On the practicality of the structuring of the Path of XPR please click here.
Yet the real “How long” question is a tricky one to answer, other than by reflecting on who is asking… To clarify that statement, consider the first line of Psalm 13: “How long, O LORD, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”
Can you hear the cry of mind into the question itself: “How long?” How long before I am healthy? How long before my business takes off? How long before I am enlightened? It will take as long as it takes for the questioner in you to disappear, since, by transcending mind, you equally transcend time! Here is the PaRaDoX to PaRaDiSe: enlightenment won’t happen because of your doing, yet it will not happen without your doing. However the light moves only as quickly as your willingness to eXPeRience fully the back of your mind, which is the exact facilitation of our Mystery School; the School of life!
Moment by moment, life reveals its Supreme Pleasure, fondly toying with you and you only, its Divine partner in play… In truth, you can never know what will happen! And, you wouldn’t want to know, as knowing would take all the fun away! And yet, are you at ease with the Mystery or might your insecurities prevent you to relax and to have fun with the adventure of life? Are you driven by to-do lists, goals and deadlines? Might your achievements be like trophies on the wall, yet they fail to give you a real sense of your perfection? If so, listen to the story now of what the question “how long?” implies and what is involved in being free of all questions.
And all of that because the nights went out…
PoeTREE on the Schooling of the Mystery!
Picture this: we are Thursday; and it’s about 7P… I was quite engaged with the construction of a piece on the purpose of a Mystery School… Admittedly, there was a deadline attached to it as both Michael and I were really eager to come out with our new website, and that one article was needed… That was one level of impatience. On a parallel universe, and at the exact same time, a bigger level of impatience was being played out… The problem with impatience is that most people are very impatient with it! They never quite let it consummate itself fully on its own funeral pyre… which means that the Phoenix can never rise from the ashes… And that’s a bummer, because without a rising Phoenix, Phonetics, as a dear friend would say, can’t be heard…
You see my dilemma now? How in the world can I write sensibly about the PaRaDiSe Mystery School when I have not fully embraced my impatience—my suffering! That’s ludicrous, foolish, absurd, not counting utterly dishonest! It was therefore ignited by the force of exponential hunger that the prayer went out throughout the many-layered universes: “give me patience and give it to me now…” I was fervently writing out myself naked, when, suddenly, ALL lights went out.
A “Jesus-thought” popped into my mind, like “will my writing be saved?” As you know, salvation is increasingly important in this electronic day of age! A minute passed. Two minutes. Five minutes. Still no light! By now, it was clear that something unusual had happened. “O well,” I told myself, “there’s really nothing I can do about it… I’ll just go for a walk. By the time I come back, the power will be back!”
And it did exactly that: I went out for a delicious walk… When I came back, a few of my neighbors were in the street, frustrated, vulnerable, attempting to make sense of the no-light situation. So what would LOVE do in that situation? It began by reporting to the city the electricity outage… In the process, I learned a new word: “outage.” English is SO totally pure; I really “grok” this language… “OUT-age:” when you go out (when you leave yourself), you age, since the light of you goes bye bye… Delightful, truly!
And now what, LOVE? I clearly couldn’t continue to write… I remembered I had some shopping to do, so along with the blessings of my Higher Self, I grabbed by handbag, got in my car and asked Her (my car is a She) to drive me to Whole Foods, which She did splendidly. I wasn’t in the store but for 5 minutes when I bumped into beautiful David. We hugged and decided to have dessert together. The recognition of our soul connection deepened, one thing led to another, and we agreed to take a next step together… Long story short, it was 11:11P when I returned home. And, yes, the lights were back!
That entire story was literally enlightening: it reminded me that there is a power that is truly crucial in our life, more important than the ele
ctricity that fires our computer, more important than the rays of the sun on our skin, more important than the air we breathe, more important than the water we drink or than the food we eat… That power is the light of the Soul, which illuminates a path traveling between the realms of the human and of the divine!
If my neighbors were disturbed by a 4-hour electricity outage, imagine the level of confusion that most of us live in after continuously resisting turning on the light of the Soul! To have that power turned on, you must know where the breakers are, which you do by asking the right questions: What is the Soul made of? Where does it come from? Does it have a purpose? Where does it go when we die? What is death?
Yet, the very first question should be: “do I really want to know the truth?” Most people don’t, you see, and that’s why they live in the dark! They don’t want to know because they sense that truth will change their life and they don’t want to change! And so they live a life of quiet despair, protecting their attachments, be it to a loved one, to a belief, or to a thing… Choosing to remain ignorant of the Soul, they short-circuit Her power and resist feeling Her yearning for at-ONE-ment… That only compounds the problem, as Her pain is your pain. Her cry, your cry, Her longing, your longing!
They seem to believe that the purpose of life is to stay the longest possible time in the same spot! No wonder there is some attention on “how long…” You will hear them say things like: “But I made a commitment…” Yet the commitment is not to a person, a group of people or a thing OUT there! The commitment is directed IN: to do what LOVE wills… And, have you noticed, that changes constantly! Look at nature… It is always cycling from putrefaction to purification to awakening to enlightening, round and round, we go! It does so freely because it doesn’t attach to anything; it doesn’t protect the years invested in a marriage or in a degree or in a company. A tree doesn’t say: “me, offering my fruits? I don’t think so! What if I don’t have enough?” If it needs giving something up, it lets go, simply and with total abandon.
