Losing the Way
Some things do not change. People who are called to spiritual realization, but have personal issues to work through. People who want love, but ‘something’ is getting in the way. People who are called to fulfill their spiritual potential and to become deeply and authentically their best self, but are not sure how to achieve this under the circumstances. People who know they are called to be more, but don’t know how to be. People who figure there must be more to life than this . . .
This is the raw material that does not change.
In fact this is the condition of a human being who wants to be more conscious, more creative, more at peace . . . A description of you and of me? . . . it is a description of the soulful heart when it is engaged and active and searching for a deeper understanding, for a deeper loving . . . In fact this is the nature of consciousness when it is functioning right . . . there is a continual heartfelt questioning . . . a koan, to use the language of Zen . . . a ‘divine discontent’ in the soul that draws us to plunge deeper into the mystery of our existence and will not be satisfied by the throwaway solutions of a commodity driven, materialistic culture . . .
In truth, this unease is reaching crisis level.
Human beings have always asked what it means to live a fully realized life in this cosmos, but this question takes on new and bewildering dimensions in our current times. As our capacity to data-connect and data-collect and data-inspect outstrips all reason it seems to more and more people that we are in a world gone mad.
Whether it takes the form of a globally orchestrated militarized oppression or of a creeping assimilation by a techno-dominated culture we seem increasingly helpless in the face of what we have unleashed. Everywhere the human heart is oppressed in new and innovative ways.
But while some of these problems are as current as the latest operating system, the basic human dilemma is as old as the hills . . .
And this doesn’t really change . . .
It is the fundamental struggle of the human heart born into a ‘world’ . . .
And this is the fundamental problem . . . this is the ‘cosmic’ problem . . .
And whatever kind of world we now find ourselves entering – whether it is an Orwellian dystopia or a world that is brave and new – we have a treasure-trove of knowledge about this deeper ‘perennial’ matter . . .
Long before we had a virtual universe of digital information at our finger-tips we had access to awakened consciousness.
The world’s enlightened wisdom teachings have consistently affirmed that there is within us a renewable resource that can flow into a human life – an inexhaustible well of awakened consciousness, kindness and creativity that can be tapped and utilized and that can bring liberation for ourselves and all beings.
So . . . what happened? Has this knowledge been suppressed? Or have we just become distracted? Why aren’t they teaching this in schools?
Did we lose the instructions?
Or did we simply lose the Way?