The Necessity to Surrender to the Divine and Spiritualize the Being

By Bernhard Guenther, October 9, 2019

Chapters:

• Introduction
• The Four-fold Approach of the Seeker
• Imbalances in The Work
  • Overfocus on the Physical Body and External Life while Neglecting Inner Work
    • Authenticity vs Inauthenticity
  • Overfocus on Spiritual Work without Psychological Work
  • Overfocus on Spiritual Work/Escaping the Matrix while Avoiding/Denying Physical Reality
    • The New Age Ascension Religion
  • Overfocus on Psychological Work without Spiritual Aspiration
  • Overfocus on Activism and Fighting the Matrix without Sincere Inner Work
  • The Importance of Both Inner and Outer Work
• Aspiration and Surrender to The Divine
  • What is The Divine?
  • The Importance of Meditation and Stilling the Mind
  • Active Meditation and Self-Remembering
• The Battle of Dark vs. Light from an Integral Yoga Perspective
  • Spiritual Activism
  • The Splitting of Humanity, the Supramental Action, and the Matrix
  • The Socialist Centralized-State, Anarchism, and the Ideal of Human Unity
    • The Blindspot of Anarchism and the Mental Fortress
• The Adventure of Consciousness Continues

Introduction

“At the moment we are at a decisive turning-point in the history of the earth, once again. From every side, I am asked, “What is going to happen?” Everywhere there is anguish, expectation, fear. “What is going to happen?”

There is only one reply: “If only man could consent to be spiritualized.”

And perhaps it would be enough if some individuals became pure gold, for this would be enough to change the course of events. We are faced with this necessity in a very urgent way.

This courage, this heroism which the Divine wants of us, why not use it to fight against one’s own difficulties, one’s own imperfections, one’s own obscurities?

Why not heroically face the furnace of inner purification so that it does not become necessary to pass once more through one of those terrible, gigantic destructions which plunge an entire civilization into darkness?

This is the problem before us. It is for each one to solve it in his own way.”

– The Mother Mirra Alfassa

Over the past few years, I’ve gone through some more profound inner changes and realizations. Some of them I’ve shared in previous articles and essays. However, this year in particular, it has accelerated to another level. There is a deeper calling arising within me. I’ve noticed these changes in others, and maybe you can relate to them as well. This growth period also entailed accelerated suffering, igniting more vulnerability and humility within me.

More “stuff” has surfaced, associated with present lifetime wounds and “issues” and related to past lives, ancestral traumas, and larger karmic lessons. At the same time, there have been more experiences of higher divine love/joy, which are not dependent on any external factors, that come with it as this (inner) work is getting more refined.

A big part of this inner growth period is related to my relationship with Laura. It felt like Divine Grace brought us together. Our connection accelerated my (our) internal process in a way I certainly didn’t expect, and I don’t think I could have done this by myself. In fact, I even felt (before meeting her a couple of years ago) that I’ve had hit a wall in my own process. I knew deep inside that only by meeting my “shakti” and learning through experience a true deeper human love would I be able to progress to the next level, which is ultimately tied to my connection to God and love for the Divine.

But this growth period and our relationship wasn’t and isn’t all love and bliss. In fact, more stuff came out of the shadows and dark for both of us, triggered in the crucible of this alchemical union, which wouldn’t have surfaced to be made conscious of for us as single individuals.

It was an Ascent and Descent simultaneously as “the Work” continues. The higher the love we aspire to experience, the deeper we need to go into our shadows, wounds, and traumas and heal/transmute everything that is holding us back from this.

The fundamental essence of Laura’s and I’s relationship is that it has its foundation in the Divine and our personal/individual relationship to the Divine, so we don’t use each other as our primary source of fulfillment and “happiness”. This also implies engaging in the necessary essential psychological work, shadow work, and trauma work—together and as individuals—to clear our vessels and anchor the Divine within and don’t spiritually bypass our issues.

This is not easy work at times (to say the least) let alone also having to deal with occult interferences that try to disrupt our relationship, be it working through others projecting on to us, or through thought injections from these forces working through our own minds, ego, blindspots, and wounds.

“What the Divine Mother is now birthing in all those open to her is a vision of total relationship between heart, mind, body, and soul, so that through that deep sacred relationship, we can come into the unified force field of reality, become completely embodied and present, and use that inner love to express our longing to see the world transformed.

What is really at stake is this: If we continue to have a vision of relationship as purely personal, purely private, and something that we cultivate only for our own pleasure, we will keep feeding the tragic narcissism that is now ravaging the planet on every level.

The real thrust and purpose and meaning and divine importance of relationship is to give us the fuel to take on the world, the energy to keep on pouring ourselves out for the creation of a new world. It is critical to remember that this crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it.

What is needed is a vision of evolutionary relationship as a relationship that helps us come into the real, take responsibility for it, and enact our sacred purpose with a partner, and for the world: when two lovers come together in this dynamic love consciousness, they create a transformative field of sacred energy, from which both can feed to inspire their work in reality.

Both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved [Divine], by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle.

From the very beginning it must be centered in the Divine. It must be a relationship that is undertaken in the coscious presence of the Divine for the Divine’s great work in the Universe. Only a relationship that is centered in God, and that has God as the prime actor in the relationship, will be able to bear the vicissitudes of authentic love, of dealing with the challenges of life and service in the world.”

– from “Evolutionary Love Relationships” by Andrew Harvey & Chris Saade

Having said that, I’m not implying by sharing my experience that everyone needs to have a partner to do this work. For most of my life, I’ve actually been single and living in solitude—hermit style. But it has been part of my individual soul lesson and progress to find that entering a relationship like this is an integral part of my path. It felt destined. We all also have our unique path, soul lessons, and karma to work out; hence, any comparison is futile and counter-productive.

Over the past six years, I have also increasingly felt the call to aspire and surrender to the Divine. I clearly “see” and experience now that this surrender/aspiration is a necessity for anyone on the path towards Awakening to truly transcend the matrix (regardless of whether one does it through a relationship or not).

This higher alignment is the essential trajectory for humanity as a whole if we genuinely want to make the “shift” so we don’t end up in another “Dark Night of Civilization”—as it has happened to past ancient civilizations—which resulted in destruction and the necessity to repeat the karmic cycle. I have felt this call within over the years, but in earlier times it was still driven partly by an “intellectual” understanding of the Divine; not an embodied inner realization.

However, we also need to acknowledge that we all are engaged in our own individual processes. We all are where we “need to be,” and this is based on many unknowns that our minds can’t understand. At the same time, there is also a collective process that is occurring regarding the bigger picture of the evolution of consciousness; which we are all affected by and influenced by—and this manifests differently for each of us. Everything is connected and interrelated; nothing is isolated or separate, even though our egoic mind perceives it that way. There is a higher Divine plan/Will doing its magnificent work on unseen levels.

Many of us will experience this acceleration of breakdowns and breakthroughs. This process results in more pressure to awaken and thus can result in more suffering by its tendency to bring up “stuff” we have suppressed, sometimes even for lifetimes. As we become more sensitized, we also start to feel the suffering and pain of the collective and all of humanity more and more.

Depending on how we handle the intensity of these energies, it can either break us down and cause us to spiral into more suffering and despair, or it can break us open to higher states of consciousness—if we choose to engage in this process consciously and don’t fight/resist it. Most often, it’s both simultaneously, the ascent and descent, as consciousness widens all around us and the process of transmutation quickens.

For the ones who decide to “answer the call” to engage in this process consciously, life takes on a whole new meaning and aim as they start to respond to something deep within them. This call often arrives in a very soft and quiet voice at first and is hardly noticeable. Yet, it is there, the lotus flower within, the voice of our psychic being, which directs and guides our evolution.

This inner call inspires us to embark on the path, driven by questions like “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Where did I come from?” “What is life about?”. Then, we start to question everything, looking for the truth of our being. This call is the starting point of the seeker as he/she starts his/her quest and adventure.

The Four-fold Approach of the Seeker

If we are sincere in our seeking and questioning, we soon will realize that the Work needs to happen on all levels: physical/somatic, emotional/psychological, mental/intellectual, and spiritual. Various esoteric teachings have pointed out and described the Great Work in their language, pointing to this alchemical process on the path toward awakening.

But life has also become more complex in our modern, isolated, and increasingly technology-driven world. The matrix is on over-drive to keep humanity locked in a frequency prison and separated from spirit.

These occult matrix architects have their teaching function in the bigger play of spiritual evolution, inviting us into a more holistic and integral approach to self-work. They are pushing us to not retreat from the world or look to escape it but to engage in this Work in our everyday lives.

Despite the seemingly ensuing darkness taking over the earth, the Light from above is descending as well, creating more and more pockets of Light. This light anchoring on the planet will also increase instances of Divine Grace, and many of us are already bringing in the Light to this planet as anchors of these higher frequencies.

Yet, the Divine can only express itself through us and to the extent of our inner alignment and how purified our vessel is. This purification process allows us to bring forth the true Self and live with our psychic being at the front instead of living with our traumatized ego-personality running the show.

We are all dealing with individual challenges and lessons to go through this process, and we all have our distorted filters based on wounds, trauma, conditioning, and ego-identification; that need to be cleansed into a clearer perception.

In the end, it’s the same ONE Divine Force attempting to infuse all of us with the divine supramental consciousness by asking us to clear our vessel from the lower egoic/animal self. By rising into this higher level of Being, we give an alchemical birth to a new human—one that is a pure embodied vessel of the Divine.

To clear our vessel, heal ourselves, embrace life, and get a better understanding of ourselves and the world, the Work of the seeker is four-fold, each aspect representing one part of his/her Whole: physical, emotional/psychological/somatic, mental/intellectual, and spiritual.

• Taking care of your physical body/vehicle via the right diet, exercise (including body-mind practices), and becoming a self-responsible adult in everyday life creating your livelihood. [Pyhsical]
• Psychological inner work, embodiment, and engaging in somatic psychotherapeutic work and shadow work to heal and transmute your wounds and traumas that are stored in the body. [Psychological/Emotional]
• Learning about the world, the matrix, deprogramming yourself from social/cultural conditioning, and understanding higher/universal laws so you can see through appearances, deceptions, and distractions and have a bigger picture context in light of the evolution of consciousness. [Intellectual]
• Spiritual inner work to connect with your essence (true Self, psychic being), anchoring the Divine force and aligning with Divine Will via aspiration – rejection – surrender. [Spiritual]

These four aspects are all interrelated and affect and influence each other. It’s not a linear, step-by-step approach but an integral, holistic, and multi-dimensional process. Depending on where each individual is at and what his/her lessons are, any of these points could be a priority for a period of time. However, it all comes down to this surrender to the Divine, which must happen in order for us to spiritualize our Being fully.

Engaging in this holistic work on all levels, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, will also align you with your vocation and deeper soul purpose, which aligns with Divine Will. As you start to live more authentically from within and practice self-responsibility for your unique karmic situation, you bring forth your true essence, and this alignment within your Being results in “right action” externally, helping others and the world to awaken during this Time of Transition; according to the specific gifts and talents you have to offer the world during this period.

In other words, your creative power will increase as you become a clearer vessel for the Divine. This is the real “secret” of reality creation—aligning your little “personal” will with Divine Will. As mentioned before, it’s important to understand this process and how it manifests differently for each of us.

[NOTE: We go deeper into the four-fold approach of Holistic Self Work in our 14-week program. Learn more HERE.]

Imbalances in The Work

If we don’t engage in the work holistically (on all levels), it can result in various imbalanced consequences. While there are many variations, I will generally outline the ones I have seen the most, including in myself.

Overfocus on the Physical Body and External Life While Neglecting Inner Work

Many people tend to be overly focused and identified (even to the point of obsession) with their physical body/appearance and physical health, fixated only on diet and exercise, but don’t engage in any form of inner psychological/spiritual work. The obsession with physical looks and youth is very predominant in this day and age.

We see this trend with the continued rise of cosmetic surgeries; as people start to self-mutilate their bodies in the quest for physical “perfection”. This act of surgery from a somatic perspective creates even more trauma in the body; as the body does not know that this is merely cosmetic and takes in these experiences with the same fear as it would an unplanned violent attack.

All of this trauma done to the body has become normalized based on us accepting these distorted and socially conditioned “ideal” body images, thus we see it as perfectly “normal” to seek to emulate them; often driven by our own unresolved unconscious wounds, traumas, and insecurities. We try to “compensate” by making the external “perfect” so that we do not have to face our inevitable mortality or the false core beliefs that we may hold that we aren’t “good enough”. This topic is a big “elephant in the room” topic and is often a difficult thing to realize for those who have gone “under the knife” themselves.

Obviously, we want to be and need to be physically healthy; but staying fit, healthy, and “looking good” goes way beyond exercise and diet; so its important to not become neurotically attached and addicted to this quest, otherwise it often results in eating disorders or a disordered relationship with exercise (which keeps us from reflecting on the unresolved unconscious wounds and traumas that may be behind them).

Taking care of our body via the right diet and exercise is important, but true health is holistic and goes way beyond taking care of the physical body alone. Health also relates to living an authentic life and taking care of your inner life; emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

We can also become overly focused on career ambitions and external success in the world (which can be detrimental to health), once again, most often driven by unconscious wounds/trauma and the need to compensate for “holes” within ourselves—which are often filled with unfelt/unprocessed life experiences—which we avoid feeling by seeking to fill them by external accomplishments.

