“Just as those ignorant of the spot might pass, time and time again, over a buried treasure of gold and not find it, so do all creatures go daily to that Brahma-world in sleep and not find it.” ~ Ch?ndogya Upanišad 8.4.2

It has to do with awareness. This door to awareness is somehow closed, and what we’ve got to figure out is how to open it.
I really think that’s all there is to it. If we can open or ‘cleanse’ the doors of perception as Blake and the Doors put it, I really get the sense
that the rest would take care of itself automatically. Like that flushing effect would flush out the Ego, and then an inpouring of ‘Cosmic’ energy
would carry you to the finish line, or the goal, or however you want to put it. It’s a bit like breathing when you are sleeping or digesting your food
or any of the trillions of complex actions your body does automatically without you having to even try.

So how do we open that door? I don’t know. It may be the same in all of us, or each of us may have a unique thing that’s blocking us. I think it’s something that
we inherently know, at least down deep, but that the fact that awareness, or consciousness is closed, or at least very restricted, is keeping us blindsided from
even that one thing. You know there’s so many parables, ancient stories, about the man living his whole life on some land that he’s unaware
that underneath is buried a treasure chest full of gold and jewels. And he spends his whole life toiling away in poverty, just getting by. The metaphor
in that really seems to be pointing to what I’m trying to say here. It was simply lack of ‘awareness’ keeping him from that ‘treasure.’

It could be that the value in a daily meditation practice is simply to make you aware of the obvious thing, ‘just under your feet,’ so to speak, that is blocking your awareness itself.

Then ancient Vedas of India say: Being -> Consciousness -> Bliss. So if they are right, if we could just figure out what “Being” meant, in an everyday, practical way, then that could be
the ‘ticket’ or the path to a recovery, an answer. I wrote in my last article on this subject that “Surrender” was the ticket. Well, surrender and being feel very related. This whole thing feels very similar to how Claire Weekes wrote, preached “Face. Do not run. Accept. Do not fight.” She was talking in terms of Nervous Illness. Nervous Illness is a state in which the nervous system registers feelings in a magnified way. Perhaps Nervous Illness and Ego are virtually the same thing? In her teaching the exagerated sympathetic nervous system exagerated the inbuilt functions of the “Fight or Flight” response which created a feedback loop that kept the Illness alive. It didn’t matter what originally caused the Illness. It was this current feedback loop keeping it alive. So the answer in her teaching was that you had to change your mood: You had to face your feelings and not run from them, and once you faced them you had to accept them (surrender) and not try to fight them. The instinct is the opposite. But with time and practice, acceptance could be cultivated as a mood.

Maybe “Being” means that: Stop running and stop fighting. And by that I mean psychologically from your own mood. I don’t mean that like, out there in life you accept when a company has overcharged you or accept that your air conditioning is broken and not have it fixed! hahahahahahahahahaha. But what I am saying is that even “Out There” in the daylight world of your doings and goings, the back of your mind can still be a field of cultivated acceptance. That actually is one of the main themes of the Bhagavad Gita. Detachment from the outcome is the same as a mood of acceptance.

To become a god requires complete, unconditional surrender to the all, sacrificing your self (ego) to your Self (nature, Atman). In Norse Mythology, Woton hung himself upon a tree for 9 days, sacrificing himself to himself (Since he was already a god). The sense you get out of that is the need, in order for the ‘god’ energy to come through, of sacrificing, of lancing, the individual self, the separate, narrowly contained self (Which sounds a whole lot like the ‘Ego’) in order to let the ‘All’ (The infinite, the eternal) come through.

Now this doesn’t mean you literally go out and ‘crucify’ yourself or hurt yourself physically in any way. This is a psychological thing. These metaphors, these allegories, point to psychological, spiritual ‘quests.’ It’s tricky because what is Ego exactly in your day to day life? It may be something relatively benign like this: Am I do this activity (job, hobby, social, sport) because I, myself, my ‘inner’ self (That’s the one closer to the ‘Atman’) want to do it, or am I doing it for something or someone else (attention, money, to please someone else)?

That’s one idea. That first paragraph was a big, mythopoetic phrase. It’s great. It feels good to sing! But then the second paragraph explores how to take that ‘Poetic’ language and actually apply it to your life right here and now. I hate to use the word ‘practical,’ but it seems one has to find a way to translate these ideas, written thousands of years ago, and also in big, broad, philosophical language, into a ‘real world’ application. I think that’s a good way to continue the exercise, quest, adventure, in a way that honors both sides of the equation: The Mythic, on one hand, which inspires but feels ‘out there’ + the “So, what do I actually do!?!?!?!” which is of the here and now, feels more mundane, but at the same time feels real.