A Teaching Remembered

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

by

A.L, Bryant

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE                                                                                                                                                   7

INTRODUCTION                                                                                                                                         8

I           THE JOURNEY DEFINED                                                                                                              10

II           A GUIDE TO LIGHT THE WAY                                                                                                      12

III.        THE JOURNEY BEGINS                                                                                                                 14

IV        YOUR WORLD BEGINS TO SHRINK                                                                                             18

V         YOUR INTERNAL STRUGGLE COMES INTO VIEW                                                                      21

VI        YOUR CONFLICTING IMAGES OF REALITY                                                                                 24

VII.      THE POWER OF YOUR SELF IMAGES BEGINS TO FADE                                                           28

VIII.     THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE                                                                                                             30

IX        YOU BEGIN TO CONTACT THE “SEA” OF UNEXPERIENCED LIFE WITHIN YOU                       34

X         YOUR PSYCHIC CAPACITIES BEGIN TO COME INTO VIEW                                                       38

XI        YOU LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR PSYCHIC POWERS IN RELATION TO YOUR JOURNEY     41

XII.      YOUR BODY BEGINS TO ASSERT ITSELF                                                                                    44

XIII.      YOUR AWARENESS OF YOUR BODY EXPANDS                                                                         48

XIV.      YOU BEGIN TO CONTACT EVIDENCE OF OTHER PLANES OF EXISTENCE                            50

XV       THE KARMIC ROOTS OF YOUR PRESENT LIFETIME                                                                  53

EPILOGUE                                                                                                                                                    55

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to describe the pathway by which a person may move toward the underlying unity within himself which, instinctively, we all desire.  This unity is not a dream but a demonstrable potential existent within each human being.  It is, indeed, a birthright – a seed within the self which when touched by the sunlight of consciousness bursts forth into vigorous growth.

To gain access to this vital inner force is exceedingly difficult.  But to fail to do so is to live in an unending personal hell.  There is no third alternative.

Life is what it is.  The only question is whether or not we are in touch with it.  The Journey is the pathway toward this goal.

A.L.B.

INTRODUCTION

Most people in our society today feel harassed, even trapped, by the circumstances that surround them.  They experience life as a relentless procession of pressures and uncertainties – a kind of treadmill upon which one constantly runs but never gets where he wants to go.  An unsettling sense of emptiness – even deadness – pervades their daily routines.  And underneath their superficial smiles and seeming cheerfulness lies the nagging fear that life is, indeed, as barren and as hostile as it seems.

To gain relief and reassurance, people turn to the myriad of escapes available.  All of these in one way or another seek to ease the sense of burden and discomfort – yet all by their very nature provide nothing more than an illusion of well being.  Although they succeed for a time in suppressing unpleasant feelings and sensations, they solve nothing in themselves.

Through such escapes, a person may achieve considerable relief from the turmoil of his life.  Yet the relief is precarious and superficial.  In spite of all his efforts to maintain the surface calm, there are bound to be moments when feelings of doubt and depression, exhaustion and hopelessness break through.  His is the proverbial house built upon the sand – and he lives in constant dread of the storm.

When unable to avoid contact with his anxieties and tensions, he is apt to feel as though he is swimming with all his might at the edge of a whirlpool and barely holding his own.  The undertow is relentless, and he senses his growing fatigue.  Utterly alone, he feels he is engaged in a struggle for his very existence.

One cannot help but feel there must be some way to gain release from this dilemma.  The trouble is that no alternative is visible to the person who is already immersed in a relentless struggle to hold his life together.  All he can see to do is more of what he is already doing – to struggle harder.  Yet the harder he struggles the more he feels caught.

The problem is that he does not perceive, even dimly, that his struggle is, in fact, a struggle against reality itself – and endless battle to avoid perceiving and accepting life as it is.  If he could see this, he might concede that such a battle is hopeless – that one cannot change reality by denying it.  But he does not see, nor can his blindness be cured in any simple or painless way.

People hold to their struggle with the same vise-like grip with which they cling to life itself.  Yet sooner or later their unceasing efforts to maintain an iron control over their lives must fail.  For many, death itself must constitute this failure.  But for others, there comes in the midst of their struggle a gradual, dawning realization that reality must be faced and the struggle against it abandoned no matter how painful it may be to do so.

This realization has vast significance.  It is, in fact, the turning point in life at which the Journey toward true unity within the self begins.

CHAPTER I, THE JOURNEY DEFINED

The Journey herein described is a journey of consciousness – an inner experience along a tortuous pathway of changing perceptions.  If pursued, it will lead you slowly and painful out of the isolation from life imposed by your loss of contact with reality.  And ultimately, it will deliver you into the paradoxical freedom (and captivity) inherent in being what you are.

Your capacity to be conscious of your life is the deepest expression of your humanness.  Like all such gifts, however, it can be misused.  If you can perceive things as they are, this awareness provides a solid grounding upon which to live your life.  But if your perceptions deny what is real, your consciousness inhabits an unreal “world” of illusions.  And you are, as a consequence, in trouble.

Although you may have doubts about the degree to which illusions play a part in your life, you need to know as clearly as you can the nature of the threat they pose.  You cannot physically live in an imaginary “world”.  And if your mind is lost in such an adventure, the development of your true potential as a human being simply cannot take place.  To be consciously immersed in an unreal “world” is a form of dying.  While your mind is hypnotically focused in a kind of waking dream, you live out your physical life as a sleepwalker, mechanically acting out fixed patterns of behavior that have little relevance to the real circumstances you are in.

The nature of the journey is that it will gradually bring to a halt your continuing conscious movement away from reality and will then cause you to retrace the steps by which you got to where you are.  Only in this way can you find your true freedom and identity.

CHAPTER II, A GUIDE TO LIGHT THE WAY

The most difficult problem you will confront in descending from the “world” of your illusions is that you have consistently “burned your bridges behind you”, submerging out of sight of your consciousness all of the things with which you could not grapple.  In effect, you have “lost” your way back.  And if you are to “find” it again, you are going to need help.

Alone, you are like a man wandering the trackless sands of the desert.  There is no clear sense of direction – nothing you can rely on to show you where you are nor where to go.  Your illusions are mirages that lead you ever onward toward disaster.  Yet there is no other inner source of direction.

Hence the need for someone who has already “travelled the road” in his own life – someone who “knows the way” and who is willing to be your Guide.  Only with help such as this can you hope to proceed on your journey.

A Guide’s primary function is to bring reality into your life by being consistently and dependably real himself.  In so doing, he will come to represent the deepest possible threat to your illusions — a threat that will shake the very foundation of your sense of who you are.  But if he can stand his ground against your defensive responses and you can allow him to continue in your life as he is, you will slowly find the basis for a continuing relationship between you — one that will take you forward on your journey.

