The Untethered Soul (12 page)

If you close around the pain and stop it from passing through, it will stay in you. That is why our natural tendency to resist is so counterproductive. If you don’t want the pain, why do you close around it and keep it? Do you actually think that if you resist, it will go away? It’s not true. If you release and let the energy pass through, then it will go away. If you relax when the pain comes up inside your heart, and actually dare to face it, it will pass. Every single time you relax and release, a piece of the pain leaves forever. Yet every time you resist and close, you are building up the pain inside. It’s like damming up a stream. You are then forced to use the psyche to create a layer of distance between you who experiences the pain and the pain itself. That is what all the noise is inside your mind: an attempt to avoid the stored pain.

If you want to be free, you must first accept that there is pain in your heart. You have stored it there. And you’ve done everything you can think of to keep it there, deep inside, so that you never have to feel it. There is also tremendous joy, beauty, love, and peace within you. But they are on the other side of the pain. On the other side of the pain is ecstasy. On the other side is freedom. Your true greatness hides on the other side of that layer of pain. You must be willing to accept pain in order to pass through to the other side. Just accept that it is in there and that you are going to feel it. Accept that if you relax, it will have its moment before your awareness, and then it will pass. It always does.

Sometimes you will notice that it feels hot inside as pain passes. In fact, as you relax into the energy of the pain, you may feel tremendous heat in your heart. That is the pain being purified from your heart. Learn to enjoy that burning. It is called the fire of yoga. It does not seem enjoyable, but you will learn to enjoy it because it is freeing you. In truth, pain is the price of freedom. And the moment you are willing to pay that price, you will no longer be afraid. The moment you are not afraid of the pain, you’ll be able to face all of life’s situations without fear.

Sometimes you will go through deep experiences that bring up intense pain inside of you. If it is in there, it is going to come up. If you have any wisdom, you will leave it alone and not try to change your life to avoid it. You will just relax and give it the space it needs to release and burn through you. You do not want this stuff inside your heart. To feel great love and freedom, to find the presence of God within you, all of this stored pain must go. It is in this inner work that spirituality becomes a reality. Spiritual growth exists in that moment when you are consciously willing to pay the price of freedom. You must be willing at all times, in all circumstances, to remain conscious in the face of pain and to work with your heart by relaxing and remaining open.

Remember, if you close around something, you will be psychologically sensitive about that subject for the rest of your life. Because you stored it inside of you, you will be afraid that it will happen again. But if you relax instead of closing, it will work its way through you. If you stay open, the blocked energy inside of you will release naturally, and you will not take on any more.

This is the core of spiritual work. When you are comfortable with pain passing through you, you will be free. This world will never be able to bother you again because the worst the world can do is to hit the pain stored within you. If you do not care, if you are no longer afraid of yourself, you are free. You will then be able to walk through this world more vibrant and alive than ever before. You will feel everything at a deeper level. You will begin to have truly beautiful experiences rise up within you. Eventually you will understand that there is an ocean of love behind all of this fear and pain. That force will sustain you by feeding your heart from deep within. Over time, you will form an intensely personal relationship with this beautiful inner force. It will replace the relationship you currently have with inner pain and disturbance. Now peace and love will run your life. When you pass beyond the layer of pain, you will finally be free from the binds of the psyche.

part IV
going beyond

Hubble Deep Field

Image credit: NASA, The Hubble Deep Field Team (STScI), Robert Williams

At some point in your growth, it starts to become quieter inside. This happens quite naturally as you take a deeper seat within yourself. You then come to realize that though you have always been in there, you have been completely overwhelmed by the constant barrage of thoughts, emotions, and sensory inputs that draw on your consciousness. As you see this, it begins to dawn on you that you might actually be able to go beyond all these disturbances. The more you sit in the seat of witness consciousness, the more you realize that since you are completely independent of what you are watching, there must be a way to break free of the magical hold that the psyche has on your awareness. There must be a way out.

This inner breakthrough to complete freedom is traditionally depicted by the overused and generally misunderstood term: “enlightenment.” The problem is that our views of enlightenment are either based upon our personal experiences or upon our limited conceptual understanding. Since most people have never had experiences in this realm, the state of enlightenment is either scoffed at completely or viewed as the ultimate mystical state accessible to almost no one. It’s safe to say that the only thing most people know for sure about enlightenment is that they are not there.

