felt can be  very deep as the full horrendousness of our inhumanity can be seen that much more clearly. Indeed, if we read the autobiographies of significant spiritual personages, we find that they  too  (just like us )have their dragons and demons to confront,  their painful divorces, periods of fear and depression, conflicts with family and tragic losses. What is different is that  because of the greater degree of light that they have been able to release within themselves, their ability to process their pain from a more abundant space, is considerably greater.

For example, I  recently read  an account of a famous Sufi Master going through the agony of trying to help his atheistic son who was dying of  his heroin addiction and constantly being told by him that his condition was his father’s fault , that his father spent too much time  trying to be a great Master and had neglected him. Despite his enlightenment, this man suffered a great deal. We see this degree of suffering clearly depicted in the well-known Biblical  story of Job, who, despite  being  highly evolved and loved by God,  was not spared a   very rough ride! In a very short space of time,  Job lost everything - his health, his family, his status, his money.  He went from superstardom to penury in one fell swoop. The story went that  because  Job was very beloved by God. God was testing him very strongly. Would he still love God or would he curse him?

LIGHT EVOKES THE DARK SIDE
My point simply is that the closer we come to the light of our  soul, the more  we  may need to confront our darkness which obscures it. This is because our  gradual birthing into a deeper,  more unitive self, tends initially to signal its presence by letting us see what still stands in our way –   it enables us to realise how fixated parts of us  may still be in the contractions of our dis-unitive self. And this can be  very  painful.
It can be very  painful because, among other things,  we  will probably get to realise things about ourselves  that we would prefer not to. For example, we may get to see how attached parts of us still are to being ‘asleep’(unawake) – having been that way for so long - and  how loath we are  to relinquishing our old desires and graspings. (Who would we be without  those desires of ours, which the Buddha saw as being the source of so much of our suffering, we ask!) It hurts too, when we get to see  that, despite all our aspirations to be deep, parts of us are still mired in superficiality, and that while our hearts may have some idea about  what the truth is, it is still so difficult to live it.  I remember  personally going through a long period where every day I was confronted with the fact that every single one of those ‘Seven deadly Sins’ applied to myself! It gave me a little comfort, I remember, when, talking about this to a Zen priest , he  told me that he still needed daily to confront his small-mindedness,  his lust,  his greed and  his restlessness!
None of this, of course,  ‘comes up’ for ‘normal man’ or  the person who is not  on a path and therefore  not concerned with becoming more fully human.  Normal man is ‘allowed’ to live without self awareness! Seldom, if ever, does he have to look at his dark side and  so confront his greed, selfishness, vanity and violence. Rather,  as we have seen, he is free to project these tendencies outside of himself onto everyone else!

CONFRONTATIONS WITH DEATH
For many seekers, the more they begin moving into the higher realms of  their human nature,  the more they are challenged to confront death. As Stan Grof put it in his book ‘The Stormy search for the Self.’
‘All the situations that provide opportunities for spiritual opening are typically associated with a variety of strong opposing forces….Here belong terrifying experiences that can deter less courageous and determined seekers, such as encounters with dark, archetypal forces, the fear of death and the spectre of insanity.’

Dr John Perry, also says the same thing.‘When a true spiritual awakening and transformation is under way, one often encounters images of death and destruction of the world itself. The psyche does not express itself gently.’
 Put simply, God not only  moves in  loving and mysterious ways (God’s presence in Moses’ burning bush) but also, at times, in disturbing and painful ways! In this context, we need to remind ourselves anew what  spiritual evolution is essentially about. It is  essentially about death and rebirth : the  gradual death of an ‘us’ or a self attached to a particular identity, and  the  gradual emergence in its place, of a ‘new, more all inclusive us’,  a deeper self  founded on a whole new  and wider identity. It follows, therefore, that  unless the old form dies - which implies the totality of  behaviours, attitudes, beliefs and ideas that hold that old form in place,  the new, more expanded identity  has no ‘space’ to come into being. And it is sometimes the case that our old  encrustations or un-consciousnesses  will have become so solidified ( the continual repetition of our old egoic habits will have laid such deep tread marks in our psyche) that the only way that  they can be broken up ( and so die) is explosively .  As Gurdjieff put it:
‘Man being the inert, unconscious creature that he is, often,  the only way he can ‘wake up’ is as a result of  being  confronted by a force greater than the sum of his  own inertia! ‘

SPIRITUAL TSUNAMIS
Thus,  it may sometimes be that the seeker/initiate will  have to be subject to severe suffering if he is to shift at all ( if his ego is to begin melting). And these ‘spiritual tsunamis’ can take many different forms as we have seen:  the death of a loved one ( as happened with my mentor), a stroke (Ram Dass), a financial or physical or emotional  or mental collapse. I remember once I had to experience a severe financial loss, a near-fatal illness and the loss of a loved one, all within the space of a few weeks! While I don’t think I dealt with these losses in a particularly ‘spiritual way’ at the time ( I spent a great deal of time marooned on the island of self pity!) I know my soul engineered them for my own deeper spiritual good and I am probably the better for them today!
Basically, what suffering does  ( and it does it much more powerfully if we can really take it into our heart, experience it consciously)  is that if it doesn’t destroy us (and it can do – hence the danger of this journey),  it burns away  the old protective covers or egoic sheaths. This  helps us  become  increasingly naked  and as such,  enables us to discover a new, more expanded sense of Selfhood. In this new space, our souls are given a new opportunity to emerge.

So if, for example,  we are used to defining ourselves through our money,  and it is our money that stands in the way of knowing ourselves more deeply, our souls might engineer a crisis taking the form of a financial crisis. Similarly, if we use our social position as a screen to hide our real self behind, something might happen for that social position to become blown away, etc. Basically, what the initiation does is  allow us to see that our old ways of ‘playing the game of life’, do not  work and if we are to advance, a new and ‘higher  life game’, a more authentic version,  needs to be brought into expression.