CHAPTER III, THE JOURNEY BEGINS

“And I will bring the blind by a way they know not;

I will lead them in paths they have not known

I will make darkness light before them, and

crooked things straight.

These things will I do unto them, and not forsake

them.”*

The person who is to be your Guide will seem “special” to you from the moment he first comes into view in your life.  The impression will be intuitive and impossible to pinpoint, but persistent.  Somehow, powerful things will seem to go on between you.

You are bound to feel some deep perplexities about him, including a sense that you cannot place him in your experience.  And you will be right about this.  There will be a sense of doubt, a suspicion that he is not “for real”, and an underlying fear that you are being manipulated in some way you cannot understand.

As your contact with him continues, your uncertainties will intensify.  While doing your best to maintain your surface calm, you will feel somehow threatened and uneasy and generally distrustful of the whole situation between you.  No direction of movement will seem to resolve the dilemma.  If you pull away, you will feel relief from the tension in the relationship, but in some inexplicable way you will also feel lost.  If you remain in contact, the sense of stress will continue.

These perplexing experiences will indicate that the relationship is already deep and important to you, although you won’t feel clear at all about how it got that way.  You will sense the tension as something beyond your control and will assume it is a response in you to the behavior of your Guide. Actually, it is not.

•  Isaiah 42.16

Quite the opposite is true.  The changes you experience in the relationship reflect a basic shift in you.  Because your Guide has become emotionally important to you, you have become involved in intense effort to entice him into perceiving you in the ways you wish to be perceived and behaving toward you in ways consistent with these perceptions.  In effect, you are seeking to ensnare him into the illusory “world” occupied by your consciousness.  And, as a result, you have begun to deal with him through the rigid behavioral patterns you learned long ago for coping with situations of this sort.

No matter what your guide does, there will be difficulties between you.  Even if he does nothing, you will move in ways that seek to force a resolution of the situation.  Since he is now a part of our private “world”, you are bound to feel an urgent need to know where you stand with him.  Above all else, you will be groping for a sense of the power relationship between you.  In your mind, there are only two possibilities you can conceive of.  Either he is in the “driver’s seat” or you are.

Your impression will be that your Guide is more powerful than you, and you will fear this power because you perceive it to be a threat to the security of your own sense of identity.  Therefore, you will approach him initially through the strategies you have developed over the years to cope with situations of weakness.  His response to this, however, will perplex you because he will refuse to take advantage of the weakness of your stance, being content simply to accept you as you are.  As a result, your fear of him will gradually decrease; but as it does, veiled hostility will take its place.  You will have interpreted your Guide’s behavior as weakness and will consequently begin to shift to your strategies of power.  Strategies that seek to undermine his self confidence and self respect while establishing you in a strong and virtuous position.

But now you are in for another surprise.  For your Guide will resist strongly (in his own way) these forceful efforts to ensnare him into your illusions.  Every effort you make to gain the upper hand will slide past its mark without succeeding in its purpose.  He will not be susceptible to your strategies for gaining control because he sees them clearly for what they are.  By seeing them, he can sidestep them, leaving you to absorb the force of your own attack.  This is a bewildering and unsettling experience but a deeply valuable one for you.

If you cannot gain the upper hand and your adversary refuses to do so, you are bound to feel confused and afraid.  It is as though you are in a world you do not know and with which you are utterly unprepared to cope.

The pressure of your confusion and uncertainty will force you to reassess your point of view.  And this is exactly what you need to do.  For until you can make some sense out of the nonsense you seem to be perceiving, you will be immobilized and helpless, which is intolerable.

A new possibility will slowly begin to emerge in your conscious view.  Since your Guide refuses to use his strength to dominate you, then perhaps he is not hostile to you after all and does not desire control or power in your life.  In fact, as you continue your agonizing reappraisal, you will gradually come to see that you have been dealing with him in blind and automatic ways and that you do not really know him at all.

This emerging perception leads inevitably to others as well.  If it not your Guide that forces you to gird for battle, then your fear and hostility must originate in response to things occurring inside of you.  Somehow, your perceptions are askew.  What you thought you “saw” was not really there, and you cannot “see” what is.  Herein lays the deepest kind of insight – insight that will change your life and in so doing take you forward on your journey.

CHAPTER IV, YOUR “WORLD” BEGINS TO SHRINK

What was true in relation to your Guide is repetitively true in other segments of your life.  You see in a blur and act as in a dream.  Slowly, very slowly, you will come to see that this is so.

From now on, you will find it difficult if not impossible to approach new situations in your life in the same old way.  For though the instincts will remain in you to do so, they will be counterbalanced by the knowledge that you cannot fully trust your perceptions of how things are.  So, when you next begin to struggle in an unfamiliar context, you will also begin to question what is really going on.

But more than this will happen, for you will begin to question the nature of all other situations as well in your life, both past and present.  And as you do so, you will gradually come to see the astonishing degree to which you have been “living” in a “world” that is not real.

Your battles with life have been battles to protect and to affirm this private “world”, which exists as your conscious view of how things are.  You have seemingly won these battles whenever you able to force or manipulate others into behaving as though things were as you saw them.  When you could not accomplish this, you continued to struggle, desperately hoping that through your persistence you would ultimately succeed.  Or you found ways to divert your mind from the situation, denying the existence of that which you could not face.  What you couldn’t – and wouldn’t – do was admit that the situation was not as you perceived it.  Any insight such as this would have subjected your entire “world” to the threat that you would come to see it as unreal.

But now, that which you dreaded most has happened.  For in your struggle with your Guide, you were confronted with the fact that your perceptions were askew.  And, as a consequence, you now know that much of what you thought was so, is not.

The “world” in which your consciousness has been immersed is composed entirely of images of your own creation.  Each of these “children” of your mind was given life by you.  Together, they constitute your “world”.  But you have never fully recognized that this was so.  To you, this “world” has been reality itself.

As your “world” of illusion is subjected to increasing threat, you will have a sense of being rapped and suffocated and will feel terrified that it (and you) will be reduced to nothing as the process in which you are now enmeshed continues toward its conclusion.  The problem is that you see your “world” and you as one.  In fact, this is not so.  The “world” is a fiction.  But you are real.  And if you are to regain your ties with life, it must succumb to the ruthless inroads of reality.  Your “world” must die so that you may truly live.

