Meditation: An Odyssey of Self

The path back to Self, or the path back to home, is littered with many roadblocks, dead ends, speed bumps, and even the seemingly unsurpassable slopes of a great mountain. You may also find, like Odysseus in his odyssey, beings in the form of a Cyclops or the voices of the Sirens, all created to thwart you from your destination, your return to home. Whatever you may encounter, you will, putting all stories and metaphor aside, the wiles and tricks of the ego, who is hell-bent on surviving at all costs, even if it is your own life that it must pay.

But let me say this. The path back to Self is also an illusion, the road and the journey, the days and the nights of time, the entire breadth and compass of space. You are Self, you are already here. And this is important to understand. The mind, connected to the biological form, and the consciousness, directed into the focus of the mind-body, is easily led astray, just like you are led astray to believe that what you are looking at now are letters on your screen. But there are no letters at all, except on the surface of things. These are pixels grouped together inside the screen, that are controlled by an inner program that tells the screen which pixels and where are to be dark, grey, and white. It is all an illusion designed for some good – to give you the messages of symbols, representations of the light that you may or may not be experiencing right now. This is, if you can witness it, the Great Mystery of who you are, the secret of the universe that cannot be relayed through the symbols themselves, but only through the presence of conscious witness who can see through them.

Plato taught, through the symbolism of his dialogues, that all roads lead back into the unity, the non-duality as many call it now, Being or the Good. You can call it what you will: self, god, God, being, unity, love, presence, “the now”, nothingness, the void, emptiness. It doesn’t matter – all of those are appropriate inside the context they are in; and they are inappropriate outside the context. They are simply the signs and the pointers to who you truly are, but they never are pointers to the ego. They always must point away from ego.

As I have said in other posts, the ego is not attracted to things such as Being and emptiness. The ego is always caught up in desire and want, fear and aversion, and it is always involved in the generation of stories and timeliness that give it things to do, to be, and to become dramatic about. The ego keeps busy because it needs to maintain all of these stories, identities, and diversions – it is the only way it can feel its own existence. This works for a while, until it doesn’t, and as time goes on, life becomes and more and more painful: for when you have chased love for lifetimes, only to come up empty handed, the pain gathers in layers around the heart, pulling it down into the lower regions, and the frequencies of dark magical brews and chemical addictions. For many, there is that moment of heartbreak, when the pain can no longer be endured. There is usually a trigger to unravel this pain, and it is always a beloved.

And when you begin that journey, of clearing away the pain and all the ego has gathered to serve that pain, you begin to emerge into that space of Being, the place where the ego finds its end of days, the end of its drama and all its roads. Even Plato has spoken often of this other world, in both the Republic and the Phaedo, a second world that is beyond the world of ego and illusion. It is a world where only joy is found, and it allows you to create and discover and interact beyond the space/time limitations of the world of ego. You will find yourself involved in activities, whether through hobbies or a job or otherwise, that take very little if any effort on your part. You will find that things that are created into the world come from this world and emanate from that through allowance, and very little doing. You will realize how wrong you were about how to be successful and make something in the world, as you will learn that when you see a vision and an idea, that it does not belong to this or that ego – that it is instead of a quantum nature, that is accessible and desired by all. When you communicate it, you will find that others support it and want to bring it into being. There is no resistance here except for the resistance of ego. Fortunately, once you let your own ego die, the ego of others is of very little concern. Nothing can stop what is coming, just as nothing can stop the storm as it rolls down the coast. You learn trust that all things that you envision are there for all to envision and that you and they envision it because it is meant to be something in the world. You can choose what is always present, and what is not present you do not choose. There is no longer a conflict between what you want and what you see. You finally see that there is no longer resistance or duality, no drama, and no suffering. What comes comes. What leaves leaves. It has no importance, like the bird that flies from this branch to the next, effortless without regret or longing. I can assure you, whether you are struggling now or in the future – this is what you have yet to experience and will experience when you finally allow the ego to dissolve by seeing through its tricks and wiles, only to find yourself at home after all.

Blessings XO