Gabor Mate shares below a compelling case about a woman who got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer (even though she was successful professionally, seemingly “happily” married with kids, and physically fit/healthy) due to her people-pleaser program and avoidance of facing her childhood trauma and shadow, which resulted in her living an inauthentic life.

Authenticity vs. Inauthenticity

We start living an inauthentic life when we fall into the trap of comparison and are very concerned about what other people think of us and the way they see us, resulting in a people-pleaser program and a lack of boundaries. We then build a fake persona to appear a certain way based on the social image we’d like to portray. We then start to identify with our external ego-personality and create a further disconnect from our true self/essence.

Any feelings and emotions that contradict the ideal image we have of ourselves then get pushed into the unconscious. This also results in suppression of our wounds, traumas and “negative” emotions which we don’t like to feel, express, and show.

Authenticity doesn’t mean to just express any desire or compulsion we may have or act out from our neurotic narcissistic ego—it means to act from our true self. Therefore, genuine authenticity means to be in touch with our inner self; our body, our feelings, our spirit; and express this essence through the instrument of the ego-personality.

We then don’t shy away from pain and discomfort but see it as a sign to adjust, engaging in inner work without trying to escape or fill our internal emptiness through external means. There is no division between our outer and inner life.

Inauthenticity is based on an internal split; a contradiction between how we act, what we say and do, and how we feel internally. When we get stuck in inauthenticity, we lose our inner guidance connected to essence/the Divine. Inauthenticity is also the result of head-centric living and disembodiment; it is a state where we live disconnected from the wisdom of our bodies. The more severe the body-mind split, the more we look externally for happiness, guidance, and fulfillment. Most people live inauthentic lives because of social and cultural conditioning.

The goals, desires, needs and wants they have and the lives/careers they pursue because of these needs/wants/desires, are most often not their own based on who they truly are within, but have been programmed into them via official cult-ure and/or are the result of trying to fill their emptiness/holes within based on unfelt wounds and trauma (that they might not even be consciously aware of). These needs/wants/desires are also based on growing up in a world where pathology has become normalized, and their programming from growing up in this toxic culture.

These conditioned/programmed goals and enjoyments in life serve as buffers to avoid facing the pain they are holding on an unconscious level. They don’t know who they are and don’t know that they don’t know. There is no true individuality on that level of being but only mechanical living under the illusion of free will; influenced by group/hive mind mass consciousness and matrix occult forces. Over time, living an inauthentic life can result in depression and even illness and dis-ease—no matter how much care you may take of your physical body with the prescribed “right” diet and exercise.

Overfocus on Spiritual Work Without Psychological Work

People who are only focused on “spiritual work” and neglect psychological work and avoid facing their early childhood wounds and traumas can easily fall into spiritual bypassing. Even though they may have some spiritual peak experiences at first, they will find themselves repeating the same ancestral patterns within their own lives without understanding what drives these patterns. This is particularly important for anyone who is very attracted to Eastern spirituality.

These old esoteric traditions have their place and contain timeless wisdom and gnosis, however, the times have changed and Westerner’s (and Western-influenced cultures) now need a more holistic integral approach to self-work; which considers the modern times we live in and the complex psychological pathologies that have arisen out of them. Unlike tribal communities, many people now live disconnected from their bodies, nature, and live in isolation without the support of or connection to the people who live on the land around them.

This “first world” style of living, with all its technological advances and comforts, has become almost completely disconnected from spirit and nature. With the rise of materialism and science, which has become the modern “religion”, we are now faced with the dawning of the A.I./Transhumanism “God”. As a result, we’ve become traumatized simply by trying to adjust to a world that doesn’t recognize Spirit but is based on a head-centric mental consciousness. Many of the issues and problems we’re dealing with were unknown in ancient times as spirituality was still an integral part of everyday life.

Hence, we need to look at our basic psychology as well and address how these changes have affected us, even to the point of changing the wiring of our nervous system and basic biology. Any spiritual realizations we have will not create any lasting changes if we don’t find ways to integrate these realizations into one’s whole being and practice them in every aspect of daily life.

On a positive note, there have also been groundbreaking advances and discoveries in psychotherapy, and new modalities like somatic trauma therapy can help heal us our bodies in a more holistic fashion by showing how our childhood wounds get stored as trauma in the body and then proceed to affect our adult lives (the inner affecting the outer) which can certainly help us to implement our spiritual realizations in a more lasting way.

John Welwood (who originally coined the term “spiritual bypassing”) talks about the importance of combining psychological and spiritual work in his article The Psychology of Awakening:

“Spiritual realization is relatively easy compared with the much greater difficulty of actualizing it, integrating it fully into the fabric of one’s daily life. Realization is the movement from personality to being, the direct recognition of one’s ultimate nature, leading toward liberation from the conditioned self, while actualization refers to how we integrate that realization in all the situations of our life.[…]

Many Westerners have tried to take up this model, pursuing impersonal realization while neglecting their personal life, but have found in the end that this was like wearing a suit of clothes that didn’t quite fit. Taking on the challenges of a fully engaged personal life—finding right livelihood in a complex materialistic world, being involved in a committed intimate relationship, dealing with the social and political concerns facing us at every turn—inevitably brings up unresolved psychological issues. For this reason, Western seekers may also need the help of psychological methods to help them more fully integrate spiritual practice and realization into their lives.[…]

Psychological and spiritual work address different levels of human existence. If the domain of spiritual work is emptiness—unconditioned, universal, absolute truth—the domain of psychological work is form—our individual, conditioned ways of experiencing ourselves and the world—or relative truth. Spiritual practice, especially mysticism, points toward a timeless trans-human reality, while psychological work addresses the evolving human realm, with all its issues of personal meaning and interpersonal relationship.[…]

It can be difficult to understand or appreciate why we might need to resort to psychological work when many Asian spiritual practitioners have found liberation solely through the profound teachings and practices of Buddhism for thousands of years. But it helps to recognize that the highest, nondual Buddhist teachings, which show that who you really are is absolute reality, presume a rich underpinning of community, religious customs, and shared moral values that the West mostly lacks.

Modern Western culture is marked by social isolation, personal alienation, lack of community, disconnection from nature, and the loss of the sacred at the center of our lives. And the Western self is riddled with inner divisions—between self and other, individual and society, mind and body, spirit and nature, or the guilty ego and the harsh, punishing superego—that were mostly unknown in the ancient cultures in which the meditative traditions first arose.[…]

While spiritual traditions generally explain the cause of suffering in general terms as the result of ignorance, faulty perception, or disconnection from our true nature, Western psychology provides a more specific developmental understanding. It shows how suffering stems from childhood conditioning; in particular, from static and distorted images of self and other that we carry with us in the baggage of our past. And it reveals these painful, distorting identities as relational—formed in and through our relationships with others.

Spiritual traditions that do not recognize the way in which ego identity forms out of interpersonal relationships are unable to address these interpersonal structures directly. Instead, they offer practices—prayer, meditation, mantra, service, devotion to God or guru—that shift the attention to the universal ground of being in which the individual psyche moves, like a wave on the ocean. Thus it becomes possible to enter luminous states of trans-personal awakening, beyond personal conflicts and limitations, without having to address or work through specific psychological issues and conflicts.

This kind of realization can certainly provide access to greater wisdom and compassion, but it often does not touch or alter impaired ego structures which, because they influence our everyday functioning, prevent us from fully integrating this realization into the fabric of our lives.

Thus, as Sri Aurobindo put it, “Realization by itself does not necessarily transform the being as a whole. One may have some light of realization at the spiritual summit of consciousness but the parts below remain what they were.”

For psychological and spiritual work to be mutually supportive allies in the liberation and embodiment of the human spirit, we need to re-envision both paths for our time, so that psychological work can serve spiritual development, while spiritual work can take into account psychological development.

These two traditions would then come together as convergent streams, furthering humanity’s evolution toward realizing its true nature—as belonging to the universal mystery that surrounds and inhabits all things—and embodying this larger nature as human presence in the world, thus serving as a crucial link between heaven and earth.”

– John Welwood, The Psychology of Awakening

In the same article mentioned above, Welwood describes a case of how “spiritualizing” our issues and suppressing negative emotions (in this case, anger) can lead to blind compassions and avoidance of healthy assertiveness and boundaries. If we just view things from an absolute perspective (“higher truths”) but don’t take into account the relative situation, we can easily fall into spiritual bypassing and miss this opportunity to heal trauma and childhood wounds.

“A client of mine who was desperate about her marriage had gone to a spiritual teacher for advice. He advised her not to be so angry with her husband but to be a compassionate friend instead. This was certainly sound spiritual advice. Compassion is a higher truth than anger; when we rest in the absolute nature of mind, pure open awareness, we discover compassion as the very core of our nature. From that perspective, feeling angry about being hurt only separates us from our true nature.

Yet the teacher who gave this woman this advice did not consider her relative situation—that she was someone who had swallowed her anger all her life. Her father had been abusive and would slap her and send her to her room whenever she showed any anger about the way he treated her.

She learned to suppress her rage and always tried to please others by being “a good girl” instead. So when the teacher advised her to feel compassion rather than anger, she felt relieved because this fit right in with her defenses. Since anger was threatening to her, she used the teaching on compassion for spiritual bypassing—for refusing to deal with her anger or the message it contained.

As her therapist, I had to take account of her relative situation and help her relate to her anger more fully. As a spiritual practitioner, I was also mindful that anger is ultimately empty, a wave arising in the ocean of consciousness, without any solidity or inherent meaning. Yet while that understanding may be true in the absolute sense, and generally valuable for helping dissolve attachment to anger, it was not useful for this woman at this time.

Instead, she needed to learn to pay more attention to her anger in order to move beyond a habitual pattern of self-suppression, to connect with her inner strength and power, and to relate to her husband in a more active, assertive way.“

Many Eastern spiritual traditions talk about the necessity of ego dissolution to pierce through the illusion of separateness to re-connect with our true Divine nature and embody Spirit. While there is truth to this process in the context of the awakening process and the evolution of consciousness, it is necessary for many to also develop a healthy ego-personality and individual self before they look to dissolve their sense of who they are.

Many people have been wounded and not “seen” by their early attachment caregivers to the point where they lost this sense of self and it didn’t develop, to begin with, and this often results in their adult lives from issues of insecurity, low self-esteem, and sometimes they may even consciously or unconsciously dislike or hate themselves. This is often fueled by guilt and shame that they carry from these early experiences, resulting in them blaming themselves for any lack of love they received, rather than facing the truth of what happened and the suffering it caused for them.

Building a healthy ego is the necessary prerequisite before trying to get rid of it. You cannot get rid of something you didn’t have to begin with. For some, this seems like a paradox, but it is a natural part of this process of soul individualization. We first need to separate ourselves from the group/hive mind and mass consciousness before we can engage in the Great Work of ego dissolution to unite with the Divine. As Carl Jung said: “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

“But this spiritual truth and true aim of his being is not allowed to appear till late in his journey: for the early preparatory business of man in the evolutionary steps of Nature is to affirm, to make distinct and rich, to possess firmly, powerfully and completely his own individuality.

As a consequence, he has in the beginning principally to occupy himself with his own ego. In this egoistic phase of his evolution the world and others are less important to him than himself, are indeed only important as aids and occasions for his self-affirmation.

God too at this stage is less important to him than he is to himself, and therefore in earlier formations, on the lower levels of religious development, God or the gods are treated as if they existed for man, as supreme instruments for the satisfaction of his desires, his helpers in his task of getting the world in which he lives to satisfy his needs and wants and ambitions.

This primary egoistic development with all its sins and violences and crudities is by no means to be regarded, in its proper place, as an evil or an error of Nature; it is necessary for man’s first work, the finding of his own individuality and its perfect disengagement from the lower subconscient in which the individual is overpowered by the mass consciousness of the world and entirely subject to the mechanical workings of Nature.

Man the individual has to affirm, to distinguish his personality against Nature, to be powerfully himself, to evolve all his human capacities of force and knowledge and enjoyment so that he may turn them upon her and upon the world with more and more mastery and force; his self-discriminating egoism is given him as a means for this primary purpose.

Until he has thus developed his individuality, his personality, his separate capacity, he cannot be fit for the greater work before him or successfully turn his faculties to higher, larger and more divine ends. He has to affirm himself in the Ignorance before he can perfect himself in the Knowledge.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Overfocus on Spiritual Work/Escaping the Matrix while Avoiding/Denying Physical Reality

[Note: This section relates to the chapter “Avoidance of every-day responsibilities” in my essay/ebook “The Perilous Path Towards Awakening”]

The rejection of the material world is another area where people come to a distorted understanding with regards to living a spiritual life, while the flip side of that coin is using spiritual concepts as a justification/means to obtain more and more materialistic objects, fuelling consumeristic addictions which often results in hedonistic physical indulgence (like you see distorted in the rise of “the Secret” and many various “manifestation” techniques and aims).

Many religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Judaism, have promoted the practice of Asceticism. Ascetics live a life characterized by abstinence from sensual pleasures and renunciation of material possessions for the purpose of pursuing spiritual goals. This old dogmatic religious approach is based on the idea that life on earth is misery which one needs to escape from.

The Christian Catholic church infuses its followers with the guilt-trip that one is born in sin and the flesh (body’s sensual desires) are “evil” and that one needs to be saved (by Jesus) to be raptured into “heaven”. The ascetics of the Eastern dogmatic religious traditions view life and physical reality all as “Maya” (illusion). For some ascetics, they feel that in order to get out of the wheel of karma and the cycle of rebirth they must reject physical reality.

