All that’s required for enlightenment or an easier life is to release resistance and the need to control what happens to you.

The need to control life comes from the ego and is an impediment to higher consciousness. It’s only when resistance is released that the need to control fades; then, you can be open to a less stressful life that still challenges you but doesn’t bring you out of your center.

When you resist or try to control life, you create tension that manifests as obstacles further down your path.

You meet brick walls where there were once open doors, and those who struggle to find the source of this newfound difficulty need look no further than the resistance they may be showing and the control they may be attempting to exert.

Be Open

Adversity is inevitable. You can’t control whether you experience it, but you can lay down the need for control and, in doing so, learn to respond to it properly.

It’ll be easier if you respond with love and openness, and it’s funny how a simple shift in perspective births such a profound shift in consciousness while making life infinitely more joyful.

If you can be open to what your path has for you and willing to go with the flow while going out of your way to take opportunities and create new experiences, you can get the most out of your life without forcing the experiences you want.

Releasing resistance, which includes the need to control your life, could very well be the key to enlightenment or creating the life you deserve. It’s a simple concept, but acting on it can be difficult.

An Interesting Paradox

Paul Ferrini outlines the ‘one supreme addiction’.

“You think you are the doer of your life and that you have created safety, when in fact your life is about to explode and you are about to realize that you have no conscious control over what happens. You believe that you are powerful, yet you demonstrate again and again your utter powerlessness.

“This is an interesting paradox, is it not? No matter how hard it tries, the ego cannot create safety. No matter how many times the ego tries to push you out of the present moment, it inevitably brings you into it full force, because the price of denial is pain.

“The more you seek to control life the more life will give you the message that it cannot be controlled. And then you will feel powerless and try even harder to control. You see! It is a silly game. You cannot win the game, yet you can’t stop playing it either. This is the one supreme addiction.

“It has many forms. Even the attachment to risk-taking is a form of control. The forms are endless.” (1)

The Mind Strives Needlessly for Security

Adyashanti describes the secure position from which the mind attempts to operate.

“Life moves, undulates, breathes in and out, contracting and expanding. This is its nature, the nature of what is. Whatever is, is on the move. Nothing remains the same for very long.

“The mind wants everything to stop so that it can get its foothold, find its position, so it can figure out how to control life. Through the pursuit of material things, knowledge, ideas, beliefs, opinions, emotional states, spiritual states, and relationships, the mind seeks to find a secure position from which to operate.” (2)

Beyond the limited self and the ego that keeps it in motion is pure awareness.

“The mind seeks to nail life down and get it to stop moving and changing. When this doesn’t work, the mind begins to seek the changeless, the eternal, something that doesn’t move. But the mind of thought is itself an expression of life’s movement and so must always be in movement itself.

“When there is thought, that thought is always moving and changing. There is really no such thing as thought. There is only thinking, so thought which is always moving (as thinking) cannot apprehend the changeless.

“When thought enters into the changeless it goes silent. When thought goes silent, the thinker, the psychological ‘me’, the image-produced self, disappears. Suddenly it is gone. You, as an idea, are gone. Awareness remains alone.” (3)

Spirituality and Self-Harm

Many spiritual people, Adyashanti writes, are violent to themselves.

“Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves.

“They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind’s idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence.” (4)

Few seekers are ‘truly free’ because most conform to ideas and beliefs.

“Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven.

“But Freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of ‘a someone who is in control’ is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.” (5)

It’s Time to Let Go

To take Adyashanti’s advice and ‘step backward into the unknown’ is to relinquish the control over your life you’ve struggled to maintain since day one, and you’ll feel a supreme sense of relief when you finally let go of it.

Most of us, including me, have yet to let go of it completely.

It helps to have guidance from spiritual teachers who are aware of the difficulty of detaching from the known, but ultimately, it’s a personal process that requires deep soul searching.

Meditation and other forms of consciousness expansion reveal vibrant states of being beyond the chatter of the mind, and the need to control life will fade along with the chatter and resistance that once seemed impossible to transcend.

As you slowly release your grip on life, you’ll finally begin to see clearly.

You’ll know without a doubt you’re connected with something much greater than the physical world, and openness to this cosmic consciousness will help you release the rest of your resistance and welcome the lessons placed on your path.

Footnotes:

1. Paul Ferrini, Silence of the Heart. South Deerfield, MA: Heartways Press, 1996, 28-9.
2. Adyashanti, “Only Awareness Remains,” 2003, downloaded from http://www.adyashanti.org, 2004.
3. Loc. Cit.
4. Adyashanti, “Selling Water by the River,” Inner Directions Journal, Fall/Winter, 1999, downloaded fromhttp://www.adyashanti.org, 2004.
5. Loc. Cit.