You cannot help but find this a deeply difficult experience.  It is as though you are being shorn of vital, living parts of yourself.  And to your consciousness, this is the way it is.  Yet as you divest yourself of the images you have mistaken for reality, you will have fleeting moments when you gain a strange, elated sense that all is well.  And so, it is.  You are gradually awaking from a living nightmare.

CHAPTER V, YOUR INTERNAL STRUGGLE COMES INTO VIEW

As your “world” shrinks before the tide of reality that surrounds it, another segment of your journey will slowly come into conscious view before you.  Whereas your attention up to this point has been directed almost solely toward things outside, now you will begin to sense in addition the symptoms of a raging struggle within yourself.

You will gradually come to see, for example, that you are very impatient with yourself.  And demanding too – as demanding as you are inclined to be with others.  Bits of evidence here and there will indicate also that you have an angry need to keep things inside you under tight control.  Everything must be as you expect it to be.

Consider your response to tension, or to sleeplessness, or to your deep spontaneous feelings.  These experiences and many others all bring out of you responses that seek to deal with the problems by suppressing them.  You react to such events within your physical self exactly as you do to seemingly hostile circumstances outside of you.  This is not, of course, mere coincidence.  To you, they are somehow all the same.

What is there about your body and its sensations and emotions that arouse such anxiety in you?  A clue to the answer lies buried within the question.  Note that you seem to view your body as something separate from you.  It is yours – but it is not you — strange, but deeply true.  Somehow, this is the way things are to you.

Who, then, are you if your body is not you?  The answer is that you are a disembodied mind – a consciousness without a physical context.  The reason you felt driven to create a private “world” of your own now becomes apparent.  The purpose of that “world” was to provide a new context for your consciousness – to make you whole again.  But you never can be whole by “creating” something that is not there.

A split of mind from body makes it possible for you to take sides and struggle within yourself – a feat that would be impossible if you were unified in your sense of who you are.  You view your body and relate to it as though it were a threat to you.  In fact, you perceive it as a hostile outside force.  And you approach it with exactly the same blind attitudes you apply to everything else.

But why?  Why turn with such hostility against a part of your own being.  The answer is that your body is (to you) your won rejected self.

Because you view your body as you do, you treat it ruthlessly.  You see it as a possession that exists to serve your will.  Since it has “sinned” and “fallen from Grace”, you wish to have as little to do with it as possible.  You ignore it whenever you can and force it to exist for the most part as an unconscious robot “marching” to the tune you play.  Its “voluntary” functions are carried out through a myriad of programmed responses, carefully learned and stored over the years – and trotted out automatically in response to the vague clues that normally reach your consciousness.  Only when the available responses are clearly inadequate are you forced to engage in a substantive way with what is going on.

By disowning your body as part of you, it becomes by this very fact a barrier between you and the outside world.  You deal with outer reality at second hand through your body – never directly.  In one sense, this makes you safe.  But you are also, as a consequence, cut off from life.

Because you are cut off, you are dependent upon illusions to fill the aching emptiness thus created.  But it is not possible for them to do so.  Although they are more real to you than reality itself, they are as empty as the hole within a donut.  You cannot eat the hole because there is nothing there.  And you cannot be filled while living in a “world” of illusion because no sustenance can enter where you are — only the image of it – nothing more.

CHAPTER VI, YOUR CONFLICTING IMAGES OF IDENTITY

As a disembodied consciousness, you also are not bound in any way to the reality of who you are.  You are as you perceive yourself — period.  And what you perceive are images —   Images of your own creation.

The driving force within your private “world” is a rigid, generalized image of virtue.  Life when viewed from this vantage point is skewed in an amazing way, amazing because (in your view) you are always in the right — by definition.  If there is trouble in your life, therefore, it must necessarily originate somewhere outside of you.  That is the way the ball game is set up.

Under this arrangement of perceptions, there are two possible sources of trouble: something in the outside world; or, your body, which (you will recall) is not you.  Your struggles in life are aimed at keeping these two apparent sources of trouble under your conscious control.  These struggles are endless simply because you are asking all of life to behave toward you in terms of an utterly false assumption about your identity.

Your imager of virtue is the self you have always wished and hoped to be – and the one your parents seemed to think you should have been.  According to this image, you are good and loving, trustworthy and kind – a guaranteed success at anything you seriously undertake.  And so on.  In short, you are perfect and therefore deserving of deferential treatment by all that surround you.  The outside world (in your view) should be immediately responsive to your every need and desire.  And the problem, as you experience it, is to make it behave as it “should”.

To term this view of the world as distorted is a masterpiece of understatement.  In truth, it constitutes a denial of all that is real.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the force that drives this image is anything but good.  When brought into the light of day, it turns out to be pure hostility and destructiveness that has been masked in order to present and opposite appearance.  The purpose of the masking, of course, is to make it possible for you to act in destructive ways and to vent destructive feelings while consciously feeling virtuous about what you are doing.

Actually, your image of “virtue” is hidden from your view, operating from the background where you cannot readily bring it into focus.  Because it is general and not specific, you have had to create a series of separate and subordinate images that are rooted in the general image but serve to elaborate it into specific terms to fit the various circumstances in your life.  These subordinate images and all that is attached to them constitute the bulk of your “world”.  Through them, you have managed to perceive yourself as a Father (or Mother), an employee, a church member, and so on.

For each subordinate image, in turn, you have developed and operating role through which you make contact with outer reality.  These roles are played out by your body primarily through programmed responses.  Much as you would have liked these roles to be identical with their associated images, practicality requires that you use the roles to soften and mask the “perfection” of the images.  The true purpose of a role is to seek the recognition and deferential treatment that is “due” you.  While functioning through these roles, you give the appearance of being in touch with things outside.  Actually, of course, you are not.  Not in a real sense.

Your individual roles include within them specific attitudes and behaviors that are not necessarily consistent with those contained in other roles.  Hence, each role and its associated image is necessarily segregated in a more or less “watertight” compartment of its own and set in motion only in the proper context.  As a number of these roles increased over the period of your lifetime, your “world”, of course, grew larger and more complex.  And you became, as a consequence, an increasingly fragmented consciousness.

This mode of dealing with life can accurately be described as your defense system.  It is your defense against something you have never been able to face, much less to bear.  Strangely enough, this something is but another image of yourself — an image of “badness” that has seemed to threaten your very existence.  It is this from which you have been running all of your life.  And it is this with which you struggle, both inside and outside yourself, in a desperate and unending effort to gain your freedom.  Your trouble is that wherever you go it goes along, because it is attached to you.

Although you long ago managed to cast your “bad” image out of sight of your consciousness, it did not die but rather continued to live and grow in the dark.  As your “world” grew, it grew also – always darker, more malevolent, more destructive.  The more destructive it became, the more you repressed it – and the greater the chasm became within your sense of self.