The more extreme forms of asceticism may also include severe body self-mutilation, and often include meditating in graveyards covered in the ashes of dead bodies, which they practice to demonstrate that they can and will completely transcend the physical world in order to achieve Nirvana; often living in seclusion and isolation from the rest of the world.

The New Age Ascension Religion

Interestingly, we can see a similar ascetic approach of trying to escape the world in the “the New Age fringe movement”. Over the years, more people have become aware of the hyperdimensional matrix and occult hostile forces controlling humanity on unseen levels. There is a lot of talk about the earth being a “prison planet” and that the “tunnel of light” that is said to be experienced after death is a “trap” that keeps us enslaved via “soul-recycling”. In other words, they view that reincarnation is a trap that we need to escape from.

[I have written about the “tunnel of light trap” and “reincarnation trap of recycling souls” before. It’s a theory I don’t entirely agree with for reasons outlined in my article Soul Evolution, Universal Laws, and Karma in The Body.]

This also ties into the popular New Age idea of “ascension” in order to move into 5D, 6D… all the way up into 12D (whatever that is). The focus of some of these ascension teachings is on getting away from this physical existence and even out of the body (or not reincarnating because “the earth is a prison”) to “ascend” into another “higher” existence/world.

Many of these New Age ascension teachings are based on spiritual bypassing and overestimating one’s level of being by creating peak faux enlightenment experiences. Some of these New Age ascension fringe ideas sound very similar to the old ascetic dogmatic religious ideas mentioned before: denying the physical world, seeing physical existence as “evil” (a prison), needing to escape into “heaven” and exiting the reincarnation (enslavement) cycle. Same idea, just different package in New Age lingo.

Our body is truly the vehicle for “ascension,” but we must anchor the divine force within ourselves by being grounded in this body and the earth in order to bring this plane of reality into a higher level of being. Through this process of soul integration, we essentially transcend death itself. This is a long evolutionary process and ties into what Sri Aurobindo meant by stating that man, in his current state, is a transitional being.

We are in a transition and our state of being, including all the matrix manipulation/interferences (seen and unseen), are part of the evolution of consciousness. There is no error in or anything wrong with reality, nor are we trapped here. Everything we experience has its teaching function in light of the process of soul individualization. The idea that the earth is a prison planet we need to escape from and that reincarnation is a soul-trap also instills the victim/blame consciousness in us—which is exactly the disempowered state that the hyperdimensional occult forces want us to get stuck in.

Ironically, it may as well be that the hyperdimensional matrix forces are behind these life-denying ascetic ideas and “escape the matrix” theories. In order to truly transcend the matrix, we must spiritualize our being and the world—not escape life.

As I wrote in the aforementioned linked article Soul Evolution, Universal Laws, and Karma in The Body: People who firmly believe that this 3D existence is just a “prison” also fall into the victim trap which keeps them entrapped in the “prison,” ironically. By perceiving the world this way, they may also fail to recognize and connect with the immense beauty of life.

I see the matrix control as a prison and school at the same time, but no one is here against their “free will.” According to Universal Law, an agreement and choice were made to be “in the matrix” at some level in the “distant past” (even if done via deception/temptation which is symbolized in “The Fall from Eden”). In the end, we are all here to experience soul evolution and the greater evolution of consciousness.

Many truth/spiritual seekers wear their inability to function in the “3D world” and inability (refusal) to manage ordinary daily affairs like a badge of merit—as proof of their awakened state (“I am too spiritual/woke to…”) This ties into the martyr complex as well. The Zen saying, “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water” applies here, which basically means for us to have humility before/after any “spiritual experience” and continue on with our “ordinary” lives.

This also applies to the trap of “fighting the 3D matrix”. While the matrix control system mines us for our energy and keeps many of us preoccupied in survival mode and “making a living” (while stealing from us (taxes) and/or manipulating us into debt), we need to be strategic planners in order to avoid attracting unnecessary negative attention from the matrix that could compromise both our ability to function and to be of service to others.

When we refuse to deal with ordinary life affairs; often stemming from an inflated sense of being “too spiritual”, or an emotional reactive “fuck the system” attitude (projecting at the symptoms/shadows on the wall of the 3D matrix)—the “matrix has us”. In this case, it keeps us in a primary state of reactivity where we get stuck in a sort of ego/survival/poverty/scarcity consciousness, which is precisely the frequency where the matrix overlords want us to be in.

Some people focus their whole energy and life trying to get “off the grid” or look for loopholes and ways not to pay their taxes, mostly trying to live “under the radar,” which can compromise their ability to be of service to others by keeping them focusing too much of their energy on avoidance/survival. It can also be used as another “escape” from the 3D world.

While I’m obviously not condoning the tax (theft) system, nor am I against those who feel they are drawn towards striving towards self-sustainability or living “off the grid” (quite the contrary), what I am pointing out is that we need to be cautious not to fall into the “3D revolutionary mindset trap” (trying to save the world), nor into reactionary black & white thinking and behavior.

As it is mentioned in various esoteric teachings, such as “Gnosis” by Boris Mouravieff:

“From his first steps on the track [way of access towards awakening – transcending the General Law/Hyperdimensional Matrix], man must apply the principle: ‘feed the crocodile so that we are not devoured.'”

In other words, sometimes we need to feed the “crocodiles” to keep them calm, i.e. play by the matrix “rules” to an extent in order to protect ourselves so we can continue with the Great Work and not draw unnecessary negative attention upon ourselves.

Overfocus on Psychological Work Without Spiritual Aspiration

When we focus on psychological work alone and don’t aspire to something higher beyond our ego-structure via a consistent spiritual practice, we can get “stuck in the mud” of the unconscious, constantly looking for more trauma in our lives and then engaging in never-ending “processing” to heal from it. We can also get addicted to our suffering because of identification with our “story,” forgetting that these wounds and traumas don’t define us.

Psychotherapy also usually only uncovers childhood wounds and traumas in this lifetime (most often related to our parents) and the process “ends” there—but it doesn’t take into consideration spiritual/universal laws (like karma), ancestral, past life trauma, as well as agreements of entrapment with occult forces which could have resulted in entity attachments that we may have been carrying with us for lifetimes. 

Having said that, we don’t necessarily need to engage in past life regressions either since the cumulation of every lifetime is happening within this present lifetime, and all previous lifetimes are, therefore, somatically accessible through the body of this present incarnation. We also have the power to reject/eject entities ourselves via healing/closing the entry point for these forces—which was often created through trauma. The most progressive psychotherapeutic works widen their perception of reality to include the multidimensional spiritual domain.

Psychological self-work can become an endless loop of rabbit hole-ing because there is always more to dig into—especially in light of hyperdimensional attack possibilities where thoughts/emotions are injected into us. There are also many instances where what Western Medicine would deem as a “mental illness” is merely a spiritual crisis (rather than a psychological pathology), and these identifications with “psychological issues/labels” and perceiving these “chemical imbalances in the brain” as a “life sentence” makes us identify with these states as “us”, rather than work to understand the hidden workings/spiritual components behind them.

Even worse, being stuck in these tunnel visions of psychology (especially when it comes to solely “treating” them with psychiatric medications and being subject to their myriad of side effects) can make things worse in the long run by killing our “soul”, so to speak, and cutting us off from our Essence; when the reality is that any crisis is simply part of the healing process and there is nothing “wrong” with it. While these medications can be a useful “band-aid” for a period in certain cases, they present no long term solution.

Through my own process and experiences dealing with severe depression, despair and suicidal tendencies in my early twenties; I realized that depression, anxiety, and many other “psychological issues” people are being labeled with are in fact a normal reaction to growing up in a society that is very much removed from nature and spirit. It’s a sign of a healthy “spiritual immune system” to reject the pathogen of cult-ure and influences of a pathological society.

These “psychological issues” are not pathologies in the sense that mainstream culture/society interprets them, where it sees people from a purely biological perspective and then treats these “chemical imbalances” in the brain with pharmaceuticals or cognitive-behavioral approaches. Depression, for the most part, is a cry/call from the soul/spirit begging for attention. It’s a healthy response to the normalized pathology of the world we live in.

As Krishnamurti said: “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Depression is, most often, a spiritual crisis; and it doesn’t get healed by focusing on and then treating the symptoms rather than the causes.

I also noticed and have experienced throughout my life that if you have faith and are sincere in your questioning and efforts to seek truth, no matter what it turns out to be or how much you suffer, the “universe” (Divine) will respond with help, support, and guidance in whatever form is necessary for you in that moment; whether it be through a book, a person, healer, or teacher; coming into one’s life at the perfect moment.

That is also the true meaning of the esoteric phrase  “Ask and you shall be given”. The “New Age” and Oprah-style “pop-spirituality” have distorted this idea into gaining more material fulfillment (ie: millions of dollars, a mansion, the perfect relationship, etc) which is based on the ego’s socially conditioned desires of what people believe will bring them happiness.

In fact, lots of popular self-help style books are based on adjusting a person to the workings of the matrix ideas of “success,” rather than helping them to become truly sovereign and transcend this matrix programming altogether. A lot of deeper esoteric truths have been distorted, diluted, corrupted or even left out entirely so it can be morphed into emotionally appealing and oversimplified “sales bits”; which we also see a lot in the so-called “New Age Movement.”

Getting into the body is a fundamental part of the Work as well, which means not getting caught up in the intellectual “analysis-paralysis” which many head-centric “top-down” psychotherapeutic focus upon. It is also essential to watch out for the victim-consciousness states that may come as a result of getting “stuck” and identifying with our story and trauma, which happens when we look to blame others for our circumstances and the way our lives have gone.

We all have our own unique experiences to learn from in the process of awakening and our unique karmic situation was designed by the Divine exactly to facilitate this process within us. In the end, all there is are lessons for the purpose of soul evolution.

Spiritual/esoteric work aims at connecting us with our true Self, the soul. This is the essence of who we truly are. Our true Self/psychic being is the part of us that is untouched by all the trauma, wounds, or occult hostile forces that we may have been subjected to. It is our eternal Self; a pure expression of the Divine.

Psychological work, when used wisely, will help us to clear the “vessel” within; so that we come more into contact with our Divine nature. This process transforms the conditioned wounded ego-personality into a clearer expression of Essence, bringing the psychic being to the front and not letting the lower self (with all its unconscious programs) run the show anymore.

But we need to make an effort to “self-remember” by engaging intentionally in spiritual work in order to facilitate this process of bringing forth our Essence, as well and both aspire and surrender to the Divine so we don’t get stuck or lost in the mud below (ie. constantly digging in the subconscious).

Ultimately, the trap of doing psychological work alone is that it is mostly based on going back into the past; without realizing that our current state of (spiritual) evolution and the current state of man is only transitional—we are evolving towards a fuller expression of being as we are being pulled by the Divine Light from Above and into “the future.”

“I find it difficult to take these psychoanalysts at all seriously – yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. . . . They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities, but the foundation of these things is above and not below.

The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms forever in the Light above.”

– Sri Aurobindo

“Here we touch upon the fundamental error of our modern psychology: it fails to understand anything because it searches below, in our evolutionary past. True, half the Secret may be there, but we still need the force above to open the door below. We were never meant to look behind, but ahead and above in the superconscious light, because it is our future, and only the future can explain and heal the past

We appear to progress from below upward, from past to future, from night to conscious light, but this is just our small momentary understanding that obscures the whole, for otherwise we would see that it is not the past that impels us, but the future that draws us and the light above that gradually pervades our darkness – for how could darkness ever have created all that light?

If we had been born out of darkness, we would end up only in darkness. “This is the eternal Tree with its roots above and its branches downward,” says the Katha Upanishad. (VI.I) We feel we are making great efforts to progress toward more understanding and greater knowledge; we have a sense of tension toward the future. But this is still our limited perspective.

If we had a different perspective, we might see the superconscious Future trying to enter our present. And we would realize that our sense of effort is just the resistance put up by our denseness and darkness. The future does not move only from below upward, otherwise there would be no hope for the earth, as it would end up exploding in the sky from a supreme psychic tension, or falling back into darkness.

The future moves also from above downward; it penetrates deeper and deeper into our mental fog, into our vital confusion, into the subconscious and unconscious night, until it illuminates everything, reveals everything, heals everything – and ultimately fulfills everything.

Yet the deeper it goes, the greater the resistance – for this is the Iron Age, the time of the great Revolt and Peril – but also the time of Hope. At the supreme point where this Future touches the rock-bottom past, where this Light bursts into night’s nethermost level, God willing, we will find the secret of Death and of immortal Life. But if we look below and only below, we will find mud and only mud.”

– Satprem

Overfocus on Activism and Fighting the Matrix Without Sincere Inner Work

This topic ties into the “Trap of the Revolutionary Mind” and the “Trap of Fighting Evil” which I have addressed in more depth in my essays/ebooks:

• The Perilous Path Towards Awakening
• Timeline-Reality Split, Frequency Vibration and the Hidden Forces of Life
• Individuality, Embodiment, and the Anchoring of a Higher Frequency

If we don’t engage in both inner psychological and spiritual work, our well-meaning efforts to fight the matrix, injustices, atrocities, and any activism will be reactionary and driven by unconscious impulses driven by our own wounding. We then easily fall into the trap of projecting our shadow and anything we have not healed within externally onto others in an “us vs. them” or “me against the world” mentality.

