One of the greatest challenges of internal work is trying to discover your real “Self” while battling the worldly issues you face on a daily basis. And no matter how Awake you are, you will still battle them.
The deeper question is why does someone become awake in this day and age, and still get bombarded with “issues?” This is a common question for all of us.
No matter who you are, life comes at you every day with stressors that you have to deal with. This is normal – both unaware and aware people share the same experience. Where the aware person excels is in their ability to see all of this and not be overwhelmed by it. That doesn’t mean they don’t feel pain. It doesn’t mean the experience is painless. It doesn’t mean they don’t experience essentially exactly what the non-aware person does.
So the question is why? I thought we were awake?
The aware person is merely able to see and Know. They possess the knowledge to see what’s going on, accept the situation for what it is, and be comfortable with experiencing the pain. They shouldn’t think that these issues will not happen to them.
There are many, many layers to this. We can be aware, we can feel awareness, we can know that we are aware, and so on. And that is the point. Identifying with something “outside” of these worldly issues.
This is the part of the spiritual journey where most people give up and stop. Why do this if I still deal with what other people deal with? But it’s also the part that matters the most.
The warrior understands that there is no light without darkness. You cannot truly see the light until you have spent time in the dark.
I have spent decades of my life in the dark, and some things I regret, some I don’t. I had days where I woke up feeling enlightenment, only to be confronted by modern life’s daily stressors the very next day.
But it does not consume me and I expect life to have its ups and downs. I still feel the pain, just like anybody else on the journey.
I used to have this profound ability to turn emotions on and off at the snap of my fingers, in some ways I still do. Years of training built that for the wrong reasons. I can See that now. Since then I have practiced discernment in knowing what to feel and what not to feel. But we do not have the ability to have 100% complete control of what Nature wants us to feel.
So this is my message to you: Drop any mental concept you have in your mind about the spiritual path you are taking, what you should feel, or how you should feel. If you take a deep look inside and ask yourself the difficult questions on the non-linear path towards mastery, it will hurt.
Because it’s supposed to.