NOT TO  PATHOLOGISE SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE
What is important if we happen to be going through  one of these tough ‘crises of transformation’, is that we desist  from seeing it through a pathological lens -  see it as evidence of something having gone awry. This can sometimes be difficult as our ‘feel-good culture’ makes us believe that feeling sad or depressed is somehow ‘wrong’ .If seen through such a lens, it can make the seeker  potentially susceptible to taking on whatever negative projections might be  being  directed towards him.

Seen from a spiritual perspective, then,  it may not only  be that  nothing has gone awry; it may well be that very significant things may be happening, with a transformation for the better being just around the corner. As seekers, we must understand that in  the same way that the rites of passage taking us from adolescent  to adult can be tough - teenagers face all kinds of growth pains as they mature – so, in moving beyond ‘normal adulthood’ to more universal states of consciousness, we   may similarly experience ‘higher’ growth pains!
Therefore,  while the symptoms of spiritual transformation might appear  on the outside,  to be very similar to those experienced by people undergoing   a psychotic breakdown,  this is not   at all what is happening.  Not only is pathology not present , not only does the spiritual aspirant  who experiences ‘strange things’  or who may be plunged into deep  dark nights or existential angsts, not need to be locked up in a mental institution , but  on the contrary, he needs to be celebrated and supported as someone with the courage to voyage into the higher reaches of his humanity. But the going can be pretty tough . Especially if there is no one around him who understands his state of being and who is simply projects their  own fears and lack of comprehension onto the seeker. That is why it is difficult going through deep spiritual transformations in a culture not programmed to understand them.  As I said, the seeker may actually take on the viewpoint of his society and use it to invalidate his experiences

EXAMPLES OF SPIRITUAL CRISES
For example, if the seeker happens to be experiencing, say, a Kundalini Awakening ( the rising up of a particular evolutionary energy coiled at the bottom of our spine), it may  initially feel as if he is exploding in fire,  especially if his chakra system happens to be blocked, making his body somewhat  resistant to this powerful energetic current. If we research into this particular phenomena,  however, we will find that  these experiences are natural, that they happen to many thousands of seekers and that there exist many ways of being able to work creatively with them.

Another  well-known and much documented spiritual crisis is the Dark Night of the Soul experience , beautifully described in St John of the Cross’ little spiritual classic of that name. Here, we go through a process of feeling utterly abandoned by God and where all we can see are the darkest and most  loathsome and impure aspects of ourselves. This can  either feel as if we have ‘fallen from grace’, done ‘something  horrendously wrong’ and are being punished for our terribleness, or that we have a severe and incurable depressive illness! In actuality, none of these things will have occurred and  again this crisis is  a very core part of the  process of purification  or ‘shedding of old skins’, that is so necessary if we are to open up to deeper levels of heart and soul. And  again, it is perfectly natural. If the seeker has the courage, consciously,  again with heart, to ‘sit the crisis out’, experience fully everything that his psyche brings up for him, it can result in the deepest of transformations occurring for him. But again, it’s tough!

Also, often  just before a big breakthrough, we can experience a huge contraction, as if all our ego encrustations  that we have laboured so hard to  try to dissolve, seem more solidified than ever. This ‘Existential crisis’ is one of  our being caught, as it were, between two ‘meaning systems’. The  old  self, which has not yet fully died, is nonetheless seen as  utterly false and empty, while the new , more unitive one has not yet come into being. Stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, the seeker can feel almost suicidal with grief. Again, this is a natural part of our spiritual birthing and again we need to open to our grief and allow the necessary transformations to take place in their own time. But it is tough!

THE PROBLEM OF SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT HAVING DONE OUR EARLY HOMEWORK
What can  make these ‘higher-order awakenings’ even tougher, however, is if we try to move through them without  our having done the necessary ‘preparatory work’ ,  and therefore are still holding  onto  old wounds or unresolved emotional patterns relating to  our birth, early childhood or even to past-life memories. So long as our old ghosts have never been properly exorcised, they will continue to haunt us in one form or another. To give an example, if we  have never  worked at resolving an original birth trauma relating to  our original physical birth, it may well impact upon how effectively we complete subsequent ‘metaphysical births’ - the birthing into our deeper nature. That too, may be traumatic.

Similarly, if we only focus on ‘being better’ ( a spiritual aim) without first handling the issue of ‘feeling better’ (a psychological goal) and  thus try to awaken our deeper self without first trying to work through issues relating to our egoic self, that is,  we try, spiritually , to run before we can walk, we may  well encounter trouble. For example,  if we dislike our  personal father and have never resolved things with him, our emotional pain  and anger may  well spill over into our spiritual questing and contaminate it. We may  well project our  unhealed resentment towards our judgemental and condemning personal papa onto  our image of God the Father and  so  get him to behave similarly towards us! 

In other words, if the seeker tries to move too quickly or too deeply into  the ‘enlightened life’ without having  first  worked at  loosening up some of the central emotional issues in his  personality, he may suffer as a result. His enlightenment may not be total and he may have insufficient emotional strength to be able to process the higher frequency spiritual energies which I quoted Deunov as saying are now emerging on our planet. This is why ego healing work  or ego development work is such an important aspect of spiritual awakening.(See my CD ‘The meaning of Enlightenment.)

THE SELF’S NEED TO METABOLISE EXPERIENCES AT EACH NEW LEVEL
The seeker needs to understand, then, that one of the central tasks of the self, as it journeys from little egoic/false self to  more expanded, higher-order spiritual self, is that it  must learn to metabolise or digest the experiences presented to it at each stage of development. If this does not occur, damage takes place. Put simply: we cannot and should not, skip out stages. In Ken Wilbur’s words, ‘We cannot get to the Buddha without first embracing Freud!’ Basically, all parts of us  need to evolve. We need to take the whole of us along with us on our journey and  not split off from or abandon aspects of ourselves as  being ‘non-spiritual’ ,as these abandoned aspects simply stop evolving and  set up camp in our basement metamorphosing into our opponents! In Wilbur’s words again:
‘If the Self fails to digest and assimilate significant past experiences, and these remain lodged, like a piece of undigested meat, in the self-system, psychological indigestion is generated.