These unconscious shadowy parts of ourselves are our blind spots; the unhealed traumas that we may carry are then also used by occult entities to tag into, manipulating us like puppets on strings by fueling our reactive behaviors and feeding off all the emotional “loosh” we create when we get triggered and then project those emotions outside of us.

Many people also tend to use activism as an avoidance to face themselves and easily fall into the “victim/saviour/persecutor” trap, blaming the system/matrix for their suffering/misery or becoming a “rescuer” whose ego feeds off the idea of “activism” to make them feel better about themselves (egoic self-importance). These reactionary behaviors are also based on a lack of knowledge of universal laws and how the matrix actually works through us and humanity on unseen levels. We can then also fall into the Trap of Identification and feeding into the Divide & Conquer agenda of the Matrix forces.

The Importance of Both Inner and Outer Work

While there are other imbalanced variations of the four points mentioned above, it all comes down to engaging in both inner and outer work. Inner work in this context relates to emotional, psychological, somatic, and spiritual work that helps us to get more in touch with who we truly are behind the layers of wounds, traumas, and social/cultural programming/conditioning.

Ultimately this internal process is about Individualization and Embodiment. To be embodied doesn’t mean to simply be in “touch” with the physical body (like through paying attention to diet/exercise). Embodiment (from a spiritual/esoteric perspective) is the process of soul integration, connecting to one’s “higher self” and becoming a conscious vessel for spirit to work through our bodies; it relates to the alchemical marriage of the inner male and female, where Being and Doing become one.

Based on various esoteric teachings, the soul is something human beings need to develop or grow from a consciousness seed, and then we work to embody the fullness of our soul via spiritual/esoteric work. In the average person in today’s post-modern maze, the soul remains in an embryonic state and is thus not fully individualized. Until the soul has matured, one’s identity lies in the mechanical false personality and is open to manipulation on all levels.

An embodied soul, on the other hand, becomes the seat of the real self’s creativity and dynamism, and the personality blossoms as an expression of one’s higher (immortal) identity, connected to spirit and the Divine within.

Outer work relates to taking care of our physical body, being a responsible adult with the practicalities of our lives, creating right livelihood, and being able to provide for oneself. It also entails learning about the world, the matrix, and understanding higher/universal/occult laws so you can see through appearances, deceptions, and distractions (while applying critical thinking and using your intuition) and hence can make wiser decisions that are aligned with Truth.

Inner and outer work need to go hand-in-hand. The more that we are embodied and understand/apply universal and metaphysical higher laws, the more we become aligned with our vocation and soul purpose and have a more positive impact in the world and in our lives.

Laura and I have explored this topic in our 4th episode of the Cosmic Matrix podcast. We discussed spiritual integrity and the importance of engaging in a balance of both inner and outer work. In spiritual communities, this imbalance shows up in a variety of ways. For example, many well-meaning “truth seekers” tend towards being overly focused on the external world while lacking a balance of sincere inner work and embodiment.

On the other side of the coin, there is also the New Age trap of too much “self-work” which often results in narcissistic tendencies, whereas people are overly focused on their internal experience without understanding the world around them. This can create an excessively solipsistic worldview by taking a truth and distorting it into a lie like you see in the “You Create Your Reality” scene.

Furthermore, many people who call themselves “spiritual teachers” make no effort to understand the external forces that affect us; like the matrix, universal laws, and how occult forces manipulate humanity. Despite their well-meaning intentions, through their ignorance, they end up supporting a negative agenda and often even end up worshipping occult forces who disguise themselves as “positive” ones or they allow these forces to act through them by tagging into their own thirst for money/fame/power.

Other topics addressed in this episode include the trap of ambition on the spiritual path and seeking fame and recognition (along with other ego temptations), the fear of speaking out, and much more.

Aspiration and Surrender to The Divine

However, all the necessary inner work (relating to healing wounds, traumas, shadow work) and “external” work of intellectually understanding how the matrix operates (or any form of activism) is futile in the long run if it is not eventually matched with this sincere aspiration and surrender to the Divine.

At the same time, if we are really sincere in our internal process and truth-seeking (within and without), we’ll inevitably ignite the divine spark within us (the psychic being), and the aspiration/surrender to the Divine will follow this natural call—when we are ready. This is not a rational decision but an embodied inner call and drive.

This necessity to surrender to the Divine has become more apparent to me as well via the emergence of something within me, a higher guidance, as I realize the illusion of control of my ego-personality and the illusion of personal will which often results in will-full doing (trying to “force” what “I” want into creation).

I also sense the immense resistance my ego and lower nature puts up at times (which I wasn’t always aware of in the past or justified/rationalized away), including the occult hostile forces which try and interfere with the process—especially during leaps in consciousness. I truly understand now what Sri Aurobindo meant by saying, “This yoga is a battle”. It’s very humbling and this process has opened me up to deeper compassion; for myself as well as for others.

Over the past few years, I’ve gotten deeper into the work of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. To be clear, for me, this is not about worshipping him like a “guru” or making a dogma of his teachings (which is more of a revelation.) It’s way beyond that. Anyone can verify this for him/herself when studying his work.

I can’t possibly summarize here what he has done for humanity and the effect his work has had on me (and continues to have on me); which also resulted in profound inner realizations (and confirmed my own insights and experiences) on what “needs to be done” to anchor the Divine within. It’s all very humbling, and there is much work ahead.

Yet, “Truth is a Pathless Land” (as Krishnamurti said) which also goes back to the four points of holistic work and our individual lessons and process. Regardless of where we are at as individuals and what teachings or modalities we currently follow and work with, ultimately it’s about this surrender to the Divine—whatever that may mean for each individual.

Talking about the Divine and God is a tricky subject and most often a triggering one (especially for those who have had bad experiences with Catholicism and the church). In fact, when I was introduced to Sri Aurobindo’s work five years ago by a friend, I first rejected his work without even looking into it, simply because I got triggered by his name. It sounded to me like “just another Indian Guru” based on my aversion to any “guru” types, the Western commercialization of India, and the distortion of yoga, along with the exposure of various pathological gurus.

It actually took another friend to give me his book “The Hidden Forces of Life” with quotes from Aurobindo’s work about occult forces to open my mind and pierce through my resistance (clearly the Divine was trying to reach me since all this was very synchronistic as several outside sources tried to introduce me to his work).

Reading this book dissolved my previous judgment—which I can admit was based on ignorance, assumptions, and projections. As I started to learn more about his life and work, there was definitely a deep resonance; and once I began studying his (and the Mother’s) writings more deeply and I immersed myself in Integral Yoga.

For a brief overview of the work of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother watch THIS.

However, in the beginning, I also had trouble with a concept he mentioned often; this “surrender/aspiration to the Divine”. I also got triggered by the words Divine and God (side note: there are always lessons in anything that you get triggered by). I felt like I was giving my authority/sovereignty away to an external force/being; at least, that’s the way I initially perceived it.

My aversion to the word “God” was related to the historical abuse by corrupted dogmatic religions that have externalized this “God” figure into a punitive man in the sky. The word “surrender” also has a different meaning (from a spiritual perspective) to the way that the word is used in the common English language, which is most often associated with defeat, passivity, capture, or even imprisonment.

Yet, deep down inside, I knew I had to work on my connection to God/the Divine. Something deeper within me was calling for it. I started to meditate daily with this increasing inner call to aspire and surrender to the Divine, engaging in prayer and stating “this is not about my will but Thy Will”, in order to align myself with the Divine Will of the descending higher Force. It’s not about what “I” want but my life is in service and only in service to the Divine.

For a long time, I encountered a strong inner resistance opposing this surrender. Parts of me didn’t want to give up control. As I deepened my meditation practice, I realized that this resisting “voice” was not coming from my true Self, conscience, nor was it positive resistance/rejection of Falsehood, but it was clearly coming from my selfish ego that “wants what it wants” and which also lives in fear of not trusting life, the Divine, and can’t let go of control.

Even though I have had breakthroughs since then and experienced the Divine doing His work through me, I still need to keep reminding myself of this full surrender—every day—for there is still resistance, not only coming from ego, but from my unresolved wounds, conditioning, the lower nature of the vital, the physical body, and via thought injections of the occult anti-divine forces. It’s a constant practice of Aspiration – Rejection – Surrender:

“There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.

But the supreme Grace will act only in the conditions of the Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions laid upon it by the Falsehood and the Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the Falsehood, it would defeat its own purpose.

These are the conditions of the Light and Truth, the sole conditions under which the highest Force will descend; and it is only the very highest supramental Force descending from above and opening from below that can victoriously handle the physical Nature and annihilate its difficulties . There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature.

The surrender must be total and seize all the parts of the being. It is not enough that the psychic should respond and the higher mental accept or even the inner vital submit and the inner physical consciousness feel the influence. There must be in no part of the being, even the most external, anything that makes a reserve, anything that hides behind doubts, confusions and subterfuges, anything that revolts or refuses.

If part of the being surrenders, but another part reserves itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each time that that happens, you are yourself pushing the divine Grace away from you.

If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands and vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti, then it is idle to invoke the divine Grace to transform you.

If you open yourself on one side or in one part to the Truth and on another side are constantly opening the gates to hostile forces, it is vain to expect that the divine Grace will abide with you. You must keep the temple clean if you wish to install there the living Presence.

If each time the Power intervenes and brings in the Truth, you turn your back on it and call in again the falsehood that has been expelled, it is not the divine Grace that you must blame for failing you, but the falsity of your own will and the imperfection of your own surrender.

If you call for the Truth and yet something in you chooses what is false, ignorant and undivine or even simply is unwilling to reject it altogether, then always you will be open to attack and the Grace will recede from you. Detect first what is false or obscure in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.

Do not imagine that truth and falsehood, light and darkness, surrender and selfishness can be allowed to dwell together in the house consecrated to the Divine. The transformation must be integral, and integral therefore the rejection of all that withstands it.

Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand and even though you do not satisfy the conditions laid down by the Supreme. Make your surrender true and complete, then only will all else be done for you.

Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine Power will do even the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it: you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequence. Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the surrender of a living being, not of an inert automaton or mechanical tool.

An inert passivity is constantly confused with the real surrender, but out of an inert passivity nothing true and powerful can come. It is the inert passivity of physical Nature that leaves it at the mercy of every obscure or undivine influence. A glad and strong and helpful submission is demanded to the working of the Divine Force, the obedience of the illumined disciple of the Truth, of the inner Warrior who fights against obscurity and falsehood, of the faithful servant of the Divine.

This is the true attitude and only those who can take and keep it, preserve a faith unshaken by disappointments and difficulties and shall pass through the ordeal to the supreme victory and the great transmutation.”

– Sri Aurobindo

I also noticed that this surrender to the Divine is the crucial aspect missing in most people that are engaged in self-work and truth-seeking—as it was in myself for many years. For some people, self-work can turn into an isolating activity of complete self-absorption or in an act of trying to escape the world. Even though at times, we may need to exclusively focus on different areas in our lives, it all goes back to the four points of holistic self-work.

On the other side of the coin, there are many activists and truth-seekers who are overly focused on fighting/exposing the dark forces in the world without any spiritual foundation or engaging in any sincere inner self-work.

Finding the balance between both inner and outer work, fully embracing life and surrendering to the Divine is the highest form of spiritual activism, and doing so will naturally assist humanity in anchoring higher levels of consciousness onto this planet. This process requires inner sincerity and outward action in alignment with Divine Will, a powerful force. We are all transducers of this Divine Force, each in our own individualized way.

“The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world.

So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujga, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the Sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga.

In the end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he merges them in the divine Will and its transcendent and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready.

Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth’s spiritual progression or its transformation.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

Surrender, from a spiritual perspective, means to fully trust life. There is nor error in creation/reality, and there is a teaching function in every aspect of our lives. It is all guiding us closer to the Divine and our true Self. This implies to see through the appearances of reality and not getting caught up in shadow projections and victim/blame consciousness.

“In spirituality, we constantly meet this concept of “surrender”. Meaning, to be truly devoted to spiritual work, the divine asks us to completely surrender our sense of who we are (our small ego self) to a higher power, to see that we are mere instruments of that power. Yet, to surrender we have to learn to trust. We have to learn to trust reality completely.

This does not mean to trust our reactions to reality, which are another thing altogether. Our reactions to reality -could- be telling us the opposite of what is true – because these responses are rooted in trauma.

Many of our strong emotional reactions are traumatic responses that were triggered by the present moment. The present moment is just the messenger. These responses disable us from a wide range of reactions available. They keep us limited and stuck.

It also doesn’t mean to trust reality as it appears, for things are not always what they seem on the surface. Trusting reality means trusting that exactly what is happening in your life is exactly what is supposed to be happening. No matter how bad it is. To trust reality is to trust God. To recognize that there is no error in creation. That the divine has delivered you exactly the experience you need in this very moment.

This does not mean to stay in an abusive relationship or situation. Not at all.
This is actually an invitation – to learn your lessons. By trusting that the circumstances of your life exist exactly for your evolution.
This means that -everything- in your life, no matter how dark, no matter how messed up, it also has a divine purpose.

The catch is that only by trusting the reality of your direct life experience can you discover what its purpose is. How much you trust reality is equal to how much you are capable of learning. You are finally participating in your own unique karmic situation. You are not just facing life – you are embracing it.

How much do you trust reality?
How much are you willing to surrender?”

– Laura Matsue

What is The Divine?

