2005/08/31

Where should we be – & how do we know when we're there?

There are times when everything clicks into place. We all have them, those effortless days.
If you consider the circumstances when it last happened, you'll probably find two things:
1) You were carefree and thus full of energy:
2) You were in tune with what was going on.
In a word, you were lucky.

We see therefore that luck arises from attunement, albeit unconsciously, betwen our inner & outer reality/ies. In other words, one unified reality exists at such moments.
Perhaps, having had this insight, we have tried to rercreate a carefree mood – yet found the magic mytseriously absent. Why? Because experience is like a moving water – even when it flows in the same course it is now the product of different dynamics to what it was then. One thing we can all attest to is that any exercise of will or intention is generally inimical to the fragile conditions which luck demands.
An important step therefore to understanding where the right spot is for us, is to accept that there is never a way back to a longed-for state of feeling – only a way forward to a situation where we may possible reencounter it in a new form. This is particularly true of relationships.

The question gets a whole lot more challenging if I explore luck in relation to my spiritual dynamic. Nearly every spiritual path teaches that in order to make progress I must exercise my will to choose one direction in preference to the millions of others. The more actively I follow this advice, the more I am likely to negate the carefree conditions luck demands.
And here the conundrums multiply.
Can I pursue my spiritual path wholeheartedly and yet remain open to contradictory experiences?
Should I just go with the flow rather than hold to any one direction?
How can I create favourable conditions for magic /luck?

There is no single answer – everyone's different. There's no single route to any spiritual destination. (The distorting effect of religions is to articulate a certain note and address only those people whom that vibration manifests, creating the effect of marginalising anyonelse.) But there is an underlying spiritual truth – balance.
We are driven by impulse & conditioning to race for ladders, but it is often the snakes that of adversity that make the best teachers. The Christian concept that truth is a revelation that comes from a book has taught us to see knowledge as something outside ourselves - but this is an illusion, as the great mystics have repeatedly reminded us.

The snake of adversity on which we have unhappily landed may in fact be -to the unconscious- the snake of healing wisdom. If you consider the caduceus: the writhing snake takes us throu a series of wild arcs as we veer erratically in our initial search for identity, but happily each is balanced with its twin. As we ascend the snakes of awareness the swings are less wild and the crossing points more frequent, until we see that the two paths are in fact one.
At this point, perhaps, we see that the buffeting of fate was designed to bring us to a natural feeling of centredness - not a prescribed place, nor yet an intellectually determined one, but one where the native energy or ’fluence of the godhead can use us as it sees fit.