As was the case with your image of “virtue”, your “bad” image is also generalized and non-specific.  It is experienced as black, unthinkable, impossible – a shadowy phantom whose makeup is totally unclear.  And because this image is repressed and disowned by you, you can sense evidence of its existence and force only at a distance from your conscious sense of you.

In the course of our retreat from life, you associated this image with your body which seemed to be the source of all your trouble.  But later, as the chasm grew within your sense of self and as direct contact with your body grew ever more tenuous, you projected this image also to the world outside where you perceived it as inhabiting the personalities of others with whom your life was intertwined.  Wherever you perceived it, you fought with it, seeking to obliterate it from your life.  But to no avail.  For wherever you turned, there it was.  So, you struggled onward – caught in a hopeless, endless battle.

Fortunately, this image is no more real than the one you created to deny it.  It originated during early childhood as your perception of how you were viewed by those around you.  These people were your mirrors of yourself.  Sadly, the mirrors were not true.  What came back to you had more to do with them than you.  But since you didn’t know this, your “bad” image became your underlying sense of self.

CHAPTER VII, THE POWER OF YOUR SELF IMAGES BEGINS TO FADE

You are not a set of images but a real, live person.  A person deluged by an amazing array of impulses, feelings, and sensations –most of which you have done your best to deny.  If you are to gain your freedom and become the spontaneous person you are innately meant to be, you must dissolve the images that have imprisoned you and re-open your consciousness to the underlying truth about yourself.

This you cannot do alone.  To make progress, you will need a mirror of your behavior and attitudes – one that you can always trust.  Fortunately, you have this in your Guide.  It was his faithfulness to the truth in the relationship between you that caused the first defeat of your “virtuous” posturing and confronted you with the recognition that you were not dealing with the reality of the situation at all.  Now this process must continue between you.

Your Guide will find it necessary to challenge your image of “virtue” over and over again as it seeks to force outward upon the world its topsy-turvy version of reality.  Only in this way can you hope to move forward toward freedom from the hold this image has upon your life.  Its grip is tenacious and its strategies incredibly clever and subtle.  And you will be amazed at the difficulty you will experience in perceiving the true nature of your behavior and attitudes.

Nevertheless, as time goes by, you will begin to be able to question and to challenge the nonsense in your own perceptions.  There will, of course, be many clues to help you.  Whenever you feel mobilized, you are occupying your defense structure and perceiving everything in the environment that surrounds you as a potential threat to you. Your mobilization can be detected through tense muscles, a pounding heart, a sense of being threatened, suffocated, encircled – or through as sense of “virtue” in your position.  Andy of these symptoms (and many others related to them) can indicate that you are out of touch with life and can constitute a strong reason for probing carefully to seek the reality of the situation you are in.

Needless to say, there is a great deal of hostility abroad in the real world around you, and it is perfectly valid for you to fear it and defend against it.  Your problem is to get to the point that you perceive it only when it is really there.

Under the battering of constant challenges, the power of your image of “virtue” will slowly weaken.  And, strangely enough, as this happens, the threat seemingly posed by your “bad” image will decrease as well.  Both will fade like phantoms in the night because this is exactly what they are.  They were always symbols – nothing more.  And as your need for the apparent safety of a symbolic, unreal “world” decreases, the entire landscape of its illusions will gradually shrink before your eyes.

CHAPTER VIII.  THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

As your “world” continues to dissolve before your eyes, the hostility that has been the driving force behind this structure will begin to surface in your view.  Hostility is really an attitude and not a feeling.  When you are hostile, you are denying life — all of it — including your own.  Thus, hostility is really the negation of feeling.  And that is exactly why it is present in you – to deny your feelings — feelings of terror primarily.  For that is what always underlies chronic hostility.  It would be fair to say that hostility is terror cornered.  When cornered, terror turns to destructiveness in self defense.

Some of your destructiveness became apparent to you during your earlier encounters with your Guide.  But you will find that there is more of it than you yet have seen — much, much more.  And it will tend to flow toward your Guide like iron filings to a magnet.  The hostility you instinctively bring to your relationship with him is, in truth, your own self destructiveness.  He continues to be a primary channel for it because you periodically fall back into your waking dream in which you do not see him as he is and perceive him instead as the embodiment of your “bad” image.

As you become more fully aware of the depth and power of your destructive attitudes, you will come to see also that your Guide is not the only one toward whom these attitudes are directed.  Bit by bit, you will begin to recognize that all of the relationships in your life have been founded upon hostility — all of them.  Your perceptions of these relationships have been based upon your “virtuous” illusions about yourself.  Now it is necessary for you to begin to see how things really are between you and all the other people in your life.  Not a pleasant task but a very necessary one.

In all of your relationships, you have tended to operate as a parasite, draining off the life energies of those caught up in the web of your private “world”.  This draining of the energies of others is inevitable in any situation in which you seek to project an illusion into other people’s lives.  To the degree that you succeed, and they become emotionally open to you, you must drain them, since you are only pretending to be in contact while actually operating from a position of hostility that shuts off any return flow of emotional energy from you to them.  Of course, other people have been doing the same thing to you in return.  These are “the games people play”.

Your destructive attitude has flourished only because it has succeeded in remaining hidden.  The truth is that it is not justified – not as a generalized attitude.  Hence, you must give it up.  Strange as it may seem, you will find that you are deeply reluctant to do this.  For your hostility is an old friend.  Life without it, somehow, seems unthinkable – particularly when you begin to realize that what lies beneath it is terror.  But regardless of how reluctant you may be, it must go.

As you move forward on your journey, the arena in which your hostility operates will be reduced little by little until ultimately it is restricted to the confines of your own skin.  This is where it all began; and hence, it must end here as well.  You have always been the primary target of your own destructiveness.  All of the overflow to others has resulted from your unwillingness and inability to bear the brunt of it.

The primary symptom of your self-destructive attitude is an underlying sense that you are nothing — nothing at all.  You know nothing, feel nothing, have nothing, are nothing.  In fact, in your own perception you do not really exist.  Not as a separate person — only as a part of other people’s “worlds” – a captive of their illusions.

During childhood, your true identity as it was expressed through your spontaneous feelings, desires, and impulses was repeatedly suppressed, denied, ignored, or overpowered.  And all the while you were treated as though you were really someone else — someone who personified the “bad” images of those around you.  Over the years, you gradually succumbed to this insane circumstance and relinquished conscious contact with your underlying sense of self.  In its place, you took on as your sense of identity the “bad” image that was projected upon you, thus becoming a slave of the unreal “worlds” of those around you.  Once consciously imprisoned within the crushing walls of your “bad” image, you denied it and fled into the further unreality represented by your image of “virtue”.