This inevitable question often comes up: “what is the Divine?”, and who is the “I” that needs to surrender to it? It all becomes very paradoxical as we’re confronted with the limitation of language since “the Tao that can be named is not the Tao” (as it is said in the Zen tradition). The Divine/God is nothing external outside of us, and it is certainly not some guy with a beard in the Sky who judges you based on the misinterpretations of Sacred knowledge that the old dogmatic monotheistic religions are centered upon.

It is far beyond any mental concepts and neither the left-brain “thinking” mind nor the egoic mind cannot come close to perceiving it, as it can only be understood through direct (inner) experience. “God” can only be truly felt when the mind is silent (which is very uncommon for most people).

I’ve already written about this topic in the section “What does it mean to be “Awake”?” in my essay The Perilous Path Towards Awakening where I also mentioned some signs that can show how you are becoming more aligned with the Divine:

• Ambition, vital desires (based on wounds/conditioning/lower nature), vanity, the need for attention – to be “liked” or “desired”, the notion and pressure to “become” something/someone, any comparison/competition with others, or even “dislike” of others all fall slowly away, as do any triggers and reactive behaviors.
• A deep and embodied sense of peace and trust, of faith and “being taken care of” (as in trusting the flow of life), knowing that any challenge that will come up serves as a deeper lesson for the purpose of a true awakening.
• It is the end of fear and blame, the death of ego-identification, and re-birth of the real “I AM” – embodied spirit (soul individualization) – expressing itself uniquely through “you”, connected to all that is.
• Will-full doing dissipates, to be replaced by an embodied responding to what is – and what life brings – that is uniquely tuned to your soul lessons and talents; it guides you from an embodied inner place without expectations and attachment to outcome.
• Goal setting and ambition are replaced by a quiet aspiration with intentions coming from a higher guidance but without expectations or need to control.
• Making choices and decisions don’t stem from a thought process anymore or any head-centric analysis of “should” or “shouldn’t”, but emerge from a gut-level of nonverbal intuitive knowing, deeply tuned in with your soul and the Divine.

Life becomes like a dance in the river of life as we don’t fight the current anymore. This is often described as being in the “zone”, a state where we are locked into the rhythm of life (Tao) and completely aligned with Divine Will. Contrary to popular belief, this awakened state is not a constant feeling of “bliss” or ecstasy (even though there can be peak experiences like that), nor is it a “feeling” of love or happiness.

It really transcends anything we usually experience in ordinary consciousness and is not necessarily related to any particular emotion or feeling. Ultimately it transcends the duality of pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering—as it is a state of inner peace.

There is deeper, silent, contentment, a grounded calmness, a sense of peace and joy, one which is not dependant on any external circumstances or occurrences. It is a sense of slowing down and simplifying. It’s a place of true freedom. Thoughts may still come and try to attach themselves, but it becomes easier to detach from them; we can effortlessly release ourselves from believing in these passing thoughts and we no longer identify with them.

This sense of detachment is much different from more common forms of dissociation, like escaping into the intellect or going out of body, but it is an embodied recognition of one’s true nature in contrast to the illusion of thought (and who we “think” we are).

One recognizes that the mind is just a tool, a servant; not be looked upon but also not to be treated as the dominant master/guide of our existence. It’s not about demonizing the intellect but illuminating it with wisdom, for it needs to go through its own transmutation process to become an instrument for the Divine in order to access the higher knowledge (Gnosis) that is available for us—beyond the five senses.

We can also still “use” it in practical ways to live out our daily routines, since we can’t nor is it a good idea to just “check out” of our existence here on Earth; on the contrary, we are more involved with reality—more embodied and fully-embracing of life—and whatever this dance may bring, we are in full conscious participation with the rhythms of life, we are active instruments of this divine play (“Lila”); without attachment to any outcome or any will-full doing.

Laura and I have also explored the questionin this podcast: “What is Your Relationship to The Divine?”

Below are some excellent insights by Adyashanti (linked video clips) on the limitation/illusion of personal will and the reluctance of the ego to truly surrender to the Divine and letting go of control because it is stuck in this mode of “I want this, I’m afraid of this, I don’t want this, I’m attached to this, etc.”, essentially trapped and identified by thoughts, stuck to grasping to them with either hope or fear.

It also relates to the human drive to succeed and “be something” by constantly doing something, having something, etc. This is what Adyashanti calls the “personal will”. “When I get the right job, car, have enough money, find the right relationship, etc., only THEN everything will be alright.”

Even in our spiritual life, that same egoic personal will can “hijack” spiritual aspirations: “When I have attained peace, find the bliss, master the pose, have healed everything, etc… THEN I’ll be (insert your own pay-off here) satisfied, happy, fulfilled, enlightened, self-realized.” Our egoic nature yearns to grasp onto its own agenda and tries to take control of the process.

That’s why true surrender is so hard because the egoic “I” wants what it wants and resists letting go of control. In most of us, it is so habitual, mechanical and even so “normal” that we can’t see this deception because we are so identified with and attached to who we think we are and our desires.

We are often even attached to suffering. Adyashanti makes an excellent point that any effort from personal will trying to escape suffering and samsara (you can also see it in light of trying to escape the Matrix) will get you even more stuck in suffering (the Matrix). The only way out is a truly total surrender; which is frightening to the egoic mind as it resists it this process of necessary disillusionment—which is what leads to true freedom.

• Adyashanti – Beyond The Personal Will
• Adyashanti – The Falling Away of Personal Will
• Adyashanti – Your personal drive starts to dry up…

The Importance of Meditation and Stilling the Mind

For most of us, we live our lives on the surface of the mind, the outer superficial consciousness of our Being. We do this by constantly being engaged with our minds, keeping them always in thought and pre-occupying ourselves by the “doing” that accompany these thoughts and their nearly endless desires.

What most people know as “relaxation” is often still a state where their mind is engaged in the “doing” of something; be it watching movies, browsing the internet, reading, listening to music, etc. To some extent, we are always engaged with something. Even at night, we often don’t truly rest but still are active in Dreamtime.

The Divine within us, the psychic Being, our true Self is behind all thought and mental chatter, our identifications with our thoughts, and the external distractions that surround us. Every spiritual/esoteric tradition has emphasized this truth. For most of us on the spiritual path, this is nothing new. Yet we still get distracted because stilling the mind is not something that happens easily.

In fact, even when we attempt to still the mind through meditation the first barrier we often will notice is our own active resistance against doing so. This is because our ego is terrified of this inner silence as it experiences it as a type of “death” to its fixed sense of reality and concepts that make who it thinks it is up. Yet, stilling the mind is the prerequisite to come in touch with who we truly are, the real “I.” This real “I” has nothing to do with the ego-personality we identify with or the image we have of ourselves and that we portray to the outside world.

The first step to connect with the Divine/true Self is related to the esoteric self-inquiry and asking this eternal question: ”Who am I ?” In other words, it begins our quest to “Know Thyself.”

The more sincere you are with this internal inquiry (which is often an ongoing process), the more you will realize that “your” thoughts, feelings, desires, wants, needs, etc. are not your own but have been conditioned or inserted “externally”. The “I” who you think you are (and identify with) is made up of these programs, memories, biological drives, wounds, traumas, and experiences (“good” and “bad”); accumulated over lifetimes, embedded into your DNA ancestrally, and influenced by the collective/environmental consciousness (humans/culture/society/places, etc.).

“In a certain sense, we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations – an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations.”

– Sri Aurobindo

At the same time, we are also influenced by the forces of nature and conscious forces from the higher and lower realms. We are subjected to the suggestions of occult hostile forces of the vital world, but we also receive insights, creative and inspirational impulses from Spirit, the Higher Self and divine forces which also manifest as thoughts. Creative, sensitive people, writers, artists, and musicians get their ideas from these lower/higher realms.

We all receive a mixture of these impressions/thoughts from the whole range of lower to the higher realm depending on many factors. Based on our level of Being, our intentions and aspirations in life can either be guided from the lower nature or we can choose to align them with higher ideals. The direction we bring out awareness towards determines which realm we tune into. As long as we live on the surface of the ego-personality, the majority of this will be unconscious and mechanical.

(On a side note, some people (left-hand path practitioners, Ritual Magick Occultists, Wiccans, and even certain New Age rituals) understand aspects of these laws when working in the metaphysical realm, and then make conscious efforts to connect with the forces of the lower vital world in order to gain more power or to forcefully “manifest desires,” resulting in entrapments of agreement. It’s the “Faustian Pact with the Devil.”)

But none of the impressions, ideas, and thoughts we have are “ours”—even though the ego loves to identify with them. We’re also not able to distinguish where these thoughts/impressions come from as long as we are identified with them and act on them mechanically—until we establish the Inner Witness, connected to the true Self which lies deep inside behind this outer crust. This Self is behind all thought and our grasping and identification with them.

“Constantly and unknowingly, we receive influences and inspirations from higher, superconscious regions, which express themselves inside us as ideas, ideals, aspirations, or works of art; they secretly mold our life, our future.

Similarly, we constantly and unknowingly receive vital and subtle-physical vibrations, which determine our emotional life and relationship with the world every moment of the day. We are enclosed in an individual, personal body only through a stubborn visual delusion; in fact, we are porous throughout and bathe in universal forces, like an anemone in the sea.[…]

Each person will receive according to his or her capacity and needs or particular aspiration. All the quarrels between materialists and religious men, between philosophers and poets and painters and musicians, are the childish games of an incipient humanity in which each one wants to fit everyone else into his own mold.

When one reaches the luminous Truth, one sees that It can contain all without conflict, and that everyone is Its child: the mystic receives the joy of his beloved One, the poet receives poetic joy, the mathematician mathematical joy, and the painter receives colored revelations — all spiritual joys.

However “clear austerity” remains a powerful protection, for unfortunately not everyone has the capacity to rise to the high regions where the forces are pure; it is far easier to open oneself at the vital level, which is the world of the great Force of Life and desires and passions (well known to mediums and occultists); where the lower [hostile] forces can readily take on divine appearances with dazzling colors, or frightening forms. If the seeker is pure, he will see through the hoax either way, and his little psychic light will dissolve all the threats and all the gaudy mirages of the vital melodrama.”

– Satprem, Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness

Who is the “I” that is thinking? It all gets a bit paradoxical to ask yourself this question. If you are not who you “think” you are; your thoughts, your name, your job, your ideas, what other people think of you, then who are you—really? The answer can be discovered only through direct experience.

Therefore, a consistent meditation practice that helps to still the mind is an integral part of answering this question. This practice slows down the way we relate to life, so that we stop acting/thinking/feeling mechanically, and become more internally oriented and embodied, learning to relate to the world from the depth of this inner experience.

The kingdom and the gateway to the Divine is within ourselves if we can only still the mind for long enough to experience the total peace of this experience of emptiness. The deeper you go within, the more “you” will see and experience that all thoughts literally do come from the “outside”, while the inner witness just observes them and does not identify with any of them. You realize that the mind is only a receiving station for this information and there is no “you” generating any thoughts.

In the silence of the mind we connect with who we truly are, a whole new reality opens up. We find ourselves in tune with a descending higher force (the Divine) and the innermost being within us (the psychic being) which is guiding us and doing Spirit’s work through “us.”

We then also perceive the occult anti-divine forces of the vital worlds; which try to inject us with thoughts, temptations, and vital desires of the lower nature, all of which need to be rejected so that we may keep ourselves in alignment with these Divine realms.

This process of deep self-inquiry is certainly not a pleasant one at first. If you succeed in stilling the mind for long enough, you’ll first come face to face with what Gurdjieff called “the horror of the situation”. You will realize your mechanical, programmed behaviors/thinking and identification with any thought, the lies you tell yourself, the resistance of your ego, the buffers you have created, the illusion of free “personal will”, and that most of your “doing” are mechanical reactions based on unconscious drives stemming from the lower nature, social programming, wounding and trauma, occult interferences, as well as just habitual responses based on your conditioned preferences (likes/dislikes).

If you are sincere, this internal process of deep self-inquiry often time will result in disillusionment where you must first come face to face with your “nothingness” (which is how the ego perceives emptiness). Coming in tune with this emptiness is the necessary threshold to cross before you can be “reborn” in your true Self, for the true self is to be found only in this non-local experience of space. And once we establish Inner Silence, we can then consciously choose to accept or reject specific thoughts and vibrations.

We then realize on an embodied experiential level that we are just transducers of higher energies, forces, and beings working through us. We recognize that there is no separation between us and the world around us, that those forces of nature merely flow through us. We experience varying forces somatically but it is our resistance/identification to these experiences that keep us trapped within their limited scope of reality.

When we are experiencing life as the true self there is no feeling, emotion, or thought we attach to because none of that is us. The true self does not grasp or hold onto any of these passing states. Its constant state is one of true freedom.

It all comes down what we align ourselves with based on how much we have cleared within and our aspiration/surrender to the Divine Force as embodied frequency anchors of Divine Will.

“In this silent transparency, we will soon make another discovery, of capital importance in its implications. We will notice that not only do other people’s thoughts come to us from the outside, but our own thoughts, too, come from outside. Once we are sufficiently transparent we will be able to feel, in the motionless silence of the mind, little swirling eddies coming into contact with our atmosphere, like faint little vibrations drawing our attention; if we pay closer attention in order to “see” what they are, that is, if we let one of these little swirls enter us, we suddenly find ourselves “thinking” of something.

What we had felt at the periphery of our being was a thought in its pure form, or rather a mental vibration before it enters us and comes to the surface of our being clad in a personal form, enabling us to claim: “This is my thought”.