Put another way, self climbs the ladder of expanding consciousness, but if something goes wrong in our early development, the self can lose an arm or a leg at any rung….Aspects of the self can get  damaged or left behind….And this loss results in a pathology characteristic of the stage at which the loss occurred’.
What happens is that the split-off part of us ceases to evolve and , as Wilbur says , ‘Sets up shop in the basement holding onto a very primal moral view of the world.’ From this place, it tries to sabotage our development in every way it can.
And  this is one of the problems that can affect people  who are otherwise highly developed spiritually. Those spiritual teachers, for example,  who are susceptible to the three temptations of money, sex and power, may be deeply connected in to spiritual wisdom at one level,   yet at another level,  still be fixated into a primal moral view of the world and  be suffering from ego damage. This is why it can be potentially so dangerous to skip out stages.  One definition of someone who is authentically mature is that they no longer have undigested pieces of psychological meat going rotten  in the basement of their psyches! Such a person does not have to struggle to align themselves to a higher spiritual will, for they will be disinclined to want to participate in anything  that is not  fully aligned to a higher purpose.
The seeker must also understand that pathologies don’t only happen later on as re-enactments of earlier ones. The Self can  also, metaphorically speaking, lose an arm or a leg in the higher-order rungs of the evolutionary ladder as well. Thus, someone who may not have been damaged earlier on in their lives, can, in transiting  into the higher worlds, go through an initiatory gate the wrong way and suffer a new lesion. This happened to a good Buddhist friend of mine. He went through a natural phase that advanced meditators go through whereby one gets to see the painful nature of manifest existence. However, instead of simply getting insights into the sourness of life, he actually went sour on life and entered a severe depression that lasted a long time and required  a lot of help to free him from it.
 As you can see, there are trials and tribulations to face at all stages of the spiritual journey.

INNER WORK AS TOUGH CHALLENGE
What can be particularly tough  for students going through these kinds of tests and who see themselves as being on an eclectic path , and who don’t feel called to be involved with any particular  tradition or Spiritual Master, but are trying to find  their our own way, is that they need to be both teacher and student to themselves. They need to stumble through a lot of this light work and dark work on their own. They need  to be  making important choices  all the time as to where they feel they need to go, spiritually,  as well as be deciding what kind of inner work will best support their intentions at any time.(8) I must make the point here that none of us grow spiritually simply by thinking it might be a nice idea to be a more loving person.  This will not get us very far! Rather, we grow spiritually by engaging in certain practices aimed at developing our spiritual muscles, such as meditating on sacred qualities, doing our best to engage in loving and purposeful actions and  having the courage to confront our dark side, etc.

Let us look, for example, at Meditation, which is the ‘staple diet’ of most spiritual paths. It may sound easy  to meditate, but whatever people pretend, unless we live in a monastery and have a regular teacher, it is tough - tough but not impossible -  to do it properly and  to improve and be able to maintain a quiet mind in  such an unquiet world.(9) The same holds true of prayer (if our path includes it ) . We remind ourselves that its effectiveness requires that we will have established a strong connection to that source with which we are seeking connection with. Without this, spirit cannot ‘hear’ our supplications and answer ( if it be within the scheme of things) our requests!
All the time, therefore, the seeker needs to be deciding issues such as  what practice or practices would most benefit him at any time, and where he should go to obtain them. For example,  when does he need to focus more on himself and when should he put more effort towards supporting or  serving others? When do we need to make huge efforts, or  when is it preferable to relax and simply let grace in? When do we need to work more psychologically, or when is it preferable to stop working psychologically? Should we get someone to help us or should we go it on our own? Or is it best to submit ourselves to some kind of formal training and if so, what kind?(10)Etcetera.
It is tough trying to get  all this right , that is, blend inner and outer - earn our inner living at the same time as focussing on our outer one. Not surprisingly, most of us are much better at earning our outer living. This is because, firstly,   that kind of ‘living’ is societally sanctioned ( we live in a world that  only really gives credence to what can be seen and touched), secondly, we get trained, and , most importantly, we get  paid!  Since we  all need to survive financially, the money element is very important.  The point is that  no one pays us for inner work. At least not initially! With inner work , not only do our rewards tend to come later, but even then, they can  sometimes be hard to quantify.

WHAT PATH TO CHOOSE?
Another challenging ingredient for  the seeker is  that of being able to construct a workable morality for himself. ( For example, does he live by the code of Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path or Christ’s Commandments or does he just listen to his heart?) How ‘Green’ should he be?  How does he integrate, say, sex and spirituality or money and spirituality? No genuine spirituality can exist without a corresponding set of ethics that relates to how we treat other people and our environment.  It may be that if we are not part of a particular tradition,  that we will need to discover a moral code that works for us. Or even invent our own!

What is also  confusing  is that  today there are so many  different ways that we can work on ourselves,  so many different spiritual wares or ‘spiritual paths’ on offer. Which should we choose? And what criteria do we use for choosing? And how  many ‘wrong’ paths do we need to experience before we discover what works for us? And how do we  really know what  does work best for us? It may that ‘feeling good’ is not a sufficient indicator! Here, the seeker  also needs to know that   simply because a particular  spiritual technique or process  or course of study may have served him well at one time,   that this is no guarantee that it will continue to do so, as he moves into a different stage  in his life. It is often the case that  continuing a particular practice or a particular method of study beyond the time that it is useful to us, can  prove  counter-productive.

We can look , for example, at the work involved in opening , healing and developing our hearts.  Since I teach a year-long training programme on this theme, I am only too aware how difficult this work can be, not least because as the  heart opening begins, the student will generally have to confront his hearts’  many defensive skins - all those areas and layers where he is wounded -  and then  find  the best ways to work through these wounds.  For some of us, this may be a long and arduous process. Often too, as heart qualities begin showing themselves,  it may be that we will need to confront their opposite in us. For example, when love surfaces, we might need to work with  our hardness and indifference, when joy is present, with the spectre of our joylessness,  when wisdom peeps forth, our dumbness. And so on.).
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EGO ISSUE
Whatever path we are on, be it a Devotional one, be it one of Action-in-the World or Illumination (or whatever),  a central focus will  always be on our gradually learning to move away  from  being identified with  our egos or  with that part  of ourselves that keeps us fixated in the illusion of our being separate!

