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This is a Sample of the May Salon
Caroline Myss, Avila, Spain 2007
What exactly makes the mystical path so compelling and yet, at the same time, so ominous? Why would a great spiritual master caution his disciples that it is better not to walk the very path that brought him to his own enlightenment? The simple answer is that the mystical path is the path of the unreasonable life. All your life you have relied on your five senses and your base of intellectual and street knowledge to chart a reasonable course. That is to say, logic and order govern our choices, because none of us deliberately wants to throw our life into chaos by making decisions that ignore the fundamental rules of common sense. Our five senses combined with our trust of logic and rational thought seek to maintain a structure for the sake of physical survival, and that is appropriate, as we all need to find a comfort zone with survival. But let us penetrate a bit more deeply into how and why we cling so ardently to our love of our five sensory perceptual system and our adoration of reason and order, because there we find our first insight into why Swami Muktananda would warn the novice sojourner to be cautious about taking the mystical path.
Of the many characteristics and features of this force called life, such as the continual cycle of creation and destruction that expresses itself in hope emerging out of despair, love out of hatred, and the need to produce life after massive loss through wars and natural upheavals, we fear life’s chaos the most. We fear what we cannot control, and so, our lowest, irrational instincts, can drive us out of fear to destroy what threatens us, as in the invasion of Iraq. When we function from our lowest level of consciousness, it is nearly impossible to reason with us, much less to get us to grasp a greater symbolic portrait of what is unfolding in the cosmos. From that level of consciousness, when someone or something – an event such as 9/11 – has threatened us, all we can focus on is to gain control of what is out of control for the sake of survival.
Most people are not so intensely fearful as to think that in order to protect their physical world they have to destroy the life around them, so let us move up a notch on the spiral of the five senses to what we could consider ordinary life. (And yet, ordinary life for us must now include the fact that we are a nation at war, and the impact of that war is such a factor within our psychic field that it has to be included in this discussion.) You are not, however, driven by the chaos of war and the fears of those living on the streets of Iraq, (unless, of course, you have family serving there). You are driven by a subtler but no less real need to maintain order in your life, and this need is so strong that it can drive you to “destroy” that which you perceive to be a threat to your survival. We are going to explore this topic a bit more, because to grasp this is to pierce through Swami Muktananda’s mystic’s veil.
Your methods for destruction are, of course, appropriately subtle. They are, to say this in terms of the subject at hand, fully reasonable, at least as far as you are concerned. Criticizing someone you perceive as a threat, for example, is a “reasonable” act. Or, if you perceive that an individual has violated you in emotional, psychological, or financial ways, you are (still) free to file a lawsuit, which again is something we consider a completely rational thing to do if circumstances merit such action. (You realize I’m tempted to say that even if circumstances don’t merit a lawsuit, that doesn’t stop anyone these days….) Just consider how many divorces turn into courtroom war games in which both sides are participating in acts of destruction of which they would have never thought themselves capable prior to the division of the goods accumulated during their marriage, all of which represent how each party will survive without the other.
The list of the ways and means through which we behave when threatened, the extremes to which we will go to re-establish our sense of security, goes on indefinitely: letters we are capable of writing, threats we are capable of making, degrees of anger we can express when enraged, acts of manipulation we can engage in when we are determined to get our way. The common factor is that when it comes to battling the forces of chaos that threaten our survival, we will bargain with the powers of destruction and find ways to rationalize our actions, if only in the moment. “I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” said a woman who killed her husband. A young man who shot several students at a high school said in an interview recently, “I really thought the students would just get up again after I shot them, you know, like in the video games I played on my TV set at home.” These are extreme examples, but we can reach the extreme in our lives, each in our own way.
The operative questions appropriate to all of us are these: How much authority do your fears have over you when it comes to the decisions you make? And is it reasonable and appropriate to excuse our behavior by citing our fear? How often have we used fear as our method of explaining destructive behavior, expecting those around us to greet us with an embrace of compassion because we acted out of a fear that “possessed our reason”? The implication of this scenario is that we are not as responsible for destructive actions that spring from our fears, particularly those rooted in childhood, because the fears and our personal history associated with them have made us vulnerable to forces beyond our conscious, rational control. Given that rather dicey form of reasoning, we are then able to rationalize most destructive behaviors in our favor.
And, so, here’s the point: The power to destroy, no matter how subtly that power operates within us—and it very much operates within all of us—is viewed as a rational and reasonable force, because it is activated most often by the fear of survival. And that fear seems to grant us the right to act in ways that push edge of the social, moral, and ethical envelope that many keep sealed when not threatened – for the most part. Now let’s complicate this by adding the mystical perspective, or the unreasonable force.
THE PATH BEST NOT TAKEN – THE UNREASONABLE ONE
Let me say once again that our powers of reason along with well refined five sensory skills are essential to our survival—and survive we must. Make no mistake here, I am not opposed to creating a healthy and comfortable physical life. We are equipped with our five senses and powers of reason precisely to help us maneuver in the physical world. But beyond your five
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August 2007 - Entering the Castle Australian Tour
Date: August 5, 2007 - August 12, 2007
Sponsored by: Hay House Australia
5th August – Brisbane
11th August - Sydney
12th August – Melbourne
September 2007 - Omega Rhinebeck Campus
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Sept 7-9 2007
October 2008 - Travel To The Holy Land with Caroline Myss
Israel
Sacred Journeys: Israel
Travel To the Holy Land with Caroline Myss
Oct 21-31,2008