‘Where is the I in you that can create all that?’ Mother used to ask. It is just that the process is not perceptible to the ordinary man, firstly, because he lives in constant tumult, and secondly because the process through which vibrations are appropriated is almost instantaneous and automatic. Through his education and environment, a person becomes accustomed to selecting from the Universal Mind a given, narrow range of vibrations with which he has a particular affinity.

For the rest of his life he will pick up the same wavelength, repeating the same vibratory mode in more or less high-sounding words and with more or less innovative turns of phrase; he will spin around in a cage, the illusion of progress being given only by a greater or lesser extent and sparkling range of vocabulary used.

Once the seeker has seen that his thoughts come from outside, and after he has repeated this experience hundreds of times, he will hold the key to the true mastery of the mind. For while it is difficult to get rid of a thought we believe to be ours, once it has become entrenched in us, it is easy to reject the same thought when we see it coming from the outside.

Once we master silence, we necessarily master the mental world, because instead of perpetually picking up the same wavelength, we can run through the whole range of wavelengths and choose or reject as we please.[…]

If we follow [a discipline for mental silence], and remain perfectly transparent, we will soon notice that not only mental vibrations come from outside before entering our centers, but everything comes from outside: the vibrations of desire, of joy, of will, etc. From top to bottom, our being is a receiving station: Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us.

If we say: “I think, therefore I am,” or “I feel, therefore I am,” or “I want, therefore I am,” we are like a child who believes that the disc jockey or the orchestra is hidden in the radio set and that TV is a thinking medium. Indeed, none of these I’s is ourselves, nor do they belong to us, for their music is universal. ”

– Satprem, ibid

Considering the vast majority of humans live on the surface consciousness, driven by unconscious impulses, wounds, traumas, and conditioning, and identified with every thought that arises, we can see how easily we can be controlled/manipulated by the occult hostile forces tagging into our blindspots and lower nature of the vital via temptations appealing to ego or via identification with particular groups and labels (political, religious, cultural, etc) by feeding the Divide & Conquer frequency, pitting humans against humans and constantly engaged in a play of separation.

This is how the matrix works; the battle of Dark vs. Light is through us as we are the expression of higher forces and beings influencing us. It’s like Joseph Campbell said, “All the Gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.”

The more we engage in the Great Work to come in alignment with our true Self and the Divine, the more we’ll have a positive impact on the world and in our lives because we will be guided by Truth. By transforming ourselves we transform the world we create.

Conversely, the more we identify with our personality and ignore our shadow, wounding, and traumas and are only focused externally; projecting on the outside world by falling into victim/blame traps, the easier we can be used by the anti-divine (asuric) forces for their agenda—without us even being aware of it.

“Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect way with the workings of the divine Force. It persists in applying to experience on a supernormal plane the ordinary terms of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the world.

In the world we act with the sense of egoism; we claim the universal forces that work in us as our own; we claim as the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selective, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this frame of mind, life and body.

Enlightenment brings to us the knowledge that the ego is only an instrument; we begin to perceive and feel that these things are our own in the sense that they belong to our supreme and integral Self, one with the Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. Our limitations and distortions are our contribution to the working; the true power in it is the Divine’s.

When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation.

The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person.

Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfillment; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.[…]

Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice.

This apparently self-acting mechanism of Nature conceals an immanent divine Will that compels and guides it and shapes its purposes. But you cannot feel or know that Will while you are shut up in your narrow cell of personality, blinded and chained to your viewpoint of the ego and its desires.

For you can wholly respond to it only when you are impersonalized [embodied] by knowledge and widened to see all things in the self and in God and the self and God in all things. The state of ignorance in which you believe that you are the doer of your acts persists so long as it is necessary for your development; but as soon as you are capable of passing into a higher condition, you begin to see that you are an instrument of the one consciousness; you take a step upward and you rise to a higher conscious level.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

Active Meditation and Self-Remembering

However, a passive meditation practice alone, while essential, is still not enough. We can easily use meditation as a type of medication, using it to escape from life and (spiritually) bypass relating to our lives directly. It’s relatively easier to find this stillness in isolation, at meditation retreats, at a monastery/ashram, in nature or on your meditation pillow at home.

Essentially, we need to stay connected to this inner stillness and to the truth of our Being in our everyday life; in any circumstances and place. By anchoring the Divine within, we see the Divine in All. We then realize that the ego we used to identify with is only an instrument, in service to the Divine—doing His work through us.

“But exercises of meditation are not the true solution to the problem (though they may be necessary at the beginning to provide an initial momentum), because even if we achieve a relative silence, the moment we set foot outside our room or retreat, we fall right back into the usual turmoil as well as into the familiar separation between inner and outer self, inner life and worldly life.

What we need is a total life; we need to live the truth of our being every day, at every moment, not only on holidays or in solitude, and blissful meditations in pastoral settings simply will not achieve this.

The only solution is, therefore, to practice silencing the mind just where it is seemingly the most difficult: on the street, in the subway, at work, everywhere. Instead of going through Grand Central Station four times a day like someone hounded and forever in a rush, we can walk there consciously, as a seeker.

Instead of living haphazardly, dispersed in a multitude of thoughts, which not only lack any excitement but are also as exhausting as a broken record, we can gather the scattered threads of our consciousness and work on ourselves at every moment. Then life begins to become surprisingly exciting because the least little circumstance becomes an opportunity for victory; we are focused; we are going somewhere instead of going nowhere. For yoga is not a way of doing but of being.”

– Satprem, ibid

Practicing active meditation wherever we are in daily life also relates to Gurdjieff’s concept of “self-remembering.” Self-remembering is a state of consciousness where you are fully aware of yourself and all parts of your being in whatever you do. It’s about being completely in the present moment by being aware of your feelings, emotions, physical body sensations, impressions, and your actions—without identifying with any of them—while also being aware of the outside world at the same time.

The moment you identify with a thought, feeling, emotion and/or physical sensation you are not self-remembering anymore nor are you in a state of active meditation. In short, you are not truly conscious when you do this—but living mechanically.

Self-remembering/active meditation is an internal process of conscious attention and of observing ourselves without reacting. However, this process is not to be mistaken for “thinking” about yourself nor analyzing yourself and escaping into the head. It must be a fully embodied direct experience.

You are not checked out but checked fully in. At first, we may try to use our mind to observe ourselves, but this will only result in getting caught in the mind and thought, tricking ourselves that we are actually self-remembering when we are once again disassociating into the head-space.

“To have consciousness of self is not only to be aware of oneself mentally (in which case it would be only the mind looking at the mind), but also physically and emotionally; that is a global awareness…this demands a certain quality and strength of attention, of a direct recognition on the immediate, of what-is, of having an awareness this is global in references to oneself. Consciousness of self is a state predicated on self-remembering – a conscious awareness of the body, of being embodied, of being connected with what is happening internally, as well as what is happening externally.”

– William Patterson, Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time

True self-remembering and the state of active meditation is an embodied experience of sensing your whole Being, being simultaneously aware of body, mind, and feeling without any buffers, filters, or thoughts attached to it. Through the practice of self-remembering, you become aware of where your thoughts, emotions, desires, wants, likes and dislikes arise and originate from. Self-remembering and being in a state of active meditation implies to be embodied in the true meaning of the word. You are in the present moment, aware of your whole Being, connected the essence.

The practice of self-remembering can also uncover unconscious wounds/traumas from the past. These experiences become “stuck in time” and looping as people cycle through the same karmic situations over and over again, not understanding why these events keep happening. Through their ignorance, they then project their experiences from the past into the present moment. Their triggers are made of the karmic backlog of the tension they hold in the body. The mechanism usually happens like this: someone experiences a trauma being ignited in the body, they then identify with that trauma and the feelings that it brings up, and in an attempt to not feel it entirely they focus its cause on the outside world.

Most people’s bodies are filled with tension, which is an accumulation of their unlived karmic experience. When an outer event triggers something within them, they miss the chance to resolve this karma by making the cause to be something “out there”, when the present moment was just a messenger of what they already carry within them.

The critical aspect of self-remembering/active meditation is to not identify with our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, yet at the same time be aware of them as they pass through our experience. We cannot avoid these feelings but we can be aware of them—without identifying with them.

For example, usually, we say “I’m angry,” “I’m sad,” “I’m lonely,” I’m joyful,” etc. but these identifications are also not you, they are merely passing visitors within your present experience. When you self-remember in the present moment, you may feel anger, sadness, loneliness, joy, or whatever it is that may be arising, but by observing what arises and feeling these emotions you become less identified with them. By having a healthy relationship with our feelings (as the Inner Witness develops), we remember who we truly are.

Usually, people try to avoid their feelings or identify with them entirely. The biggest obstacle in healing our wounds/traumas is to feel ALL feelings, while also not grasping at them through identifying with them (its a fine line). The trap of identification is far-reaching. It not only relates to artificial concepts of official cult-ure such as identifying with a nation/flag, a political party/side, a religion or any belief system; but even commonly happens when people identify with a specific personality trait (“I’m …[insert positive or negative character trait]”), your job/career, your astrology sign/chart, a diet (“I’m a vegan”), etc. In short, identifying with anything you do, think, believe, or feel keeps you trapped in a limited scope of reality. The truth is, our true Self is none of any of that.

Non-identification is easier said than done because it’s so automatic and mechanical and often based on social/cultural conditioning and programming. The deeper we dive into our bodies somatically and touch our inner core, releasing and feeling all feelings that we have denied or suppressed (most of them as an unconscious impulse to resist feeling anything that goes against our fixed concepts of ourselves), the more we touch upon our true Self: free, joyful, and peaceful, which functions independent of any external factors or life circumstances.

Reginald Ray talks about the issue with identifying with experiences in his book “Somatic Descent”:

“Usually when we live our life we identify with our experiences. We think “I am this anxiety. I’m a very anxious person” or “I’m a very competent person. I can carry through anything, I can do anything” or “I’m a very loving person” or “I’m a person that has this trauma or that trauma. I’m a person who feels very shaky. I’m a person who is perpetually lonely.”

What’s happening here is that we are identifying our person with a particular experience. Because we have that approach in modern culture, it’s not possible for us to really handle very much at all because it’s too threatening. Therefore, most of us have gotten into a pattern of walling off most of the unpleasant experience that’s in us or most of the experiences that are inconsistent with who we think we are. We’re identifying with experiences.

What we need to do is to shift our sense of who we are. We need to step back from identifying with our history, with our traumas, and with our problems. Okay, so you could say, what does that mean step back, how, step back into what? In the practice of somatic descent (somatic/body scanning meditation) we are learning how to make contact with that basic being, that fundamental nature, that unconditioned openness, that sense of the infinity of the vastness of our own being.

In other words, we’re going to begin to see that the person that we truly are (and most fundamentally are) is not the anxiety-ridden person, the fear-ridden person, the aggressive person or whatever it may be. Actually, who we truly are when we look most deeply into our own state of being is empty and it’s open and it’s warm and it’s not impeded. It’s free and it’s joyous. That’s who we are. That’s who we truly are.

We need to touch and be touched by this empty fastness that is our true person, our true nature. It’s a very interesting experience to meet this depth of our own self. [In order to access this space within us, we need to go deep into our bodies] and we’re going to have to let go of ideas about who we are and what it means to be human that maybe we’ve carried around our whole life and never knew we’ve had them.

We’re going to touch if I might say so, the eternal part of our self, the infinite part of our self. And one very stunning part of that meeting of our fundamental nature is that far from feeling generic are neutral or empty or cold, when we touch this infinity of openness and space at the basis of our very being, we feel more than ever in our whole life that we’ve come home to our self. Then we feel this is truly who I am. In that space all the questions are answered and there’s a peace that is unbelievably affecting.”

Self-remembering is about establishing a correspondence between the inner and outer world without identification with it. It’s a state of conscious observation through establishing your center point in this inner witness. This embodied self-awareness results in experiencing the world and ourselves (with our 5 senses and beyond) simultaneously. In this state of being where there is no separation and total unification of reality, the experience and the experiencer are One.

All Life is Yoga

We need to watch out of falling into the trap of the ascetic (which we also see in today’s New Age and fringe movement mentioned before) by separating our spiritual practice from everyday life. All life is Yoga, as Sri Aurobindo said. The Divine is everywhere—if we can tune in. Through the consistent practice of Aspiration – Rejection – Surrender and with Faith and Trust combined; we can use the stillness gained from a consistent meditation practice and our active meditation/self-remembering (applying Non-Identification and Non-Attachment) in our everyday life, as we strengthen our connection to the Divine and our psychic being within, becoming more efficient transducers of Divine Will—into all of reality.

At the same time, we also need to engage in the process of embodiment. For many of us, a meditation practice can be very challenging if we have become so used to living in the head and are completely disconnected from the body. When we sit down to meditate we may become overwhelmed with the feelings and thoughts that race within us, or we may feel our bodies as “numb” as we begin to tune into the disassociated state of our physical beings which is common to trauma.

In fact, meditation is best practiced once the tension in the body has loosened up a little, which is the true purpose of what most people know as “yoga” (asana practice)—to prepare the body for meditation. Hence body-mind practices like yoga asana practice, qi gong, dance, receiving bodywork, somatic psychotherapeutic work, are also essential accompaniments to a meditation practice and will help us get the most out of a practice.

It all comes back around to the four-fold approach of holistic inner and outer work mentioned at the beginning of this essay. How this process unfolds will be different for each of us.

