I was reading the blog by Otto Bathurst (I’m just an Ordinary Man) and was blown away by the recognition that at some level I still want the world to see how great the esoteric is and how much better life can be with it. This desire for others ‘to get it’ leads to painting a sometimes overly ‘perfect picture’ of the esoteric.
Truth is, the esoteric is perfect – it’s just everything else that can suck.
The esoteric, that ‘inner-most’ place within all of us, is a place of deep stillness, love and joy. Every time I make the choice to connect to this place within myself, it is there – steady, ready and available. I have heard this same experience from people who were raised in different religions to me, grew up in different countries, are a different gender, from a different socio-economic background, have a different type of education or vocation… it seems the esoteric does not make a distinction.
Living life through that connection to myself means that while I still have to deal with everything life throws at me (and the stuff I create), ‘the spin’ (emotion, stress, etc) is not there with it. Of course, every time I make the choice to NOT connect to this place, all the pressure, stress, emotions are there waiting for me.
Knowing this choice, I now know there is a part of me that won’t let go of a thought, or even dwells on it and makes it bigger. That part of me feeds off the emotion and even defends that emotion. In essence, there is part of me committed to NOT being joyful.
I would like to say that all I need to do is shut my eyes and ‘be with me’ and it’s all perfect, but the truth is different. When I let myself get swept up in the spin and then say ‘it’s enough’ and do what I know I need to do to ‘reconnect to me’, very little happens. This is not because the esoteric is not true, but because I have walked further away from myself than I would care to admit. It’s a bit like deciding you want the house to be clean and then expecting it to miraculously clean itself, without realising you need to go through every room and dust every shelf.
Just because the esoteric doesn’t discriminate and is available to all equally, doesn’t mean there are no consequences from not making that choice. I made the bed, now I have to lie in it, until I choose to make it a different way.
The true gift the esoteric work has given me is the awareness of the FACT that I have a choice. This empowerment does not come from someone else (although learning from others can be inspiring), the empowerment comes from my understanding that the choice I just made will make my next choice easier or harder.
The bewildering thing is observing and getting more familiar with that part of me that has some form of commitment to hardship, pain and suffering.
How can we have this duality within us, and why would we choose suffering over joy? Where does that come from?