Now you are beginning to gain your freedom from the hypnotic nonsense of these unreal images about yourself.  But that brings you face to face with the sense that you have no real identity.  To confront this void seems unthinkable – even unimaginable – because it appears to portend the end of your own existence.  But the seeming impossibility with which you are faced is all that is left now that your “world” is dissolving.

Perhaps that does not sound like progress.  But it is.  For you are now poised on the brink of a readiness to begin relocating your true separateness in life.

CHAPTER IX.  YOU BEGIN TO CONTACT THE “SEA” OF UNEXPERIENCED LIFE WITHIN YOU

The sense of emptiness you now face is for you the end of a road — the end of a road of denial.  What you are confronting is a barrier of your own creation.  Its purpose when you made it was to provide escape from all the powerful things that were going on inside you.  They were too much to bear, so you shut them off.  But in doing so, you became separated from the vitality of your own life.  You didn’t notice at the time because you were already engrossed in creating your “virtuous” identity.  But now you are beginning to pay the price.  Emptiness is the worst of all possible feelings – for emptiness indicates the absence of life.

At this point, you have no place to go.  You can’t go backward except temporarily because you know that what lies back there is illusion.  And you can’t move forward unless – and until – all that you have repressed and denied about yourself is released again into conscious view.

Fortunately, it will not be up to your consciousness to decide what to do because instinctively it will hold on to whatever “security” it still retains.  While it procrastinates and dallies and argues and denies, the “sea” of repressed experience that lies entrapped below the barrier you now face will begin to pound against this wall.  And it will continue to pound until it breaks through.

Try as it will, your consciousness cannot escape now the onslaught of all that you have been repressing for so long.  You will feel besieged, helpless, hopeless – tormented.  And in an effort to avoid the inevitable, you will instinctively pull back further into your defenses, hoping that here you will be safe.  But there is no “safety” now.  All that is past.  The tide will come in, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Once you recognize that you can no longer stem the tide of life that now threatens to engulf you, you will be forced as a sheer matter of survival to confront it.  To confront it is to experience it.  It is this which you have never done.  Now you must.  There is no other alternative.

You will no doubt wonder how you can be expected to be able to experience now what you were totally unable to cope with in the past.  The answer is that you are stronger now – and more mature.  Most of the waves of feeling that come up in you will turn out to have their origin in your childhood many years ago.  A child simply cannot stand the intensity of experience that is possible for an adult.  Nor does any child understand the reason why experiencing such agony is a good and useful thing to do.

You will discover aw you proceed that there is a great wisdom operating in your life whose purpose is to fulfill and not to destroy you.  Hence, no demands will be made upon your consciousness that you are not yet ready to meet.  But you will be tested – over and over again – to the seeming limits of your strength.  If you had a conscious choice, you probably would not submit to what lies before you.  But you don’t.  Not any more.  So you must bear up as best you can.

In the process of experiencing these old events in your life, you will begin to find out what is real in your life and what is not.  This is the road to true knowledge.  All of your so-called knowledge up to this point has been pseudo-knowledge.  For every piece of information, you have “known” there has existed in you as well a denial of your “knowing”.  This is evidenced by the powerful feelings you have been confronting that say you know nothing, nothing at all.

You have “known” not of your own experience (which you rejected) but on the basis of the presumed experience of someone else.  Someone else whose word you trusted.  Thus, you have relied upon experts, teachers, and those in positions of power in your life as sources.

Your inner archive of information has been much like any library with book upon book lined up along the shelves.  Everything was there, and you could retrieve it under the right circumstances.  But you didn’t own any of it.  One result of this is that there are certain to be all kinds of contradictions in your store of “knowledge”.  Contradictions you have never really recognized, much less resolved.  Some of the stem from conflicts in the many roles you have played.  Others are simply historical in their origin.

No part of this conglomeration of data is really solid.  Not in your own eyes.  It can’t be for the simple reason that you have been living out your life through images about yourself that had no validity at ll.  And everything you “know” has been skewed (more or less) so as to be compatible with your “virtuous” viewpoint.

Much of what you have “known” is false and much is true or partly true.  Your problem is that you have had no valid way to sort your “knowledge” out — and no desire for that matter.  Now you are about to have a basis, and a very simple one at that.  If a supposed fact turns out to have been so in your experience, then it is true.  And if your experience says it is not so, then it is false.  If you have had no experience in relation to the “fact” in question, then you simply do not know.  Believe it or not, knowledge is as simple as that.  But the sorting job that lies before you is strenuous indeed and will not be accomplished in a hurry.

This sorting process represents “the Day of Judgment” for what you “know”.  Every single item of stored information within you must, sooner or later, pass in review.  In the process, the wheat and the chaff will be separated and only the wheat retained.

CHAPTER X. YOUR PSYCHIC CAPACITIES  BEGIN TO COME INTO VIEW

At this point in your journey, the first evidence of your psychic capabilities will begin to surface within your conscious view.  The evidence will be in the form of information that intrudes upon your consciousness in very mysterious ways.  You will begin to have impressions about various things without having the slightest idea how you have acquired these impressions.  They simply come to you — that’s all.  Up out of the deep of your subconscious, they surface in your view.

You are bound to feel uneasy about these phenomena, and your defense system will attempt to suppress them as it has been doing all along.  But as your consciousness becomes gradually opened to experiencing the reality in your life (both old and new), your capacity to have psychic experiences will begin to open up as well.  You cannot have the one without the other.

Part of your confusion will be a deep uncertainty as to whether your psychic inputs are a product of your imagination or whether they are something else.  It is a weird experience to “know” things when you cannot account for the source of your “knowing” in any of the normal ways.  But you will have to get used to this.  The test of psychic data is, of course, exactly the same as that for any other information that comes to you.  Either it ultimately proves to be true in your experience or it does not.  So, when you are uncertain about the validity of what pops up in your mind, you will have to test it against other data that becomes available to you until you are satisfied that you know the truth.

The psychic is, of course, nothing more than what is often called intuition. Out of the blue intuition strikes you, and you find it hard to shake it off.  Actually, the last thing you should do is “shake off” intuition.  It is there to help you and is one of the most important resources you possess.  To say that it may save your life is no exaggeration.