The Battle of Dark vs. Light from an Integral Yoga Perspective

Spiritual Activism

The spiritual life of surrendering to the Divine is not a passive experience but one that we must engage in consciously. It is about becoming an active force in service for the Divine. Recently I’ve listened to a very insightful series called “Evenings with Sraddhalu” [links and videos of the talk are posted below at the end of this essay]. It is based on the Integral Yoga teachings by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Sraddhalu explains thoroughly the 3D matrix manifestations of the occult asuric dark forces and how they play out in light of the evolution of consciousness and the descent of the Supramental Consciousness that is occurring based on Aurobindo’s work in his incarnation.

A lot of terminologies he uses are based on Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s experiences and teachings, but Sraddhalu explains it in clear and understandable language. He’s also one of few spiritual teachers who are also aware of the matrix on the deeper levels, like in regard to secret societies, the cabal, the deep state, media control, the banking system, the socialist NWO, ancient history, the hyperdimensional occult forces, etc.

He stresses the importance to engage in “spiritual activism” to push back against the asuric forces; and warns of falling into a self-centered passive spirituality (trap of asceticism). He also calls out the corrupted New Age spirituality, in particular, “channeled” material which often feeds off “savior” programming.

I found it refreshing to hear someone who fuses deep spiritual processes with the awareness of the matrix forces that stand against the Light. Most of the readers of my work will be aware of the matrix topics which he talks about. He lays out an excellent overview of the workings of the Supramental/Divine and the evolution of consciousness. As mentioned before, it’s based on Sri Aurobindo’s work, but the ideas he speaks to are applicable universally and also mirrored in other complete esoteric teachings.

The Splitting of Humanity, the Supramental Action, and the Matrix

The Mother mentioned a possible “splitting of humanity,” which I have also written about in my essay Timeline-Reality Split, Frequency Vibration, and the Hidden Forces of Life. She speaks about how one part of humanity of people who sincerely engaged in the divine work (within and without) will “move up” into a collective higher level of awareness, while the pressure of the descending supramental force will disintegrate the other part of humanity who don’t do the work towards “awakening”.

Anyone who cannot embody the Divine (supramental) force that is descending onto this planet will become a pawn to the dark agenda and fall deeper into confusion, ignorance, disembodiment, and suffering.

The world is also in a very fragile balance, and we haven’t reached the “dark night of civilization” yet (which the Mother referred to), which is pointing to a further disintegration for humanity. This “dark night” is not going to be helped by us getting into a fear frequency or a negative or paranoid state of mind, but can act as a sober reality check for the way we may be headed if things keep going in the same direction they seem to be headed.

This impending potential means that we cannot spiritually bypass our inner work and shadow any longer, nor can we bypass looking clearly at the darkness in the world and what needs to be done to resist these asuric hostile forces that control the matrix. We must rise to the responsibility to engage in both inner and outer work.

If insufficient human beings wake up to the reality of how the dark/matrix operates by actively resisting its influences while also doing the necessary inner work to come in alignment with their psychic being (soul) to connect with the Supramental (Divine); we may experience what various ancient civilizations have experienced in past cycles (such as Atlantis), resulting in our full destruction and the Divine pressing the “reset button” on our evolutionary journey.

This active resistance needs to have a spiritual foundation in service to the Divine and the Divine only. The majority of the current state of activism on this planet still falls into the trap of the revolutionary mind (along with the savior/martyr trap) by being distracted by the 3D shadows on the walls; projecting their own unresolved issues onto the world and feeding the Divine & Conquer matrix frequency because they lack the foundation in sincere inner work and spiritual aspiration.

Sri Aurobindo also hinted at various outcomes for humanity: either there will be sufficient push back by awakened humans to counter the asuric dark forces or humanity will be destroyed due to their ignorance and passivity, resulting in the necessity to repeat the cycle. 

And in this current state, we see the majority of humans are still very ego-driven and slaves to their mechanical and conditioned vital desires. Any action coming from that ego-centric foundation will be usurped by the asuric matrix forces, eventually. There are also those on the spiritual path who are not aware of how the matrix forces operate and hence don’t push back (relating to an imbalance in inner/outer work.) Some others are only willing to serve the Divine if they “get what they want” in return as their ego hijacks this process of surrendering to the Divine.

What is needed is for us to be ready and willing to serve the Divine completely; yet how many of us have made that commitment—sincerely? Putting the mirror on myself, I can see my ego’s resistance (which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay). It’s of no use to look at the world and see if people are waking up or not, nor does it really help the world/humanity to just talk/post about the dark forces on social media. The question is, how sincere are you and how sincere am I? Not only concerning my inner self-work, research, and spreading awareness but is my aspiration and surrender to the Divine unconditional?

“All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualized; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfection. The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.

The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.

If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing.

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.”

– Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo hinted at this cataclysmic global destruction as well if a significant part of humanity doesn’t wake up and engage in “spiritual activism” in service to the Divine. We see that possibility mirrored in other esoteric traditions such as in Esoteric Christianity and the Hopi prophecy (“There is way up and down”) as well. Yet, the future is not set in stone. The Divine will succeed eventually, but it may take another twenty, fifty, hundred years or another thousand years (or longer if we must repeat the cycle) if we don’t “heed the voice of the Divine” and instead sink deeper into the Dark Night of Civilization.

Both possibilities exist right now in this fragile balance, and it’s up to each one of us which direction we will go for no one is coming to save us; no God, no aliens, no gurus, and certainly no politicians. The Divine only responds and acts in direct proportion to our own sincere collective efforts coming from within. If we take self-responsibility to learn lessons we increase our ability to anchor the Supramental consciousness onto this planet. We must surrender to the Divine Will which is encouraging us to make this shift.

“With the approach of the era of the Holy Spirit, everything must be gradually brought to the light of day, not only the secrets of the laboratory but the deepest meanings of esotericism. The same must happen with illusions, errors and lies, which must also be revealed so that they can later be rectified.

The world is suffering from a lack of harmony which gets deeper on every plane, and this is a serious danger to the moral and spiritual recovery of humanity. It also involves a serious risk of failure in the last stage of this Time of Transition that we are now entering, If this risk is not overcome, the Deluge of Fire awaits us. We will have to make an immense effort to ward off this fate, and we have very little time in which to do it.

Man has only himself to blame for the greatness of the effort needed: this is a result of his obstinate refusal to heed the warnings that have been addressed to him time and again by the Divine Voice, just as he continues today to blind himself to the fact that the Deluge of Fire is being made ready.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis

Sraddhalu also mentions how the Dark Forces are currently much better organized and in fact more “unified” than the forces of light in humanity. Too many of us are still mostly concerned about ourselves primarily from an ego-centric perspective (not to be confused with a healthy sense and relationship with ourselves which gives us the fundamental confidence to do our work in the world).

This doesn’t imply getting into a savior/martyr state or the trap of asceticism. But it requires a deeper faith and trust in the divine with a constant aspiration towards becoming more defined embodiments of this higher force; while also rejecting our egoistic tendencies/desires/attachments of the lower nature/vital and matrix temptations. The Mother mentions that we must be “willing to lose everything we have” when referring to this process.

All of this requires consistent practice, and this Faith and Trust are important because for many of us it will be a while before we can “see” or “feel” the Divine presence within and around us. But once we have had a glimpse of it, we realize that in “losing everything we have” we gain the world, for this “everything” that we lose is mostly related to our false sense of self and the lies we’ve been living because of it—and in the letting go of this we find complete freedom.

The Socialist Centralized-State, Anarchism, and the Ideal of Human Unity

It’s fascinating that Aurobindo warned of the rise of a socialist centralized-State/world government 100 years ago in 1919, mentioning the danger of globalism and the individual losing all freedom under global socialist control (which is the agenda of the [occult] asuric dark forces). He was predicting the socialist New World Order way before Orwell did.

“The process by which the world-State may come starts with the creation of a central body which will at first, have very limited functions, but, once created, must absorb by degrees all the different functions of a centralized international control, as the State, first in the form of a monarchy and then of a parliament, has been absorbing by degrees the whole control of the life of the nation, so that we are now within measurable distance of a centralized socialistic State [NWO] which will leave no part of the life of its individuals unregulated.

A similar process in the world-State will end in the taking up and the regulation of the whole life of the peoples into its hands; it may even end by abolishing national individuality and turning the divisions that it has created into mere departmental groupings, provinces and districts of the one common State. Such an eventuality may seem now a mere unrealizable idea, but it is one which, under certain conditions that are by no means beyond the scope of ultimate possibility, may well become feasible and even, after a certain point is reached, inevitable [note: keep in mind this was written in 1919].

A centralized world-State would signify the triumph of the idea of mechanical unity or rather uniformity. It would inevitably mean the undue depression of an indispensable element in the vigour of human life and progress, the free life of the individual, the free variation of the peoples. It must end, if it becomes permanent and fulfils all its tendencies, either in a death in life, a stagnation or by the insurgence of some new saving but revolutionary force or principle which would shatter the whole fabric into pieces.

The mechanical tendency is one to which the logical reason of man becomes easily addicted and its operations are, too, obviously the easiest to manage and the most ready to hand; its full evolution may seem to the reason desirable, necessary, inevitable, but its end is predestined. A centralized, socialistic State may be a necessity of the future, but a reaction from it is equally a necessity; the greater its pressure, the more certainly will it be met by spread of the spiritual, the intellectual, the vital and practical principle of Anarchism in revolt against that mechanical pressure.

So, too, a centralized mechanical world-State must rouse in the end a similar force against it and might well end in a crumbling up and disintegration, even in the necessity for a repetition of the cycle of humanity ending in a better attempt to solve the problem.

– Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity

Sri Aurobindo also described how a real STO (Service to Others) society based on the sovereignty/voluntaryism principle would look like (even though he doesn’t mention the exact terms) from a spiritual perspective. However, the necessary foundation for this “higher” unification (without oppressing the Individual) is the spiritualization of humanity. As cited above, he talks about the issue/trap of a “mechanical unification” via a forced socialist governing principle (which we see happening now). Furthermore, he writes that anarchism is a natural reaction to the suppression of the Individual by the centralized mechanical world-State:

“Anarchistic thought, although it has not yet found any sure form, cannot but develop in proportion as the pressure of society on the individual increases, since there is something in that pressure which unduly oppresses a necessary element of human perfection.  We need not attach much importance to the grosser vitalistic or violent anarchism which seeks forcibly to react against the social principle or claims the right of man to “live his own life” in the egoistic or crudely vitalistic sense.

But there is a higher, an intellectual anarchistic thought which in its aim and formula recovers and carries to its furthest logical conclusions a very real truth of nature and of the divine in man. In its revolt against the opposite exaggeration of the social principle, we find it declaring that all government of man by man by the power of compulsion is an evil, a violation, a suppression or deformation of a natural principle of good which would otherwise grow and prevail for the perfection of the human race.  Even the social principle in itself is questioned and held liable for a sort of fall in man from a natural to an unnatural and artificial principle of living.”

– Sri Aurobindo, ibid

The Blindspot of Anarchism and the Mental Fortress

However, Aurobindo also mentions that this reactionary intellectual anarchism “has not yet found any sure form” because it is based on limited mental principles (reason and logic) and even though the intention is in the right place the current state of anarchism has no foundation in this process of spiritual realization which was described above.

The main blindspot in the anarchism/voluntaryism movement is the denial of the spiritual reality (many anarchists seem to be atheists and materialists) and majority of anarchists typically hold a lack of awareness regarding the evolution of consciousness that is taking place and how things may be playing out from a bigger picture perspective (including the hyperdimensional matrix).

Anarchistic principles, like sovereignty, are also seen and approached from a very limited ego-personality separative-perspective and are based on reason/logic and not from any spiritual insights/direct experiences; with a resulting tendency to dismiss the fundamental inter-connectedness of all that is.

Anarchists may acknowledge these concepts intellectually but this union must be made with right/left brain and inner female/male modes of being (creative mind/intellect, Being/Doing) working cohesively together and not separate from one another, and often the inner experience of unity in service to the Divine is missing within these popular movements which are intended towards freedom. 

There also seems a lack of sincere self-work and embodiment (let alone esoteric/spiritual inner work) in many self-proclaimed anarchists as they infuse their anti-government attitude with a mental/rational approach of “morality” (which most often fueled by their suppressions of anger/pain and the resulting shadow projections). There is also a tendency towards a distortion or over-simplification of what some call “natural law,” resulting in an unachievable intellectual utopia that is actually ironically very out of touch with nature and the bigger process we’re going through from the perspective of our current evolution of consciousness.

The anarchistic mindset can easily get trapped in its own logic and the limitation of reason without considering the metaphysical/spiritual reality that all is ONE; and this cannot be comprehended/seen/experienced by a mental approach to “solutions” of what system (or -ism) is “best” for humanity.

The “revolutionary mind” tries to get rid of evil via externalizing it and getting caught in this play of duality, fueled by their (shadow) projections which most often result in moral-superiority, shunning and shaming anyone who is not “moral”. But for the sincere spiritual seeker, what is currently happening goes beyond our own mental ideas of morality, good or evil.

“Morality works only within the bounds of the mental process; it does not have access to the subconscious or superconscious regions, or to death, or to sleep (which happens to take up one day out of every three in our existence, so that a sixty-year life span would entitle us to forty years of waking moral life and twenty years of immortality – a strange arithmetic). In other words, morality does not go beyond the limits of our small frontal personality.