Opposite to the way of nature, asking “how long” hints to a lack of trust; it comes from an ego viewing reality through the filter of greed that whatever is given will not be [soon] enough! You may have heard in the language of parables how the precious oil was wasted by the impatience of the “Prodigal Son” and properly used via the generosity of the Sacred Prostitute. The Son—the ego mind—has a job: he is here to convince you that the visible world (or that which is outside of you) is the only real source of power. Maybe that relationship is going to do it for me, maybe one more drink would satisfy me, maybe one more chocolate, if only I could break that record, have that degree, make one more million dollars; then I could be happy! But that sense of enough never comes and the fascination with the Romantic Dream continues, even more so subtly as the unreal pursuit is condoned by the whole of society… That gives Prince Ego an advantage (shall I say an “outage”) as it has for results to send the invisible Soul in exile, relegating Her inner world to a vapid fantasy. And yes, by keeping the voice of the Soul gagged, estranged and unheard, Prince Ego is only amplifying the nagging doubt, the emptiness that he will try to adjust by fulfilling one more desire!
And yet, deep down inside, you damn well know that the hunger of the mind is insatiable: there is no end to it! Heck, the mind IS desire! If only I had the latest iPod, you think… And you dream how it would feel to crater it in the palm of your hand, you see yourself owning it, taking it out at meetings… You convince yourself that you really need it. And then you get it, and it’s like a great thrill. And you polish it, you learn it, you give it a name! So you give yourself the new gadget, you have yourself the new car, you have the woman, you have the country house, you have the Ph.D… but suddenly, it is like it dematerializes; It has no more substance... no more meaning… Yet the gaping hole is still vicariously asking for more, more, more, as a monstrous volcano devouring sacrificial virgins, more, more, more—the coercion never seems to cease, ready to eat you up again! And again, you have to invent another desire to escape the abysmal suction of death. But then, like a curse, the next desire will reveal to be a frustration… ♪♫ I can get NO satisfaction! ♫
The other option to being a beggar is to turn around and to let go of the fascination with the outside, no matter how much you romanticized it… It is to boldly jump into the
dark of the yawning abyss in search for the gold (or for the “God”) that is hidden there… Be aware that, even though you may vow yourself to consciously welcome the next pull of desire, when the voice of light will serenade you down into the deep, your mind will draw a blank and resist to go in with all its strength. Once again the chasmal tug-of-war will become more intense… Once again the two wills will be at odd, deepening the abyss that separates the Soul from the ego… Once again you will have missed an opportunity to know patience, that is, to embrace your suffering… Amazing, hum? The ego wants to lose itself SO bad; it is his ultimate desire, and yet, it is terrified that the Soul will consummate it! So the fists of fury keep on fighting while the LOVE/HATE relationship continues: ego knows that if he could only have Her, he would wake up on the other side… in PaRaDiSe! So really, the only thing Prince Ego needs to do, is to make sure that he never ever stays for too long on this dangerous möbius strip that would have him glide inside, into the Soul and be absorbed by Her! Should he have the glimpse of an in-sight, he just has to run as fast as he can into the outside world—where he can trust what he sees, because supposedly there is light outside…
And so the suffering continues, along with the impatience, the excessive pride flipping into littleness, the misuse of [electrical] power; the exile with the Soul endures… Until the accident that lets you know you’ve just chewed on the Last Desire and understand that you’ve just met your Last Judgment! The Soul made contact; somehow your fascination with effects (with looking good, with achieving in the outer life) has shifted… Somehow you find yourself being moved to cause (before the problem was created): you are source now, which implies you changed your orientation radically and took a U-turn into yourself, from outside to inside..
Yep, that turn around (the true meaning of what has been termed “repentance”) does mean that you stopped looking for LOVE in the wrong places! You get it: the way in is truly the way out! This time, you know you won’t forget to welcome Prince Ego next time the pain body strikes, next time the gaping hole is imposing its wish for another virgin. Next time, you will tango with the Soul, biting on a black rose… You are Princess Bride, the Soul, about to marry the Son Prince—the Prodigal Son has re-turned!
At last you begin understanding the intelligence of the plan and the perfect viewpoint of the ego, who came from far into the future—from out there, to woe the Soul so that he could forgive it ALL… The Sacred Marriage was clearly prearranged in Heaven. Now the fight of these two LOVE birds is like music to your ears… You expect the betrotheds to test each other’s commitment, to challenge each other’s boundaries: just how much can I get away with? Namasté, no mistakes, no mess takes: the union will be consummated. The mind will surrender to the velveteen moment, die into the most exquisite bliss imaginable and enter the Light of the Soul… There will be no more questions left and no one to offer more answers.
It is through coming to the end of desire that you become an initiate and pass over to the “other side” (the meaning of Abraham’s name). You then receive the mark of wisdom—as a letter of nobility—to add to your name… Cozily nestled into its sacred womb, you can now let any desire eXPiRe into a sacred ahhh… You have the permission to fire-breathe the divine ET, the Logos and QKosmic ETher within the spaciousness that you are, within the state of mind where ALL things are possible (that does mean that you have come to such purity your Word can create as you speak)! Yes, you are now in Gan Eden, in the “Garden of Eden,” blossoming of your own genius, in PaRaDiSe, on Earth…
It is through coming to the end of desire
that you pass overto the "other side".
“...And the end of all our wanderings will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” Thank you, TS Elliot, for such beauty and may all the teachers be honored for their direct or indirect contribution to this writing… May all know the light of the teaching is the light of Wisdom—Sophia of the Soul! That is the why of the Mystery, the why of the Schooling; and yes, here is one time where to accept the “why” question, one time where to have an agenda, a goal! And all of that because the lights went out…
Mahalene Louis
Saturday, May 22, 2010.