Indeed, the seeker needs increasingly to understand that he is not, and never ever has been, the various ego images he has of himself,  no matter whether they be positive or negative, and  that actually what holds him back is an inability to see himself as he truly is, namely a divine self! This is because our egos, which are fully entrenched into everything about how our current society functions, have a powerful pull over us. We could say that they are singularly tricky customers and they need us to believe that who we are is what they tell us we are, as   in this way they can control  and maintain power over us.

Because ego is so strongly entrenched inside our psyches, it never works to  try to confront it head on. In fact, one of its favourite tricks   it tries on to wrestle back control from people who do try to challenge it in this way , is to make us feel that our inner quest is a stupid waste of time and that engaging in activities  such as opening our hearts ( their biggest enemy) or surrendering to a higher purpose, is truly a game for idiots! ( So if ever we hear a voice  like that speaking inside us and debunking our spiritual undertakings, we  will know where it comes from!).(11)

In fact, our egos love to tell us that their death would mean our death, and that there is nothing beyond them. Thus they will fight us tooth and nail to maintain their existence. Another  favourite ploy  is to make us resist change  by keeping us  attached into or bound into  our old comfort zones or old lifestyles in the old culture which Peter Deunov rightly told us, has to die if we are  to become properly spiritual. And if ego cannot succeed in this mission ( all our resistances to things sublime are ego based, with no exceptions) at a last resort, it will try to worm itself into our spirituality!(We  realise this is happening, if we  ever start to feel  overly pleased with our spiritual progress and believe we are truly some highly evolved, wiser-than-anyone else, spiritual dude!)
In actuality, all ‘spiritual burning’ - all the pain we experience as we confront our vanity and greed and narcissisms, etc, is the burning up of our egotism. That said (see my article  on Ego in Kindred spirit, now  on my website),  it is  nonetheless important  that we do not view ego as our enemy and try to attack it, or believe that we are always ready to let it go. We may not be. There is a time and a place for doing everything and this very much applies to when we are ready to relinquish our egos.

One of the things that some |Eastern spiritual teachers often forget is that our egos are not ‘bad’. (What becomes bad or evil is if  we hold on and stay attached to them for too long, beyond the time that they have anything to offer us). For whatever we can say about them, they have, at times, offered us much and divinity resides within them. We needed them as babies and in our childhood and  adolescence, and what is known as psychological damage refers to ego damage of some form or other.  Ego then, is a kind of primary scaffolding that we need  in order to survive and evolve  our early life.  And if we try to erect higher stories to our being ( that is, try to develop spiritually) without first having established a secure  and strong ego base  , we can be playing with fire . If  there is not enough ego solidity in our basic structure,  the whole edifice  of our being could topple.

I always remember those wise words of Ram Dass’. ‘Before we can be a nobody’, i.e., let go ego, ‘We first have to be a somebody’, that is, have established a healthy ego. Interestingly enough, the healthier and therefore,  stronger, our egos become, the more willing they seem to be to allow for their dismantling. The problems around ego evolve around our either trying to ‘get rid of them’ prematurely or conversely, hanging on to them for too long!

Andrew Cohen maintains, for example, that we are always ready to let ego go and that the belief that it is not yet ‘time’, is another of the tricks it  plays on us. Yes, this can be the case sometimes, with some people. But it is not so with all people. With some people – those who have not yet developed a strong ego and who don’t yet have a secure sense of ego self – if they try to ‘get rid of ego’ , the effects can be disastrous. Egolessness is not always an asset and here we remember that many wierdos, loners and serial killers tend to be people who have never evolved a strong-enough ego in the first place . (The case of Charles Manson the murderer, was a case in point. He did not have a sufficiently grounded-enough structure in which to process all the spiritual information coming into him. That was why it all went so terrifyingly wrong). Put simply, we cannot let go  of something that has not yet properly come into being inside us.

The way I view ego is that it is something which  first needs to be allowed to grow and develop  in us, and then, later, as we feel moved to evolve spiritually, needs to be allowed to die as we   shift the focus of  our attention increasingly   away from it. I like that Hindu saying, ‘When the fruit is ripe it falls from the tree’ as I think it applies very aptly to our ego life. Thus, the more we intentionally try to align with spirit - to ride the new  spiritual current Deunov spoke of,   work at opening up more of our spiritual nature, resolve our psychological wounding, serve our fellow humans, etc - the less  our egos get energised,  and the more  they begin to  starve or diminish in potency! Once we know what  kinds of activities feed them, we can choose not to engage in them.

For me, ego is never my enemy. It starts off in life as my ally and then becomes a less obvious ally when it becomes my opponent later on.  But  I think I need  that kind of opposition if I am to grow! Indeed, far from ego taking me away from myself, it  actually offers me the opportunity to come more fully into who I am and as such , is an integral  and important part of my journey of  trying to  become a little  more fully human!

OPPOSITION CREATING  POSSABILITY FOR A DEEPER GROUND OF BEING
The Spiritual teacher, Karlfried von Durckheim, in ‘The Way of Transformation,’  saw life in a similar way and made the following suggestions as to what the seeker needed to do  on those occasions when he encountered difficulties. In his words:
‘The man who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world, will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him comfort and refuge and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably helps him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it thus making of it a ‘raft that leads to the far shore.’ Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring. The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world…Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of  the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened up….’

Powerful words, aren’t they? I think the annihilation he talks about is that of our egoity. And while written some years ago,  I think what Durckheim says could not be more pertinent today, for, as I suggested earlier, the seeker today is being challenged to do his evolving right in the middle of  a world that is not  only not  especially interested in ‘spirituality’, but is deeply in crisis , with many elements within it deeply opposed to change of any kind! In ‘After the Ecstasy the Laundry’, Jack Kornfeld described the challenge of spiritual growing in a gentler yet not dissimilar way.