Therefore, it is not a rigid moral or fanatic discipline that we want to impose on our being, but a spiritual and comprehensive one that respects each part of our nature while freeing it from its particular mixture; for in truth, there is no absolute evil anywhere – only mixtures.

Furthermore, the seeker no longer thinks in terms of good and evil (assuming he still “thinks” at all), but in terms of exact and inexact. When a sailor needs to take his ship’s bearing, he does not use his love of the sea to do so, but a sextant, and he makes quite sure that the mirror is clean.

If our mirror is not clean, we can never see the reality of things or people, because everywhere we will meet only the reflection of our own desires or fears, the echo of our own turmoil, not only in this world but in all the other worlds, in waking, in sleep, and in death. In order to see, we need to stop being in the center of the picture. The seeker will therefore need to discriminate between those elements that blur his vision and those that clarify it; such will be the essence of his “morality.”
[…]
But the supramental power does not obey our logic or morality; it sees far into space and time, and it does not try to do away with evil in order to save the good, nor does it work through miracles; it frees the good that is within the evil, applying its force and light on the dark half so it consents to its luminous counterpart. Wherever it is applied, the immediate effect is to touch off a crisis; that is, to place the shadow in front of its own light. It is a stupendous evolutionary ferment.”

– Satrpem, Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consiousness

I’ve written about the issues I have found with statism and the religion of government before. I’d also like to state, again, that I’m neither a statist OR an anarchist. This can seem like a contradiction or paradox to anyone who is caught in black & white thinking. Even though I can appreciate the principles of Anarchism from a philosophical and intellectual point of view, reading “The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity” by Sri Aurobindo has confirmed and brought clarity to the issues I sensed with today’s intellectual anarchism; which is that it’s basic flaw is that it is lacking in a deeper spiritual foundation. Essentially, statism and anarchism are two sides of the same coin.

Modern intellectual anarchism is a mechanical reaction to counteract the suppression of the individual by the government. This opposition is needed and has its place, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, but it is still just a symptom of a much larger process, and eventually, humanity will have to undergo this process of spiritualization, which goes beyond statism, anarchism or any other form of “-ism”.

In our current state/level of being and spiritual embodiment (or lack thereof), we are not even close to the “spiritualized anarchism” Sri Aurobindo was talking about and taking this next possible step after the current mechanical/reactionary intellectual anarchism that many “truth seekers” identify with today.  In that sense, we actually have “no choice” but to be governed because our collective consciousness is simply not spiritualized enough to embody and truly live this higher ideal of spiritual anarchism.

The vast majority of human beings are wounded/traumatized, slaves to their thoughts, conditioning, egoic selfish desires, and mechanical reactions—which the psychopaths and anti-divine asuric forces that work through them use to their benefit.

While many self-proclaimed anarchists promote sovereignty and freedom from external governmental forces, most of them are not aware that they themselves are not yet free from their own minds, conditioning, wounds/trauma, lower vital desires, ego identification, mechanical actions, and unconscious shadow aspects (including manipulations by hyperdimensional occult hostile forces which tag into their wounds and blind spots).

This leads them to be trapped in a hopeless cycle of projecting that which they need to address in their healing within by being overly focused on projecting their inner dissonance externally, living under the illusion of an intellectual “sovereignty” yet still being caught in a head-centric disembodied, disconnected, existence.

No matter how logical and rationally sound the ideology of anarchism is, if there is not a sincere self-inquiry, self-work, and efforts to rejects the lower nature of the egoic self to bring forth the true Self (spiritualizing the being though the embodiment process) as an instrument for the Divine, the outside world won’t change. Buddha reflected on how this much this inner process affects the outside world thousands of years ago, and yet we still haven’t gotten the point.

Even though I personally have never formally identified as an anarchist, I’ve also fallen into this mental trap of being caught in my own mental projections and rationalizations. Choosing anarchism (or voluntaryism or any other -sim) over statism is still being caught in duality on the level of mind. In our current state of evolution, we’re still trapped in what Satprem called the mental fortress: a world based on living a head-centric mental existence, shut off from Divine guidance, spiritual insight, our bodies, and the interconnectedness of life.

We live in the age of “mental man”. This period had its place and teaching function on the trajectory to become “superman” (coined by Sri Aurobindo) – a human who is fully spiritualized as a conscious divinized being who lives in oneness with all that is; having transformed both body and matter he has transcended duality—and is even beyond death itself.

“This implacable duality which assails the whole life of mental man is obviously insoluble at the level of the Duality. One might as well fight the right hand with the left. Yet, that is exactly what the human mind has done, without much success, at all levels of its existence, offsetting its heaven with hell, matter with spirit, individualism with collectivism, or any other isms that proliferate in this sorry system. But one does not get out by the decrees of any ism pushed to its perfection.[…]

Now, everything must be transformed, even the body and matter, since we are right in it. Ironically, this is the greatest service this dark, materialistic and scientific age may have rendered us: to compel such a plunge of the spirit into matter that it had either to lose itself in it or to be transformed with it. Absolute darkness is but the shadow of a greater Sun, which digs its abysses in order to raise up a more stable beauty, founded on the purified base of our earthly subconscious and seated erect in truth down to the very cells of our bodies.”

– Satprem, On The Way To Supermanhood, Chapter: The Mental Fortress

“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,
Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.”

– Sri Aurobindo

Even looking at the Auroville community in India (which was the Mother’s vision of “a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities” and was founded in 1968) we see that it has deviated from its original intentions and aim. Eventually, many problems arose within this “conscious” community of Auroville (which was based partially on anarchistic principles) which Sraddhalu mentioned in his talks as well. We see similar issues in many other “conscious” and “anarchistic” communities. The founding ideals are there, but how that plays out, in reality, is often a very different story.

“If Reason were the secret highest law of the universe or if man the mental being were limited by mentality, it might be possible for him by the power of the reason to evolve out of the dominance of infrarational Nature which he inherits from the animal.

He could then live securely in his best human self as a perfected rational and sympathetic being, balanced and well-ordered in all parts, the sattwic man of Indian philosophy; that would be his summit of possibility, his consummation. But his nature is rather transitional; the rational being is only a middle term of Nature’s evolution. A rational satisfaction cannot give him safety from the pull from below nor deliver him from the attraction from above.

If it were not so, the ideal of intellectual Anarchism might be more feasible as well as acceptable as a theory of what human life might be in its reasonable perfection; but, man being what he is, we are compelled in the end to aim higher and go farther.

A spiritual or spiritualised anarchism might appear to come nearer to the real solution or at least touch something of it from afar. As it expresses itself at the present day, there is much in it that is exaggerated and imperfect. Its seers seem often to preach an impossible self-abnegation of the vital life and an asceticism which instead of purifying and transforming the vital being, seeks to suppress and even kill it; life itself is impoverished or dried up by this severe austerity in its very springs.

Carried away by a high-reaching spirit of revolt, these prophets denounce civil- isation as a failure because of its vitalistic exaggerations, but set up an opposite exaggeration which might well cure civilisation of some of its crying faults and uglinesses, but would deprive us also of many real and valuable gains. But apart from these excesses of a too logical thought and a one-sided impulsion, apart from the inability of any “ism” to express the truth of the spirit which exceeds all such compartments, we seem here to be near to the real way out, to the discovery of the saving motive- force.

The solution lies not in the reason, but in the soul of man, in its spiritual tendencies. It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone create a perfect human order. It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords.”

– Sri Aurobindo, ibid

In other words, the solution is neither statism nor anarchism, but the embodiment of the higher Supramental Force. This is not only a spiritual revolution but a complete change of consciousness in the collective/individual resulting in “a spiritual oneness creating a psychological oneness which would not depend upon intellectual or other uniformity, and compelling a oneness of life which would not depend on its mechanical means of unification, but would find itself enriched by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.”

“The saving element needed is a new psychological factor which will at once make a united life necessary to humanity and force it to respect the principle of freedom. The religion of humanity seems to be the one growing force which tends in that direction; for it makes for the sense of human oneness, it has the idea of the race, and yet at the same time it respects the human individual and the natural human grouping. But its present intellectual form seems hardly sufficient.

The idea, powerful in itself and in its effects, is yet not powerful enough to mold the whole life of the race in its image; it has to concede too much to the egoistic side of human nature, once all and still nine-tenths of our being, with which its larger idea is in conflict; and on the other side, leaning principally on the reason, it helps too much the mechanical solution. For the rational idea ends always by being captured by its machinery and becoming the slave of the machine, until a new idea revolts against it and breaks up the machinery only to substitute in the end another mechanical system.

A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this we do not mean what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development.

What is meant, is the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine reality, in which we are all one and of which humanity is the highest vehicle on earth and that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here, with a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth.

It means that oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of co-operation, but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality; the realization by the individual that only in the face of his fellow-men is his own life complete, the realization by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded; a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race.

To go into all that this implies, would be too large a subject to be entered upon here; it is enough to point out that in this direction lies the eventual road. No doubt, if this is only an idea like the rest, it will go the way of all ideas; but if it is at all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life.

A spiritual oneness creating a psychological oneness which would not depend upon intellectual or other uniformity, and compelling a oneness of life which would not depend on its mechanical means of unification, but would find itself enriched by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.

Change of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds its formations first in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner:

it is only through the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge and creation of the thing it held in its subconscient self. Thinkers, historians, sociologists who belittle the individual and would like to lose him in the mass or think of him chiefly as a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side of the truth of Nature’s workings in humanity.

All great changes therefore find their first clear and effective power and their direct shaping force in the mind and spirit of an individual or of a limited number of individuals. The mass follows, but unfortunately in a very imperfect and confused fashion which often or even usually ends in the failure or distortion of the thing created. If it were not so, mankind could have advanced on its way with a victorious rapidity instead of with the lumbering hesitations and soon exhausted rushes that seem to be all of which it has yet been capable.

Could such a realization develop rapidly in mankind, we might then solve the problem of unification in a deeper and truer way from the inner truth to the outer forms. Until then, the attempt to bring it about by mechanical means must proceed.

But the higher hope of humanity lies in the growing number of men who will realize this truth and seek to develop it in themselves, so that when the mind of man is ready to escape from its mechanical bent—perhaps when it finds that its mechanical solutions are all temporary and disappointing— the truth of the Spirit may step in and lead humanity to the path of its highest possible happiness and perfection.[…]

The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a fullness of life and man’s being in the individual and the race which will be the base for the heights of the spirit…it will be all things to all, but in all it will be at once their highest aim and meaning and the most all-embracing expression of themselves in which all they are and seek for will be fulfilled. It will aim at establishing in society the true inner theocracy, not the false theocracy of a dominant Church or priesthood, but that of the inner Priest, Prophet and King.

It will reveal to man the divinity in himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty, Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabha ?vena, and so find it and live in it, that however — even in all kinds of ways — he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that, in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.”

– Sri Aurobindo, ibid

The Adventure of Consciousness Continues

We are in a birth canal during this Time of Transition. It may take another hundred or thousand years depending on many unknown factors and our willingness to “heed the voice of the Divine” and consciously engage in this process of the spiritualization of our being. If we don’t answer the call of the Divine, we may very well experience another “Dark Night of Civilization” resulting in cataclysmic destruction and the possibility to reset this current point of evolution, causing us to have to relearn our lessons from the “beginning” again—until we get it “right”.

We must acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with reality; that everything that we are currently experiencing exists exactly to support our greatest evolution—if we choose to rise to answer the call. We are in the midst of a massive multi-dimensional spiritual evolutionary process. We need to understand that our current point evolution is far from final. The human being, in its current form, is a transitional being. We’ve been so focused on external progress, technological solutions, and industrial achievements that we’ve neglected the importance of our inner life and progress. However, even this phase of egoic, materialistic, mental consciousness has had its purpose, as we continue to spiral up and down, ascend and descend until all and everything around us in all directions is spiritualized into its fullest potential.

Any insistence of external action without this sincere aspiration and surrender to the Divine is not only limited but futile. Nothing is going to change in any permanent way externally unless we spiritualize our being in complete surrender to Spirit and the Divine. When we open ourselves up to the Divine Consciousness and Force by allowing it to descend into us and gradually transform our mind, life, and body, it results in a true union (yoga) with the Divine and our complete perfection of this terrestrial existence. It is the manifestation of the Life Divine and Divine’s Will. The supramental divine consciousness is already exerting immense pressure on us to awaken into this new level of being. We must choose to align with and to surrender to this Force; which implies engaging in the necessary four-fold holistic work or we will “bust” and disintegrate. This process may also result in a “Splitting of Humanity” as the Mother hinted at—the Timeline-Reality Split.

In other words, it is not the time to escape the world any further but to choose to embrace life by anchoring the divine force within us.  The adventure of this cosmic yoga towards our Divinity of becoming fully spiritualized beings continues; as we enter into the birth canal of our new human species.

“Man is a transitional being. He is not final.
The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution.
It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature’s process.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Below are the parts of the talk “Evenings with Sraddhalu” relating to the topics mentioned above. The whole series, covering many other topics, can be viewed HERE.

1. World situation, battle between Light & Darkness

2. World situation, the Subjective Age

 3. World situation, the Supramental Action

4. The Night of Civilization and Spiritual-based Activism

5. Night of Civilisation and the Asuric Agenda

6. Battle of Dark and Light, the Educational System

7. Battle of Dark and Light, the Deep State

8. Battle of Dark and Light, the Overmental Manifestation