Your psychic “knowing” can and will include intuitive understandings of things that are presently going on in your life – hunches about people, a sense of discomfort with a situation for no apparent reason, an urge to do something when you don’t know why you want to do it, and so on.  Premonitions about the future are also a part of the vast universe of information you now have tapped.  When they come to you, you should not treat them lightly, particularly if they warn of danger.  Their purpose is to protect you, and you will ignore them at your peril.

Even more surprising than your capacity to gain glimpses of the future will be the data you receive about the past – long past.  Past in this instance means past lifetimes, for you have had them – many of them.  And the major problems with which you find yourself furiously wrestling in the present are virtually certain to have had a Karmic origin.  Karma is used here to denote unexperienced life carried over from a prior incarnation into the present one.

Perhaps the whole idea of Karma seems like utter nonsense to you.  But if it exists, you are going to have to face it.  And your psychic sense is going to force you in this direction by bringing to your consciousness experiences that have never happened in your present lifetime.  Further, you will be confronted with linkages between these past events and happenings in the present — spooky, to say the least.  But if you allow this flow of data into consciousness, the information you receive will begin to make sense out of circumstances in your life that from any other vantage point make no sense at all.

Your psychic inputs can, and will, come in many forms – as words and thoughts that float upward into your mind, as visual images, as things that you seem to hear, to smell, to taste, and so on.  But in the early stages, your perceptions of psychic flow are apt to be limited to impressions that suddenly seem to appear within you without having entered your consciousness by any clear route.  The reason for this is that you are not yet closely enough in touch with your physical senses to be able to perceive clearly their psychic counterparts in action.

Your psychic resources are not a plaything, nor an oddity in your life but an essential part of your awareness.  And you will find that they are absolutely essential to your further progress on your journey.  With them, you can dissolve barriers that stand in your way along the road – barriers which otherwise would prove insurmountable to you.

CHAPTER XI. YOU LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR PSYCHIC POWERS IN RELATION TO YOUR JOURNEY

All unexperienced life is stored in you as psychic images — images that retain the full, vivid detail of the original events.  These images maintain their power and vitality indefinitely and are automatically carried over as Karma to be worked through in future lives if they are not dissolved in the lifetime in which they occur.

Each psychic image of an unlived experience in your life is, in fact, a fragment of your conscious self encapsuled in a prison all its own.  Only you can release it.  Otherwise, it must remain imprisoned until eternity.  In this sense, you become the fairy prince who fights his way through the brambles to wake the Sleeping Beauty.  To awaken a sleeping fragment of yourself is to become more whole – more truly and completely what you are.  This is the objective of your journey.

In order to release these encapsulated fragments of yourself, you will find it desirable to deal with them as psychic events.  That is how they are stored, and that is how you should contact them.  The alternative is to allow them to be re-expressed at the physical level with a full acting out of the original trauma.  In your early bouts with waves of old experience, you will probably get caught up in this kind of “acting out”.  But you will rapidly find that it is extremely wasteful of your energies.  To revert to the full original experience of a childhood event is to become a child all over again in the most literal sense.  And in so doing, you inevitably become so lost in the event that you lose touch with the context of your present circumstances.  This is not necessary now, since all psychic events can be experienced within the framework of your existing reality.  You must retain this framework within your conscious view at all times.  Otherwise, you are again “living” in an unreal “world”.

There is a natural order in which the emotional events stored within your subconscious will unfold.  This order is determined by a layering of emotional strata, each layer being associated with a particular range of emotions.  Within a given layer lie buried all of the unexperienced feelings of a particular kind that you have repressed at any time.

This layering of emotions is very similar to that which is found in archeological excavations.  In a very real sense, you are in the process of unearthing a deadened and discarded life within you.  The difference is that you are bringing yours back to life – something that archeology can never do.  In denying the reality of your experience, you withdrew your vitality from it.  Now the vitality is returning.  And layer by layer, all that you have repressed will burst upward into conscious view.

The layers through which you must ultimately work your way begin with terror, which has been the driving force behind your hostility all these years.  Terror is icy as is the hostility it underlies; both represent a withdrawal inward from contact with outer reality.  Terror withdraws to escape perceived danger.  But in withdrawing, it drains off as well the natural vitality in your life.  “Frozen with terror” is an apt expression and indicates clearly the devitalizing effect this emotion can and does have upon one’s life.  Terror is literally deadening, and a person who is in a state of chronic terror is always chronically depressed.

You have avoided your terror like the plague, denying its very existence.  But though your denial has served to ease your conscious sense of being threatened, the icy finger of terror has constantly been a work beneath your conscious view, devitalizing the foundations of your life.

As you continue your journey, wave after wave of terror and panic will well up into conscious view.  In a very literal sense, you have now entered into your own, personal Purgatory and are beginning to be purged of all your sins.  These sins can be forgiven only by you – only by experiencing what you have denied.  To become fully conscious of these seemingly unendurable events from your past is to be cleansed.  Your agony is the price you pay.  Once you have paid it, you are truly free.  No one – literally no one – can make you pay again.

CHAPTER XII.  YOUR BODY BEGINS TO ASSERT ITSELF

As you become increasingly open to experiencing the waves of terror that are now welling upward into view, you will at some unexpected moment begin to have an uneasy feeling that your stomach is shut off and that it is both unready and unwilling to accept food — a strange phenomenon, to say the least.  For your digestive system has been more or less passively accepting whatever you have chosen to send down to it for many years.  Now something new is taking place.

What is happening is that your body is at last beginning to assert itself directly within your conscious view.  It has been relatively passive all these years for the simple reason that you managed to cut off your communications with it and consequently were no longer aware of how it felt.  It has been, to you, a necessary evil – nothing more.  You chose to be out of touch with it as much as you could so that you could pursue your silly illusions of being alive in another “world”.  Now the body must have its day.  It will pipe the tune, and you will dance.  Like it or not, this is what you have coming to you.

Within the physical realm of your being lays much that has been denied.  Now you must begin to reconnect with this level of experience which is, of course, a direct extension of the feelings with which you are already reluctantly in touch.  All experience is a unity.  It is you that has fragmented it.

Your digestive tract is tired of being a garbage can – tired of digesting as best it can whatever you see fit to devour.  It is not a servant, bound to serve every whim and foolish notion of your intellect.  On the contrary, it exists for the sole purpose of processing food in response to body needs.  What your intellect desires or commands is irrelevant, for in its involvement with your eating it is operating beyond its rightful domain.  When the body needs food, it calls for it through body sensations – sensations to which you should be keenly alert.  But you denied these long ago as part of your retreat from life and self.  And, as a consequence, you were left with no valid basis for knowing when to eat.

Your intellect took over and made eating a habit – one to which you will find you are amazingly addicted.  You have been eating all these years either because it was “time” to eat or because the act of physically devouring food seemed to give temporary relief to your emotional emptiness.  Both reasons are nonsense so far as your stomach is concerned.