‘The true task of spiritual life is not found in faraway places or unusual states of consciousness. It is here in the present. It asks of us a welcoming spirit to greet all that life presents to us with a wise, respectful and kindly heart. We can bow to both beauty and suffering, to our entanglements and confusion, to our fears and to the injustices of the world. ….To bow to what is, rather than to some ideal is not necessarily easy, but however difficult, it is one of the most useful and honourable practices.’

GRIST IN THE MILL
I like this.  Basically he is saying:  ‘ Respect life. Live with heart. See everything that you encounter as your teacher.’ David Spangler, the educator who used to be the mouthpiece of the Findhorn community,  suggested we learn to ‘’Sprout right where we are planted!’ In essence, what  they are all  suggesting is that  we discover who we are not by avoiding or denying anything about our world , but by having the courage to embrace everything that it  may throw up for us at any time,  in a big-hearted/tough minded way . And  again, we can only do this if we bring in the power of the heart world.  Without this particular ingredient, no  such embrace is possible.  Only with heart  and the light it brings, can the work we do, the relationships we have, the initiations we confront, the terrors we face - everything we engage in - become grist in the mill for our spiritual awakening.  Without heart,  ego is permitted to live on; without heart, we  will lack the capacity to make virtues out of our necessities and it becomes very risky indeed to allow ourselves to touch into world suffering.

SPECIFIC  DIFFICULTIES INHERENT IN WAKING UP
This awakening process, however,  is never easy because most of us  have been used to living half asleep or semi aware, lives, for a long, long time. In part, this is because we are wounded and so we  ‘numb out’ or close down in order  to protect ourselves from pain. In part,  however, it is a sign of  our ‘evolutionary incompleteness’, (as Theodore Roszak would describe it) whereby we have not yet come into a space or place of realising our own divine selfhood.

So long as we are asleep ( to who we really are) then, we cannot know our sacred nature. Just as the vaster part of an iceberg is invisible as it lives under water ( only a small part being in view) this  same analogy holds true for us, in that the vaster part of ourselves is also ‘underground’ and unconscious and so unavailable or  invisible  to us. In our un-awakened state,  then, we   tend to float on the surfaces of life wholly unaware of its depths. Thus, we are not especially aware of many of our motivations for doing things.  Many of our agendas lying behind why we do what we do, remain hidden from us.

So what is spiritual awakening, which is  in effect the prime occupation of  the seeker? At one level, it is a process of de-numbing  or un-contracting ourselves; it is about our  letting ourselves  thaw out to be  more and more ourselves as we learn  to bring more of who we really are(more of our light)  out from the dark and into expression. It is therefore about our increasingly  learning to perceive  more of what is going on both inside ourselves and  outside in the world. It is  learning to live in such a way as to be  more fully alive both  to life’s  joys and  its uglinesses. Living in this way, however, is difficult, because for most of our lives we have grown so used to living unconsciously and therefore to splitting off from the truth of who we really are. In the words of  psychologist Jean Huston: ‘We are born Stradivariuses yet we are brought up to believe we are plastic fiddles!’

NEED TO BE IN PRESENT TIME
And one of the effects of  our believing in the myth of our fiddle-hood, is that it is often  hard for us to be in a place that is very important  to be in, if our spirituality is to develop,  and that is ,   be in‘the now’ or  in present time. (One of the symptoms of insufficient awareness, is that our attention tends either to be drawn backwards to our past or forwards to our future.) Also, the more awake we become , the easier it is for us  to  choose our states of being at any time, and not live, as asleep man tends to, in a state of continual reactivity to what is going on around him.  We can choose, for example, to not be a victim, to be brave and determined, to see more, to love more, to  be more effective. If I am awake, I am more able to access ecstatic states and the easier it becomes for me to have reverence for all of life on earth..

NEED FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND OPENNESS
I make the point once more, however, that  this waking up is never a ‘given’. Whether or not we move away from ego, whether or not we discover the grace, joy, inner calm , open-heartedness and truth that we are looking for, is  always up to us and how much effort we  are prepared to make to move in this direction. And certainly it is a sacrifice as it means giving up time and energy in which we could be engaging in other activities. (But then, at one level, whatever we do or don’t do, in our lives, is a sacrifice and we could equally argue that not engaging in inner work and not evolving is equally a loss!)

I think that our making the choice to  work at manifesting particular qualities, is especially important at the start of our journey, where we need to be focussing on trying to ‘attract the attention of spirit,’  in order, we hope, that spirit might assist us. Later on, our concern may be more with surrendering to a higher will, but we cannot do this before we will have first made the effort to have  established a good rapport with that will which we  are  trying to surrender to,  (through things like prayer, meditation, service, study etc.)
Luckily,  however, this ‘work’ is not only one sided. (Which makes things a little less tough!) Luckily, if we are trying to court the divine, the divine is also trying to come closer to us, help us ‘Lift our eyes up to the hills from whence cometh our help!’(12). Put simply, the divine needs us as much as we need the divine. Thus God or higher consciousness ( or whatever we want to call ‘it’) is always trying to reach us in many different ways.  These  may include  planting sacred yearnings in our heart, talking to us in our dreams, giving us Peak or Near-Death Experiences , arranging synchronistic  or ‘chance  encounters’ with wise human beings, etcetera.  The question  always is: how open are we to receiving?

NEED FOR STILLNESS
One of the  biggest resistances many of us have to  spirit, is being  too externally focussed, too busy , too anxious  and  so too full of emotional static   to hear that ‘still small voice’ ( the favoured way the divine has of ‘communicating). Put simply, the more power we invest in our ego selves, the  less open we are to messages coming to us from ‘ higher’ sources. This  is another reason why meditation is so important ( and  of course why ego hates us meditating). To believe that we can go deep  and find a  quiet place inside us, without   our doing some practice to still our restless ‘ monkey minds’ which love to jump about all over the place ( and to which our egos attach to so gratefully!)  - is like believing we can play tennis without a racket!  

