Why do meditators still struggle with life?.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Question:
“I have been practicing silent mantra meditation for 5 years and it has not unfolded along the linear type lines I had expected when I set out on this path, to say the least.
What I mean is that I had (until recently) been carrying around the standard everyday model in my mind of incremental, measurable progress where I would steadily break out of unhealthy ways of functioning and replace them with more evolutionary ones.
However I can have periods where everything seems in perfect harmony; where the very music of life sings within me and can be experienced as a tangible feeling throughout my body, and the witnessing presence is very clear.
Then there are periods where I just seem to inexplicably lapse back into my old patterns and fears, where it would seem almost nothing has been gained since beginning meditation.
Finally, there are other very strange periods where both of these extremes are experienced simultaneously.
This is a very odd experience.
Since all of these modes of functioning are so mutually foreign to one another, when I’m riding this “see-saw” of consciousness, it feels like sometimes I can almost disappear from reality completely and the thoughts and experiences are left to their own whimsy with no one to experience them and give them life and meaning (I’m sorry if this doesn’t make sense but it’s the only way I know how to articulate it).
Yet, all the while, it’s also clear that overall I’m in a very different and more evolved place from where I began.
It’s really almost like there are two tracks existing and interacting simultaneously, one where the evolution is undertaken and experienced in a very chaotic fashion and one where it can be seen as unfolding along quite steady lines.
I really need some help with this and, frankly, some validation that I’m not just lapsing into mental illness.
Do you have any advice on how to get through the ups and downs, lefts and rights, backs and forwards, and every other way of this blissful, yet vexing journey?”
Response:
You said your life progress has not unfolded along the linear lines you expected it to.
So why would you think your spiritual development would follow a linear path?
The process of the transformation of consciousness is a kind of oscillating system between the old, conditioned state and the new unconditioned state.
Over time it trends toward more time in the unconditioned state, but when it is in the old, limited state, you can feel just as stuck and hopeless as you ever were in the past.
If you have any experience with young children from 13 years of age or so, notice how as they are becoming more assertive, and responsible, they strive toward an adult awareness.
Notice also how this is alternated by regression into a child’s state of dependency and uncertainty.
These periodic retreats do not mean they aren’t still growing up, it just means that the new state is not yet fully sustainable and they need time to rest and consolidate for the next phase of growth.
This same type of growth applies to the transformation of consciousness.
You are not lapsing into mental illness.
You have attested that overall you are in a much more evolved place, so the practice is working fine, you just need to let go of your expectation that it should be other than it is.
Love,
Deepak