You were, of course, led into your denial of the proper basis for deciding what and when to eat.  As a child, you knew when you were hungry and knew, as well, exactly what you wanted — but to no avail.

Since you did not exist as a separate person in the eyes of those who brought you up, you were fed what they wanted you to have when they wanted you to have it.  And you ate in order to survive — ate what they wanted you to eat.  Later on, you simply continued on your own the pattern thus begun.

Fortunately, there is an underlying sanity in your life.  And this is what you are beginning to experience.  Your stomach will now refuse to accept what it des not want; and if you go against its wishes, there will be trouble.

In your developing encounter with your digestive tract, you will be contacting for the first-time evidence of your true desires.  The problem is that for quite some time to come you will be encountering only the negative aspects of these desires.  Not what you do want but what you don’t.  In a word, you will be confronted with your own reactiveness.  It shows up now as reaction to the desires of your intellect.  But it originated as reaction to enforced demands upon you from outside.

This struggle between two parts of our self represents part of the underlying foundation for the endless battle between the two images of your identity.  Your “bad” image symbolized your body to you while the image of “virtue” was always your own internalized parent.  Now you are getting down to the physical roots of the problem.

Your body will not readily shed all the trauma accumulated during the anguished years of subservience imposed upon its digestive system.  So, you are in for a long and difficult period of readjustment.  You will find to your astonishment that your body can – and will – go for amazingly long periods of time with very little nourishment.  And this is exactly what it will do.  The abstinence from normal eating is, in fact, a necessary part of the healing process in which it is now beginning to engage.

Part of the problem you will encounter in wending your way through this aspect of your journey is that there are sensations “buried” in your “guts” that have nothing whatsoever to do with eating — emotional tensions that signal fear or anger.  You have tended to read all sensations in your stomach as hunger because you perceived these feelings only vaguely from the defended position of your intellect.  Now it is essential for you to sort them out.

One fact that will surprise you is that you will find little evidence of real hung as your sorting of the sensations in your stomach proceeds.  In fact, you will inevitably wonder if your hunger is permanently dead.  Fortunately, it is not.  But you will not be truly hungry until you are first freed of your terror – and of the anger that underlies it.  The reason is that it is not natural to be hungry when you are mobilized.  This means, of course, that your eating for many years has constituted an absolute violation of your body.  To eat when you are not hungry is to force your body to go against itself.

To further complicate your life, you are likely to begin to have elimination problems as well.  Your intestines are, of course, nothing but the lower end of your digestive tract.  So, they are bound to be affected by the upheaval you are going through.  There is, however, likely to be an independent reason for a disturbance in your elimination, for this natural process nearly always is the focal point for another battle between the mother and the child.  The problem, once again, is that the child is not allowed to be himself.  Hence, his elimination must be controlled — and at an early age.  The result is the repression of a spontaneous function and a reaction (within the child) to this repression.  So, if your elimination fails to function as you have learned to expect it to, you are likely to be re-engaging with another facet of the early trauma that did so much to shape your life.

Confronted with both eating and elimination problems, you are bound to feel harassed.  And you will instinctively feel a drive to “get things back to normal”.  Actually, what has been “normal” in your life really wasn’t normal at all.  And now that this “normality” is disappearing, it never will return.  You are in a whole new ball game.

CHAPTER XIII. YOUR AWARENESS OF YOUR BODY EXPANDS

As your consciousness of your body increases, your awareness of body experiences will continue to broaden.  What you are contacting is the reality of your own physical existence – the rock upon which your whole sense of identity must be founded.

Outside of your digestive tract lie other chronic body sensations that now must enter into conscious view.  Next in line for your attention will be a growing sense of declining physical vitality.  You will feel tired, apathetic, withdrawn, isolated – depressed.  And you will also tend to feel cold.  Life in general will look pretty bleak to you and you will find it very difficult to drum up and real enthusiasm for anything.  What you are experiencing, of course, are the physical aspects of a condition of chronic terror and withdrawal.  Because terror drains off your energies as fast as your body can create them, you are operating out of an impoverished physical circumstance – a deeply depleted and depressed economy.  And this is what you now feel.

All of your energies have been drained off into the ceaseless, frantic, and insane antics of your intellect as it tried to escape into another “world”.  Now you are beginning to perceive the physical ramifications of this insanity.  Terror creates depression.  And depression moves towards death.  The only question has been how far you would go toward this ultimate disaster.  You have been living out your life in a twilight zone of existence – far, far from the level of functioning that is natural and normal for you haven’t known it because you retreated from it and then asserted a denial on top of it that literally forced your body to act as though it were alive and vital even though this was not so.  This is how deeply you have been going against yourself.

As you might expect, your depression has myriad ramifications in your life.  Everything in your physical existence is depressed including all of your senses, your reflexes, your digestion and elimination.  In fact, your whole sense of aliveness has been seriously depleted.  And, strangely enough, this has been exactly what your intellect has wanted.  a weakened body can be dominated while a strong one cannot.  The last thing your intellect wants, therefore, is a revitalized body to contend with.  Such a shift would ring the final death knell for your whole defense system because it would thereby be deprived of the energies necessary to sustain its existence as the center of your conscious life.

Among the many experiences that life affords, none is more unpleasant than depression.  And it is only human for you to wish that you could avoid facing this condition in your body.  But you can’t.  if you truly wish to become alive again, you must first cope with your depression, consciously paying the heavy price required of you for all the draining of your life energies that has taken place.  To do so is to gain your freedom from it.  Otherwise, you must remain a deadened human being.

CHAPTER XIV.  YOU BEGIN TO CONTACT EVIDENCE OF OTHER PLANES OF EXISTENCE

Although your life is already far more complex than you would have wished, there are further complications yet in store for you.  In fact, ever increasing complexity in the perceptions that reach you consciousness is inherent in the nature of the Journey and in all that follows after it.  The only way you can bring to an end the unceasing demands upon your consciousness to enlarge the universe it contacts and comprehends is to stop growing.

New territory will now begin to come within your view at the psychic level.  In particular, you will begin to receive data from other planes of existence that you inhabit.  If Karma and re-incarnation seem weird to you, this will seem even more so.  Yet the information will flow into your consciousness, and it will be futile to deny it.  This data will be focused upon non-human forms — animal forms, for instance – forms that clearly have an existence of their own.  You will find that they are far too alive, to independent, to persistently present in your psychic consciousness to allow for any rational explanation.  You could not, for instance, possibly imagine them in the complete and vivid form that they will appear to you at all levels of your psychic senses.  So, they have some kind of reality of their own.