However, the moment we really find stillness, the moment we really begin to make genuine progress, is often the moment, when, as I said earlier, spirit seems to test us most. And this testing, we must understand, is  part of our journey. In fact, it is one of the main ways that we are able to evolve. How, for example, could a St. George have ‘grown’ the quality of courage if he didn’t have his dragons to confront?  How can we develop particular spiritual capabilities – wisdom, say, or compassion (another very important sacred quality) – if there were not situations out in the world  for us to encounter (sometimes to strip us apart) and which ‘ask of us’ – demand even, in some instances - that we bring forth  these particular qualities? Sometimes, if we lose everything which we depended upon to remain puffed up and inflated, we have no option but to become humble. Do you see?

And how can these qualities really become anchored within our being ( as opposed to merely being ‘nice ideas’ in our head) unless we have no choice but to put them concretely  to use?  To give an example, let us say that we are working on   trying to be more loving : it may  well be, then, that spirit will test us  - see how much progress we have made - by placing some very unloving and  very difficult  people in our path ( for as we well know, it is  very easy to love people who are warm and open-hearted and much harder to do so with those who are closed, angry and suspicious.)  Therefore, being loving with these people requires much more work, much more intentionality. Yet it is  often through such encounters that our ability truly to be open-hearted is put to the test and  hence our ‘love muscles’  are enabled to grow!

RESISTING TEMPTATION
A significant way that  the seeker is  often tested is through being tempted!  Are we,  like Oscar Wilde, ‘able to resist everything except temptation’, or is there something more endurable in us?  It is easy, for example, to believe that we are no longer vain, self-seeking and greedy when we never encounter situations that test us in these areas. But what about when we encounter scenarios that do? I remember a time in my life when I was feeling very self-satisfied and thought ‘I am a nice person. There is not an iota of aggression , jealousy or vanity in me! ‘, only to have  all my illusions rudely shattered when a friend of mine run off with my girl-friend! The emotions that came up allowed me to see how far I  still had to go and how caught up I  still was in my  self delusions , self-conceits and general aggression.

One spiritual teacher I knew who could talk the talk very inspirationally, was  chronically unable to resist  pretty young devotees throwing themselves at him, despite his knowing that sexual intimacy would be  wholly detrimental to their soul development.  Indeed, three of the main areas where the seeker tends to be tested are around sex, money and power. Having such challenges give us the opportunity to see where we are still vulnerable - where there are  still ‘holes’ in our humanity ,   as well as the opportunity to patch these holes up , if we are able. This is one reason why doing our spiritual growing  within the world and not away from it, can be so useful. If all seekers only lived in monasteries, these same temptations,  and hence the opportunities  to use them for  our growth, simply would not arise.

Some seekers also  discover, as they advance along the path, that they are  beginning to develop new powers. This is yet another test, as having these powers can be rather exciting and glamorous  at first! (They include different kinds of psychic ability - clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc - certain kinds of endurance, the ability to exercise mind over matter, etc.) Again, the challenge is whether the seeker uses these ‘siddhis’, as they are called in the East, for their own egotistical purposes or for the good of humanity.  Most teachings on this subject tell us to recognise these powers, but not to fall into the trap of thinking that they signify heightened spiritual awareness!  For  actually they don’t.  Being able to see into the future is certainly an asset and a  good example of  a new human capability that may develop in us, but it does not necessarily make us a kinder, humbler , wiser or a more loving  and generous person, which I believe are the hallmarks of  true spirituality.

ADVICE TO THE SEEKER
So, as a seeker,  please  don’t embrace this path blindly or naively. Make sure you do so with your eyes and your heart open, and  take the trouble to inform yourself about the nature of your journey and what  to expect and what  some of the challenges that might confront you might be. There are three big mistakes that we can make. The first is that we over-stay our time in the lower realms, and instead of moving up with the angels, we  still continue to  fight  old dragons when  they will already have become appropriately tamed so as not to stand in our way. This tends to be the cardinal sin of  the psychotherapist who believes everything has to be ‘worked out psychologically’ all the time. Yes, some things do, but not everything and not all the time. If our awareness is only focussed on dragons, that is what we will find. |Remember: if our wounded patterns are sufficiently loosened up and  if we will  have developed sufficient consciousness inside ourselves - sufficient spiritual capacity - spirit will  probably be able to work on us  to complete the healing process.

The second mistake is that we  ignore our dragons - we don’t process our ‘stuff’ sufficiently (often the cardinal sin of people on the path of Illumination) and think that just because we have ‘good intentions’, that our dragons will somehow get tamed  without being looked at. They won’t! Sooner or later,  the seeker  will find that what he will have repressed, will kick back and hit him, generally when least expected!

THE ART OF NOT DOING
The third mistake is that we continue to make  big efforts   -  for example,  we continue to strive hard in our meditations,  or struggle  with  our inner conflicts or with becoming more compassionate - when in actuality we  are in a phase of our development where we are being able to say: ‘Thy will, O Lord, not my will, be done’. In other words, all our good, sincere, efforting work   thus far, will have drawn higher power much  closer to us,  so it is able to work on us and help us.  This means that  instead of doing all the running ourselves,  we are in a space where what is required is for us to ‘not do’, to allow  ourselves space  just ‘to be’. In the Tao to Ching, Lao Tsu tells us  that ‘ The ‘Unwise person does a lot and yet  nothing gets accomplished, while the person of wisdom does nothing, and yet there is nothing that does not get done!’
What is being suggested here is the idea of effortless effort,  where we align ourselves to a higher will or a higher intentionality which works through us or ‘efforts’ through us,  and thus is able to direct us to the extent that we are able to get our egos out of the way! (Ego, as you can see, is very resistant to any idea of surrender!)And here, as in everything, timing is very important. If we try to ‘do nothing’ prematurely – before certain important structures will have been built into place , or before we will have erected a strong-enough bridge linking us to the higher worlds -  then  in all probability,  our surrendering will not be to  a higher will but, much more likely, to our own  unconscious chaos!
It is all a question , then, of our knowing when to make efforts and when to stop and allow divine effort to make us! If we  continue  all the time to strive to become, we may never be in an  appropriate space  actually to receive  from spirit the benefits  that all our  prior striving will have evoked for us.