Featured image credit: personalexcellence.co

When St. John of the Cross first used the phrase “dark night of the soul,” he was referring to the state immediately before a certain stage of enlightenment. (1) Whether the stage he was pointing to was Brahmajnana or Sahaja Samadhi, I don’t know. (2) And it isn’t important to what I think he was saying.

What he was saying, in my view, was that we need to pass through a time on our path to enlightenment which will be like a dark night to the soul. We’re bereft of our senses. We seem to be suspended in nothingness, deprived of every foothold. We feel abandoned which makes it doubly dark.

We’ve taken his phrase and widened its application to mean a very hard time. I had one of these minor dark nights of the soul recently and a description of what came of it belongs in an Ascension ethnography, I think.

I was wrestling with vasanas that were exploding all over the place. One vasana was going off called “I want to be left alone.” Another vasana was going off called ” I don’t suffer fools gladly.” All the while, in the background, what was really going on was I was feeling bereft of something – I didn’t know what. I felt myself to be sinking into … what? Not failure. That didn’t fit. So what was I bereft of? I didn’t know.

Then it came to me in an “Aha!” moment. I’m unwilling to wait any longer. I want to be set free from the group that is waiting. I want to start a group called we’re getting on with things. (No, don’t write me!)

I was feeling bereft of myself. My sense of myself was seeping away from so much … waiting.

I’m unwilling to situate the cause of my happiness in something or someone outside myself any longer.

I saw at the moment of insight that I was anchoring everything nurturing, everything satisfying to forces outside myself. And I was dying on the vine from a lack of … well, anything happening, really. Any of the talked-about events occurring. This has been a recurring theme for me since the mothership failed to appear in Oct. 2008.

This situation, I said to myself, is not nurturing me (OK, I screamed). I need to assume leadership here too and begin to nurture myself.

I don’t say that with blame. It’s simply an insight I came to and the feeling of having had enough that went with it.

It doesn’t mean a rupture in anything. I’ll still take my lead from the Company of Heaven’s teachings. It’s simply another phase of something necessary: Me taking control of my life.

Waiting carries no sustenance for me any more and so I begin the search for whatever it is that replaces it.

I don’t know what that might be. Shall I establish a beachhead of understanding?

Everyone is different, right? And I have to be careful with myself because I have both the monk and the warrior inside me (past-life aspects). What I replace the happiness with that I got from serving by waiting will have to pass muster with both of them.

Well, the world is my oyster. Like everyone else, I can choose whatever it is I’ll give my attention to until events start to unfold. I can follow my bliss.

And then in a second flash of insight, the answer becomes obvious.

Building Nova Earth. What could be more important than building a world that works?

This seems to be a circle I keep going round and ending up at the very same place.

Have we ever had a better chance at something like that? Think about it for a second. When have we ever had even a conceptual crack at it, before now?

Why, even having this conversation – have we ever had the opportunity to do that? Why would I want to trade this opportunity for anything else? There’s no better game in town, viewed from any perspective.

Knock yourself out designing the New World. That doesn’t have to wait for something to happen. Create the new philosophy. Design the new economy. Plan the new medicine. Open up the education of children after decades of government (Illuminati) neglect.

You who have that new curriculum tucked away in your desk, get it out and dust it off. You who have the drawings for nuclear communities drawing on railway container cars, get them out. All the new ideas that have been awaiting their time? It’s time. We’re building Nova Earth. What better time could there possibly be?

So that’s enough of dates and rates for me, my friends. That’s enough of waiting. There’s so much of Nova Earth that can be built – even with just the pen.

This doesn’t represent a change of anything for me. But what it does represent is seeing that I’ve reached this very same point again by another circuitous route. That validates for me the feeling of rightness and desirability in what we’re doing, in building Nova Earth.

Footnotes

(1) Bernadette Roberts offers a succinct description of the dark night of the soul, here:

“In experience, the onset of this process [of God-realization] is the descent of the cloud of unknowing, which, because his former light has gone out and left him in darkness, the contemplative initially interprets as the divine gone into hiding. In modern terms, the descent of the cloud is actually the falling away of the ego-center, which leaves us looking into a dark hole, a void or empty space in ourselves. Without the veil of the ego-center, we do not recognize the divine; it is not as we thought it should be. …

“From here on we must feel our way in the dark, and the special eye that allows us to see in the dark opens up at this time.” (Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991, 131.)

(2) Brahmajnana occurs when the kundalini reaches the seventh chakra. It results in the experience of transcendence and the bliss of a temporary heart opening. It is not moksha or liberation and hence not Ascension. Saying “being liberated from physical birth and death” is the same as saying “ascending to the Fifth Dimension.”