Sometimes we feel depressed and this can last for long periods, which makes us feel as though there is no air to breath and our life achievements have no value. Living in superficiality, emotional pain, mental tension and feeling like our universe has collapsed into our little troubled personality are the characteristics of a period when we are overwhelmed by seemingly unresolvable problems. How does one break out of this cage?
Even though our sleep should give us a sufficient rest, sometimes because of a lack of peace of mind sleep is not enough. The lack of restfulness might be an effect of the state where the mind is enslaved by emotional attachments; which could result from over-stimulation by material affairs. It may also be an effect of a long-accumulated tiredness or an unbalanced life in some other aspect. Therefore something more radical has to take place in order to break through. One such option is to give up the control and let ourselves temporarily die psychologically, knowing that our true self will emerge out of humility. What does this mean I’ll try to explain.
The consciousness that we have is held captive by a great number of attachments and habits. Conditioning and identification with our body, feelings and thoughts are the building blocks of our personality. As our clothes cover our body, similarly so, the personality clothes the soul. It has been created by the soul and therefore it can be dissolved. Like dropping off our dirty clothes before we take a bath, the same happens when we dive into the streams of Spirit. If we are identified with our clothes, if we believe that we are nothing else but our dirty clothes, then suffering and disease will be the consequences and death will look more like our executioner than a door to a greater life. Instead of fearing death, why not understand that by giving up all our attachments we die just to be resurrected as new people. In the moment of hopelessness one can ask: Am I afraid to die? Can’t I give up everything I know about the world and myself and surrender my soul to the Great Source. There is no other way, but through death that we are reborn.
The hundreds of problems that we have can be solved by one action without the actor, which is to let problems and the causes of problems die through detachment. The hopelessness comes out of our exhaustion trying to create happiness in ourselves and around ourselves - relying on the powers of our personality. Whenever we believe that we are smart enough and strong enough to deal with anything in our life we will fail. There is always somebody who is smarter and something that is stronger than we are. We believe we have a recipe for everything, therefore why should we be worried, we can solve all problems. But life is an art and all recipes that we have might not be good enough to succeed. In art it is the creativity and spirit which brings beauty, therefore in our daily life we need inspiration, we need that which is beyond form which can give us the strength and the vision and shed the light upon our path. Without that we will always fail.
We tend to be proud of our achievements and our powers and forget how to be small in order to receive further guidance. We think that the whole world revolves around us and that we are incredibly special, forgetting to admire that which is greater, that which is our teacher. But everything grows into the greater, just like a tree spreads its branches into the open sky so do we grow into the transcendent source for which limits are not known. Without this freedom, without this surrender to the greater there cannot be any beauty and without beauty how can there be any success.
Living habitually - using the recipes from the memory banks of our personality – in time we become rigid and then exhausted and hopeless. It seams that inspiration is no longer forthcoming; as though we killed it. Becoming hopeless and sleepless, we need indeed a rest. Everyday we go to sleep, but our attachments do not allow us to sleep deeply and that is where meditation could help. We die every day when we go to sleep, but because it is automatic and unconscious we do not learn any lessons. Every night our consciousness moves into its source: which is our Soul. There it revitalises itself and gathers strength for living in this world. But when we are obsessed with our attachments this process can be upset, making the contact with the soul simply not strong enough to transform the rigid patterns of our mind. In this situation where it seems that all doors are closed, where our rigidity and exhaustion overwhelm us; one can look into oneself and try to give up everything and say that there is nothing to do or achieve and nowhere to go, but to look inward. One can drop all cravings for one moment and let oneself ‘die’- surrender to the source.
There are many cases where people were lucky enough to fail their attempt of suicide but then they experienced that everything changed, everything was new, full of life and wonderful. They gave up everything - all attachments and concepts - and wanted to throw themselves into the arms of death, the great liberator, and it was this determination that brought to them new light. But instead of being foolish and trying to kill our body it would be much wiser to die psychologically as a personality trough the process of detachment and surrender to our Soul. This is possible through the exercises of Raja Yoga where one says to oneself that one is not this body, emotions, thoughts, mind or this little personality and then concentrates on the feeling of all-pervading peace and presence in one’s heart. If one does this with a great determination then nothing can stop one from becoming reborn in a greater freedom.
If we do not know how to relax and let all things go and accept the possibility of death as an ultimate reconciliation with all manifestation, we might not find freedom. In every surrender to the life force there is an element of death, our attachments and concepts about ourselves die to a certain extent leaving space for new forms which are more advanced and flexible. It is only through the peace that we experience through our being that we can find our creative uniqueness which makes us free from our self-limitations.
"The life is only for the one who is not afraid to die" Joyce Carey.
There is no death. Only form can die, but we are not form; we are Spirit. If we can move our consciousness freely from our body, emotions and thoughts into our Soul instead of being stuck in our personality, we can manifest the fullness of our being. This is the way to self-realisation.
(This is an edited version of the text published in Insight – Theosophical Journal, 2000) |