OUR OWN JOURNEY IS UNIQUE TO US
It is also important that  we understand that our journey is  uniquely our own and will be different from everyone else’s and thus our particular challenges will differ. (In my CD on ‘The different paths to God’ I explore this theme in detail.) So yes, we can learn from other travellers, and it is helpful to do so, but we should not compare ourselves with them. We all have different karmas to fulfil and we are all at different levels. Some people’s challenges seem to be more internal , while others are challenged more as a result of external events. Again, some seekers are more naturally inclined towards more mystical approaches,  while for others, ‘finding God’ occurs as a result of engaging in dangerous activities out in the world. Also, our ways of working will be different. Some people find it much easier, say, to dance or sing their meditations, than sit down quietly all cross-legged! And some people’s style is to move ahead with great leaps and bounds and then spend a long time integrating their experiences, while others may move much  more slowly,  gradually  integrating   things as they move along.~~
I suggest you  read accounts of successful  spiritual navigators (psychonauts) of the  past and present and  see how  they handle their egos and temptations , their confrontations with the numinous and their dark sides, and see if what they say applies to you. Also, very importantly, try to gather a good support group of fellow travellers  around you, with whom you can  openly share your thoughts. This is very important. Otherwise, one can feel rather alone. Spending  most of our time with people who are primarily ego-identified when we are trying to grow a deeper soul life, is never particularly  helpful.

Make sure,  too, that you are  adequately prepared before you attempt to ascend the higher  peaks. Here, it  may  also help at times to have some ‘specialist guide’ at hand, someone more advanced than you,  and who, metaphorically speaking, can ‘hold your hand’ and  assist you. Dante, after all,  had his Vergil  who helped him circumnavigate the difficult terrain of his  ‘hell’, without whose aid he might never have ascended to Heaven! (As regards the important  role which the Spiritual Master  can play in our journeying – and they too, can make it pretty tough for us, let us be under no illusion – again I refer you to my CD on this particular topic.)

NEED FOR FORGIVENESS
It is  vitally important that we  be as open and forgiving of ourselves as  we seek to be of others, and that we do  our best not  to make ourselves wrong for things  that we may have done  or not done in the past, as this only makes for surplus pain. We must know that what we did then was the best we could have done with the material we had at the time, and now that we are  a little wiser, we  are freer to play a ‘higher game’ – that is: do things differently.  But we might not have been able to have done that then!
So if there are regrets or resentments, it is important that we should work through them and let them go. We must realise that yes, we might have made other, wiser, choices for ourselves that could have made our lives easier, or more successful at one level. However, we should also not forget that had we made those ‘better decisions’, we might never have given  ourselves the particular  opportunities to learn  the particular lessons that we needed to learn!

And as I said earlier,  please  also move beyond the idea that God will only make good things happen for us  if we are good people. As we have seen,  spirit moves in mysterious ways,  and unpleasant things can happen to good people and pleasant things also happen to the rogues of this world. So if suffering enters our lives,  what is important is  that we  accept its presence, we engage with it and we try to bring as much heart awareness into it as possible and so  try to use it to burn up as much of our old karma as possible. Then our suffering can work for us. As I said at the start, God has both a light and  a dark side. Jung  told us that whenever he experienced something very joyful or very painful in his life, he knew it was about the presence of God making Himself felt.

THE ‘SPIRITUALLY UN-LIVED’ LIFE IS TOUGHER
Also remember this. If it is often an effort to do spiritual work,  and we really would prefer to watch television all day,   never meditate, stay unconscious, remain ego-centred, we must not forget that a spiritually unlived life is actually a  far tougher one. Especially as we grow older. Alistair McIntosh, who has written much about spiritual activism,  once remarked that the ego tends to run short of its birthright of oil in middle age and either burns out or needs to reach beyond itself to find new oil. I fully agree. I have several old friends who  have devoted their lives primarily to  the acquisition of  status and materiality, and  have never spent much time considering spirituality in any shape or form. And they are paying the price!

I think that  if there has never been any effort to  try to cultivate an inner life, that  we won’t have one. There will be no sacred  flame  to be found burning in our hearts. And sadly, without it, there will  always be something lacking inside us, an  absence  perhaps, of a certain kind of inner aliveness. The problem is that our old  ‘hole fillers’ -  being busy,  doing  business, cultivating prestige, success, glamour,  sex, etc  -  cease, after a while, to do the trick. (In actuality, they never did; they only actually made the ache worse in the long run). In actuality, the only way the spiritual vacuum can be filled is from within, through our  working at coming into a deeper relationship with our  own essence, by way of our learning to connect more deeply to our spiritual source. If that ‘essential connection’ is never made, the sense of  divine  discontent - the feeling that something is not quite right in our lives -  will never quite go away!

So  if trying to live an authentic spiritual life has many difficult elements, living an unspiritual life is , in my opinion, far  tougher. Indeed, if  we  will have only lived for ourselves and if there is no belief in anything ‘higher’ or ‘greater’ than us - no deeper ground of being to connect to in order to  warm and nourish us in wintry times when the cold winds blow and we can no longer hide behind the excitement and exuberance of youth, something in us will feel desperately lonely.  We may experience crises, yet lacking the wherewithal to perceive their deeper role as potential soul activators, we may well let them pull us down.

Indeed, many of my  psychotherapy clients who are middle aged and who come to me  ostensibly for psychological problems, suffer from  what I call  spiritual malaise. I am  always aware that  behind many of their emotional issues  lies a deeper spiritual sadness and that behind the pain and loneliness of not being in a nourishing  personal relationship, for example, may reside a deeper sorrow caused by a  lack  of any kind of  relationship with God ( be it a deity outside of or within themselves.) Often, underlying the alcoholic’s need for spirit from a bottle , lies a deeper thirsting for  a spirituality that cannot be found anywhere else but within the  deeper recesses of their own heart.