However, with the understanding that thoughts, emotions, and sensory objects are simply passing before your consciousness, it becomes reasonable to question whether your sense of awareness need be limited to this experience. What if consciousness were to remove its focus from your personal set of thoughts, your personal set of emotions, and your limited sensory input? Would you become untethered from the bonds of the personal self and be set free to explore beyond? And how, exactly, did consciousness become bound to the personal self to begin with? The problem with even attempting to consider these questions is that they call for a discussion of what exists beyond the confines of the mind. Obviously, that discussion is very difficult to have from within the mental structure we are so accustomed to using. For this reason, we will begin exploring the untethered state through the use of an allegory. Much like Plato used dialogue to tell his “Allegory of the Cave” in 360 BC, we will use a short story to tell our allegory of a very special house.

Imagine that you found yourself in the midst of an open field where the sun was always shining. It was a beautiful place of great light and great openness. It was so beautiful that you decided you wanted to live there. So you bought the land, and right in the middle of the enormous field, you began personally designing and building the house of your dreams. You put down a solid foundation because you wanted the house to be very strong and to last a long time. You built the house out of concrete blocks so that you wouldn’t have any problems with decaying or leaking. To make the house ecologically sound, you decided to put in very few windows and to build a roof with lots of overhang. After you put in the windows, and the house was complete, you realized that a lot of heat still came in. So you installed high-quality protective shutters that not only reflected sunlight and heat back to the outside, but also could be locked down for security purposes. It was a very large house that could store enough supplies to allow for complete self-sufficiency. You even built separate quarters for a quiet acquaintance who would keep the house clean and leave you to be in solitude. And solitude it would be, since your romantic quest included a commitment to no phones, radios, televisions, or Internet connections.

Your house was finally finished, and you were very excited to be living out there. You loved the openness of the field and all the light and beauty of nature. But most of all, you were enamored with the house. You had put your heart and soul into every aspect of the design, and it showed—it was truly “you.” In fact, over time, between your infatuation with the house and your growing discomfort with all the strange sights and sounds outside, you started spending more time indoors. It was then that you realized that with the shutters and doors fully locked down, the house actually began to feel like a fortress. And this was just fine with you. Being a city person, it was pretty scary living so far out of touch in total isolation. But you were committed to making it on your own.

So you gradually became accustomed to living safely within the confines of the house. You happily went about your business of reading and writing as you had always longed to do. It was actually quite comfortable in there since it was fully climate controlled, and you had been wise enough to install a modern full-spectrum lighting system. Ironically, you found your house so comfortable, enjoyable, and safe that you stopped thinking about the outside altogether. After all, the inside was familiar, predictable, and within the realm of your control. The outside was unknown, unpredictable, and completely out of your control. Your sense of inner sanctum was supported by the fact that when the shutters and blinds were locked in place they blended like paintings on the walls, and you never even considered risking going outside to unlock them. They were so well made that when the lights were turned off it was absolutely pitch black, day or night. But since you were accustomed to never turning off the lights, you didn’t notice this until they started burning out. It was only then that you realized your predicament: no one had left you replacement bulbs compatible with the new system. This meant that once the final light failed, you were left to find your way around the house in absolute darkness.

From that point forward, the only light you had came from the few candles you kept for emergencies. But there were very few of these, so you conserved them well. Being a person who loved light, this was very difficult for you. Yet it was not difficult enough to force you to overcome the fears you had developed about leaving the safety of your house. Eventually, the stress of living in this darkness took its toll on your health, both physically and mentally. With time, the very memory of the beautiful sunlit field began to fade from your mind, never to return again.

You became very concerned about keeping the house lit. The only light you knew about was the light you created in the darkness with your precious candles. It became pretty lonely in there. You were cut off from everything, and the only comfort you felt was the sense of protection your house afforded you. You were no longer aware of exactly what you were so afraid of; you were just aware of always being scared and uncomfortable. It was all you could do just to try to hold yourself together. You even stopped reading and writing because of the lack of light. It was dark, and you too were falling into darkness.

Then one day, the housekeeper, who shared your overwhelming need to stay in the safety of the house, called you down to the storage cellar. You were amazed by what you saw. A full supply of emergency flashlights had been found that could be powered simply by shaking them. Your housekeeper had already set some up, and the cellar was fully radiant. This was a true turning point in your life.

You set about your business of trying to create light, beauty, and happiness within the confines of your house. You decorated each room and worked together to keep the light shining brightly until you went to sleep. You started reading and writing again, and it turned out that your housemate loved reading your writings. In fact, it was not just the artificial lights that were lighting the house. The ember of love had begun to glow in both of your hearts. Imagine the light you could create together instead of apart. You began spending all of your time with each other, and you even staged a marriage ceremony. It was so beautiful as you vowed to take care of each other and bring love and light into your home. Compared to the darkness in which you had been living, this was heaven.

