The Word That Awakens the Man
Beezone adaptation and
edit from an essay in ‘The Enlightenment of the Whole Body’
t
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The human individual is a complex of tendencies or
limitations must be understood or else these limitations
become the controlling forces in human relationships.
The total complex of human and individual tendencies may
be considered to represent three general or fundamental
liabilities. These are:
1. Chronic self-possession
2. Incomplete experience, and
3. Imperfect understanding of experience.
Each individual is, in his attention, most profoundly
self-aware. But that awareness is itself complicated by
reason of the fact that such self-awareness is a reactive
tendency, a habit based on recoil (manifested as a knot)
from what stands prior to his or her reaction. And
consequently to all others, relationships, or conditions of
experience.
Chronic self-awareness is, thus, chronic self-possession
and a mood and state of consciousness. It is a gesture of
self protection. It is rooted in fear, loss and separation
and manifested in all negative emotions such as anger,
sorrow, righteousness and sloth.
Chronic self-awareness is the subjective mood, the
enclosure of inwardness, in which fascination and need for
experience persists, but in which experience itself is
constantly felt to be a threat to one’s very existence. And
therefore individuals are constantly in flight from there
own help.
The self-possessed individual struggles with experience.
Experience is a threat, and, therefore, it is never
completely engaged. All experiences are but partially felt
and known. And the total range of possible experiences is
not engaged. Only those experiences that are more or less
compatible with the acquired and chronic mood of self are
sought or even permitted. The remainder of what is possible
is excluded, not inspected, always resisted. And whenever
uncommon experience does occur, because of uncontrollable
circumstance, the self feels violated, or fascinated, and
quickly moves toward recovery of its self-possessed
equilibrium.
The human indivdual is asleep in himself, unliberated,
incapable of ecstasy. He is surrendered to fear and every
other form of reactive emotion. He is cautious in the face
of everything-utterly unlike one who is in love. He is
threatened, about to lose and die. He is always protecting
himself with feelingless thinking, thoughtless or
unconsidered emotionalism, and every kind of self-indulgent
bodily activity. He is always stimulating himself in part –
now with food, now sex, now excitement, now with
distraction, now with concerned thinking, now mystical and
psychic fascination. Thus, in every moment, he seeks to
remain distracted from the totality of experience and the
threat concealed in all experience.
The Spiritual Master is indeed a voice is a necessary
voice, the voice that sounds whenever the Truth of human
experience is Revealed to one who is Awake. Therefore, such
a one speaks, even with urgency and anger. It is the
prophetic voice, the awful shout, expressed with all the
gestures of frustrated Divinity.
Very few respond to this Word, this Teaching, this
Offering of Good Company. And the reasons are those which
have just been described. But if anyone will “hear” and
“see,” then the Divine Principle of Ecstasy is at Work. And
those who surrender into the Company of the true Spiritual
Master are turned out of self-limits, restored to the
pattern of relations, entered into a pattern of feeling
experience, established in a pattern of growth (or increase
of experience toward completeness), and Awakened to that
Understanding wherein all experience is relieved of the
Binding Power.
Those who are thus Free do not chronically seek an
alternative experience to the one in the moment, nor do they
seek an exclusive or experienceless Reality. They abide in
that true Understanding. And, at last, the entire world
falls away quite naturally, Revealing the Eternal Person
that is hidden in the reflecting pond of human
attention.