What you have before you is evidence of creative powers that exist within each human being but not at the conscious level.  Some of the creatures with which you now find yourself in contact are a part of you – extensions of your self.  In creating them, you became a god, acting with God-like powers in relation to the planes on which they exist.  You may have created them in this lifetime or carried them over as part of our Karma.  Either way, you are responsible for them because they are fragments of your consciousness.

All human beings are parts of such creative chains, each person being on the one hand merely a fragment of a larger consciousness above him and on the other hand a creator of the forms that lie below.  The creating is not consciously owned by the person responsible for it because the action has taken place at a level beneath his conscious perception.

You can and will know which, if any, of the creatures you now begin perceiving belong to you.  If they are yours, they will demonstrate a deep affinity for you.  There is an emotional bond between you and them that will prove undeniable as your contact at this level is gradually strengthened.  These creatures were created by you in order to gain additional freedom and distance from certain repressed physical and emotional constellations in your self.  The particulars of each creature, therefore, symbolize the nature of the constellation it represents.  In creating these forms, you embodied them with the energies tied up in the constellations they represent and thereby “banished” these constellations from your existence.  But if you are to be whole again, you must ultimately dissolve that which you have created.  Only by so doing can you reclaim the consciousness that gives these creatures life.

Anything is possible at the psychic level.  Anything you can imagine – and more.  Because of the unabridged freedom available, weird things can and do exist on these planes –werewolves and vampires, fairy princes and princesses, witches and magic spells, ad all the other things children read about in fairy tales.  Hence, these psychic planes are frightening to contact.  Yet they are safe enough so long as you maintain your conscious footing in physical reality.  The creatures of these planes can do you no harm so long as you do not “get lost” within their dimension.  If you do, then you are in trouble.  This Is what many nightmares are all about.

Actually, there are two kinds of nightmares.  The one from which you awaken in a terror in the night and the waking nightmare that can dominate your life.  In the waking nightmare, you are “living” in a dream of “virtue” while acting out subconsciously on the earth plane the nature of one or more of the sub-human forms you have created.  In so doing, you are literally projecting into the physical world the reality of another (and lower) plane of existence.  You do this projecting through your psychic power which is, in fact, the driving force behind the projection of your entire “world” of illusion into the physical plane.  Now you can understand why some people are more successful in doing this than others.  It is strictly a function of the level of their psychic power.

The fact that you are now able to perceive the creations of our consciousness on other planes means that you are already gaining your freedom from their power to influence your behavior.  You are, in the most literal sense, waking up.  And in so doing, you will begin to see the nightmare you have been living out.

CHAPTER XV.  THE KARMIC ROOTS OF YOUR PRESENT LIFETIME

As you gradually wend your way through the myriad of repressed experiences associated with events that have occurred during your present lifetime, you will be approaching the Karmic roots that underlie these experiences.  All of your major involvements and concerns – all of them – are tertian to have such Karmic roots.  So, if you have been under the impression that your life was a more or less random occurrence – or if you have been of the opinion that you have been operating under circumstances in which free will is the governing force, you can forget it.  Life is a very orderly phenomenon, and justice is sure — justice of your own making.  What freedom you have at the conscious level is only the very limited freedom to fun from your life – or to face it.  If you run from your life, it will, sooner or later, overtake you.  If you face it, you are immediately immersed in your Karmic Journey.  Yes, this is what it is – a Karmic Journey.

It is a Karmic Journey because it is the Karma you bring over into this life that makes it necessary for you to incarnate.  Without Karma, you would be truly free.  And that is exactly the freedom you are now seeking.

To be specific, all of the major relationships with which you have been confronted are inevitably Karmic relationships, and the problems that exist between you and the other people concerned are fundamentally Karmic problems.  You can, of course, create new Karma in this lifetime and without question you have done so.  But the fundamental problems that have descended upon you and have shaped the vital outlines of your life were there to begin with.  You have been a prisoner of them and will continue to be until – and unless – you gain your freedom.   The fact is that you are, ultimately, your own judge and jury – your own God — insisting at every step along the road that the lessons there to be learned will be leaned regardless of how long it takes or how many tries it may require.

The whole focus of your journey is to quicken this learning experience.  You learn by becoming conscious and by experiencing what is present in your life.

The warping of your present lifetime began in your experiences as a fetus within your mother’s womb and continued throughout the trauma of our birth and early childhood.  But what happened was no accident.  You picked your parents and your siblings before you entered this incarnation with the explicit purpose of setting up on the stage of your present life the Karmic problems from which you wished to seek release.  Now the opportunity to do so is upon you.

Little by little, you will gain psychic recall of the Karmic roots beneath your problems.  These toots will surface as surely as the sun rises in the east once you have succeeded in dissolving the layers of confusion and denial you have placed on top of them.  The, and only the, will you be in a position to open the door to the freedom that you seek — the freedom to be (and to know) who you really are.

EPILOGUE

One further perspective on your journey would seem to be in order here.  As an inevitable consequence of the changes within the self, the Journey constitutes for each person who completes it an inner passage from the attitudes of hate to those of love.

Hate is, at its roots, a denial of life – a devouring darkness that exists in the absence of light.  One hates when his consciousness is focused within an illusory “world”.  What drives him is the emptiness he feels — an emptiness created by his flight from the substance of his own reality.  Because his life seems empty, he feels goaded to expand the “world” in which he lives.  In so doing, he hopes to be filled.  But that hope is hopeless – a part of his waking dream.

Love, by contrast, is the vitality of life surging outward from a person who is unified within himself.  Its expression is as pure as he is real and is no more self conscious than the scent that emanates from a rose.  The rose is what it is, and its scent is an expression thereof.  And so, it is with each human being.  The person is what he is; and his love when it flows is but an expression of this fact.

The deepest test of love is in its confrontation with hate.  This is what happens in each person’s struggle with his Guide.  Here love, the life force, is endangered by the devouring lust of a darkness which would, and does, deny that love exists.  Hate seeks to transform the Guide into a lifeless marionette, dancing to the tune of an unreal “world”.  If hate succeeds, then the candle of love must be snuffed out, for the very identity of the Guide from which his love must flow will have been destroyed.

If love survives, then the darkness of hate must recede before its light, and in so doing, acknowledge the real existence of the Guide as a separate person.  Should this take place, then he who hates will have started on his own Journey; and his Guide, through the inscrutable wisdom of life, thereby becomes responsible to do all he can to sustain this Journey to its end.

April 3, 1972   Arlington, MA

copyright 2022  phil morse