One day you came across a book in your library. It interested you because it talked about the natural, radiant light that exists “outside.” It even spoke of bathing in that light. But it was talking about more light than you could ever imagine, without anyone having to do anything to create it. This was confusing to you. After all, the only light you knew about was the artificial light from candles and flashlights. How could you make that much light and keep it going? You didn’t have a clue what this book was talking about because you could only view things in relation to the way you were living. You were living inside the house, and therefore you were living inside of darkness. All the light that you could experience was limited to what you could create within the house. You had lived there for so long that all your hopes, dreams, philosophies, and beliefs were founded upon being inside that dark house. Your whole world was about keeping together the life you had managed to build for yourself within the confines of the house.

When you continued reading this seemingly mystical book, it spoke of what it was like to actually walk around in this natural light. It seemed to be describing a self-luminous, omnipresent light that shines everywhere all at once. It was a light that falls on everything constantly and evenly. Though you had no frame of reference for understanding this, it touched something deep inside of you. The book then discussed actually going outside, that is, going beyond the walls of the world you have created for yourself. In fact, it said that while you are attached and enamored with the world you created to avoid darkness, you will never know the abundance of natural light that is beyond the confines of your house. How will you ever go outside when you are so dependent upon what you have built inside?

The analogy of life inside this house is a perfect fit for our predicament. Our consciousness, our awareness of being, is living deep inside of us in an artificially sealed off area that is absolute. It has four walls, a floor, and a roof. It is so solid that not one ray of natural light comes in. The only light we get is what we manage to create for ourselves. If we don’t create good situations for ourselves, there is darkness. So we are very busy decorating daily. We do this by trying to bring things in there with us—hoping to create at least a little light, in the house of our own making, where we have sealed ourselves off.

That is the visual: you are inside a house, totally sealed off from natural light, and the house is sitting in the middle of an open field full of brilliant light. But what is your house made of? What are your walls made of? How can they seal off all that light and keep you locked inside? Your house is made of your thoughts and emotions. The walls are made of your psyche. That’s what that house is. It is all your past experiences; all your thoughts and emotions; all the concepts, views, opinions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams that you have collected around yourself. You hold them in place on all sides, including above and below you. You have pulled together in your mind a specific set of thoughts and emotions, and then you have woven them together into a conceptual world in which you live. This mental structure completely blocks you from whatever natural light is on the outside of its walls. You have walls of thoughts thick enough, and closed enough, to where nothing but darkness is inside that structure. You are so entranced into paying attention to your thoughts and emotions that you never go beyond the borders they create.

If you want to see how restrictive your walls are, just start walking toward them. Let’s say you have an emotional fear of heights. When you were young you fell off a ladder, and the impression stayed with you. That is one of your walls. If you doubt that it’s a wall, let’s see you walk through it. Let’s say something happens that activates these old feelings of fear, and you decide to walk right toward it. The closer you get, the more you will have the urge to pull back. That which you collected from your past forms a boundary that you intuitively want to avoid. That’s natural, that’s what we do with walls; we avoid running into them. But because you avoid running into them, they lock you inside their perimeter. They become your prison because they are the boundaries of your awareness. Because you are not willing to approach them, you cannot see what is beyond them.

When you approach the barrier areas of your thoughts and emotions, it feels like going into an abyss. You don’t want to go near that place. But you can go there, and if you want to get out, you will go there. Eventually you will realize that darkness is not what’s really there. What is really there are the walls that are blocking the infinite light. When you’re looking for light, that is a crucial distinction. If you see a wall and it is protecting you from unending darkness, you will not want to go there. But if you see a wall that is blocking the light, you will want to go there in order to remove the wall. It is often said that you must go through the darkest night in order to get to the infinite light. This is because what we call darkness is really the blockage of light. You must go past these walls.

It’s not really difficult to get past the walls. Time and again, every day, the natural flow of life collides with our walls and tries to tear them down. But time and again, we defend them. You must realize that when you defend yourself, you are really defending your walls. There is nothing else to defend in there. There is just your awareness of being and the limited house you built to live in. What you are defending is the house you built to protect yourself. You are hiding inside. If something happens to challenge the walls of your psyche, you get highly defensive. You have built a self-concept, moved inside, and now you defend that home with all you have. But what creates that inner home, other than the walls of your thoughts? When you say, “I’m a woman and I’m forty-five years old. I’m married to Joe and I graduated from this school…” those are thoughts. The actual situations don’t exist in there with you except in the form of thoughts that you cling to: “But I was a cheerleader, and I was president of my senior class.” That was thirty years ago. Those situations don’t exist anymore. But they exist inside of you, and they form the walls in which you live.