TOUGHNESS IS NOT BAD
So : we have established that  aspects of the spiritual path are tough,  that  transformation and awakening are tough, that many aspects of life are tough. But who said that tough is bad or that it shouldn’t be that way?  I think there is something about  the kinds of struggles  we seekers  go through to try to be ourselves , that  are also enlivening and, in many instances,  enjoyable. To try to stretch ourselves, to dare to be more who we really are, to  have the courage to try to love and to live our truth as opposed to  conforming to other people’s or society’s agendas all the time  - what  all this does is that it strengthens our  moral and spiritual muscles; it makes us more fully human and more alive.  And this can be fun. Indeed, if life is too easy,  it  can lack meaning; we  can lose our edge and our vitality,  and so no longer have access to that miraculous place  inside us where we can live purposefully and where extraordinary  experiences  may transpire for us

LIVING WITH HEART
In saying this, please don’t think  I am suggesting that we court struggle and suffering as an end in itself.  Not at all.  There is quite enough of it out in the world without our needing to manufacture more. I am  only suggesting  that  if and when it seeks us out – courts us – that   instead of complaining about it and resisting it, we should open to it with  full heart, thank it even, and  recognise that, from a spiritual perspective, our suffering may be teaching us things and  opening  up new dimensions of ourselves. Often, it is only when things are not easy that we  are given the opportunity  to drop bits and pieces of our egotism and discover our Stradivariusness!
I stress once more: the central ingredient to our spiritual journeying and to our ability to deal with the many tough challenges it confronts us with, is that we  try to keep our hearts as open as we can to everything that we experience, be it joyful or painful. For it is essentially  in our hearts that  we discover God and hence have access to the healing energy that  may start to transform us and  metabolise our dragons. As I said at the start, just because we may be being pricked by the thorns, does not disbar us from being able  to smell the roses. In fact, the sharp pricks should incline us all the more  to embrace that sweet fragrance .  I have tried, in my life, to walk a path of heart and from that perspective, I have sought to use difficult or painful experiences as reminders to me to  open up more fully, to stay  as loving and  as tender as possible  . It is only with the power of my heart available to me – creating a natural kind of ‘up-beatness’ - that I am able to  think positively and not  allow myself to become downhearted.

THE POWER OF GRATITUDE
What I often do if I am going through a difficult patch, is to meditate on the quality of gratitude and think of all the wonderful things that have happened  to me in my life,  all the gifts and blessings I have received, (so many of which, because I was  so unconscious at the time, I was not fully able to appreciate.) I like to image a large lighted room in the middle of my heart, with a big fire burning in it and see myself sitting in that room surrounded by all the gifts and benefits that have come to me in my life, all the  wonderful people that have contributed so much in their different ways to making my life so rich. From this place my prayer becomes one vast ‘Thank you God’. And  in this process my heart  can become as big as a mountain, and joy and gratitude  can sing out from every pore of my being.  The bigger my heart becomes, the  more of the world ‘out there’ it is able to embrace, the more  my sense of family  can grow to encompass all of humanity,  and the easier it becomes to understand and relate to people very different to myself. As this expansion happens,  and as I become more than ‘just a person’,  my personal difficulties begin to shrink.

I think a lot of our pain can increase because we use it as  a signal or an excuse to shut down – to numb  off and not feel . And what this does is that it diminishes us by putting us  out of touch with ourselves.  Thus the us viewing us becomes a reduced us, an us shut off from that  vital ingredient inside each of us that can enable us all to  digest, make meaning of and celebrate whatever we are experiencing. When our hearts grow small and closed,  they become hard and empty,  and thus the life we see out there is  also hard and empty. That philosopher who pronounced life only to be ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ was possibly not one of  the world’s greatest celebrators of the magic of being 

If we choose to live  all aspects of our spiritual life in as open-hearted a way as possible -  which means that we remember  to think about the good times in the  middle  of difficult times,  and we  also don’t forget the difficult times when we are on a roll, (remembering that in the Yin Yang symbol, the light exists within the dark and the dark within the light) - then  life truly becomes magical. The light inside us truly  lights it up. No longer is a crisis the reason to put our ‘real life’ on hold until it is over; instead we see it as an integral part of our real life and  as such, we  choose to live it as fully and  as passionately as any other part of our existence.

CELEBRATING LIFE
Our hearts really are our best friend.  To be on a spiritual journey without heart, is like exploring in the jungle without a compass, solid shoes, food and  a machete. So long as we remain connected to our hearts, we have at our command a wonderful  guide and ally that can metabolise grief, flood our being with love, heal old regrets and resentments and, most importantly, allow us to see that whatever life happens to throw up for us at any time,  is always a miraculous gift and as such, needs to be experienced in a celebratory way – even if huge despair may be present.

The word celebrate comes from the Latin which means to praise and raise.(13). I think that if we  can  intentionally live every day in a praising and  raising way ( it can be done quietly, it doesn’t have to be boisterous) everyone and everything around us will be uplifted . If we celebrate  our lives, it means that we can grant as much meaning to those times when it rains and thunders, when old friends betray us or die  and  when projects do not work out,  as we do when it is sunny and warm, and  when success and  love flow towards us.  
We know that if it were never noisy ,damp and dark, that we would not appreciate  silence, warmth and sunshine so much.  We know too, that abundance is an inner state of being and that the more we cultivate it, the bigger it will become inside us. I know then, that if I celebrate my  life,  I not only  can speed up my process of awakening, but  I can increasingly learn to live in a non dual way, realising that it is  only our  monkey/egoic minds that   create separation and like to divide life up into  compartments marked high or low or good or evil - and that , from a more unitive perspective, such distinctions  simply do not exist.

I also know that  if we choose to live in this way,  that our consciousness will feed our world and our world will reciprocate.  If we celebrate life, it means that we can have compassion for our own, and  for other people’s  shortcomings and sufferings and can more easily forgive ourselves  and them for  all our imperfections. From this place we  can also  know that joy and meaning are not about how much we have, so much as how much we are able to  realise that divine God-being that all of us, in our deeper essence, always are and always will be. The more we can realise this, the stronger the spiritual flame will burn inside us, and the quicker our impurities will dissolve. From this place, our separate I-ness vanishes and we  may ultimately experience ourselves  to be part of everything that ever is, ever was and ever will be. This needs to be our aim. Good luck to you on your journey.

Copyright  Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens