Paradoxes Beyond 3D
Hey there! How is your week going?
Last week we started articles in the Beyond 3D series. We continue this week with Paradoxes Beyond 3D.
What do we mean by that?
Some people seek spiritual growth or personal growth so that they can get complete or resolution or get enlightened. However, the paradox of walking this path, is that you can't get where you want to go until you're no longer trying to get there.
For example, have you ever desperately wanted something and found it kept evading you? Maybe what you wanted was a particular person in relationship. Or money. Or an apology from someone. Or the eggshell in the eggwhite? But week after week, year after year, the more you want it, the more you go after it the more evasive and impossible it seems.
A rule of nature seems to be that everything you chase runs away from you.
This paradox calls to mind many, many paradoxes that emerge at this level of practice. Maybe you will recognize some of the paradoxes below? If not, hopefully this article will serve as a bit of companionship should you ever encounter these confounding realities.
Paradoxes Beyond 3D
You have to do it until you can't do it anymore. Let's say you want to break a habit or grow in a new way. Maybe you want to stop eating halloween candy, or stop being angry. Maybe you want to stop reacting to the mean comments on your social media. Sometimes, paradoxically, we have to lean into the activity to get ourselves out of it. When we eat the halloween candy until we get a tummy ache, we learn to stop eating the halloween candy. Read mean tweets until you laugh at the silly absurdity of it all. Do more of the thing you want to stop doing, as if it was a theater act and you are a puppet over-playing the role. In any case, inevitably, we just have to do the puppetry of our 3D ego experience until we simply can't anymore.
What you dislike in others, reveals what YOU also need to integrate and resolve. This is a hard one to realize and listen to, let alone live by. Paradoxically, while we interact with the world around us, each irritant is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. Sometimes it's that we hate in others things we hate about ourselves. Sometimes it's that we are not making generative requests for things we want. Sometimes we need to learn to say 'no' better. Find the clue to the personal lesson, and we gain the freedom to live our lives without getting hooked by others. Remember, irritation is a signal that a Love is trying to be expressed, cared for and integrated.
We must tend 3D world even though it is only The Matrix. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Zen proverb. There's no escaping the banalities and the tragedies of the real world. No matter where you go, there you are. Even with transcendent tranquility, pain still happens, it just doesn't devastate us anymore. There's no way out of The Matrix of Creation. We might as well learn to have a good time with it while we're here.
Let it go and it comes to you; give it away and it comes back. We hear this all the time, like the poem, "If you love something, set it free", for example. Like trying to get an egg shell out of the egg white with your finger, somehow nature paradoxically enjoys skittishly avoiding meeting us in areas we are chasing. To gain power, let it go. Vividly feel the experience you want, before you have it, as if it already is your experience, and mysteriously it just appears. Give what you yearn for, and notice what happens.
There is no end-point called "enlightenment". Wherever we stand, the horizon of Experience and Nature continues to move beyond our immediate reach. Every time we get to a particular hoped-for landmark, we see new horizons. Each desire must die away as a past experience in order for the next layer of "enlightenment" to become visible. Paradoxically, we grow by getting sick of ourselves, ego death, over and over again. As the lady says in the anecdote John R. Ross attributes to William James, "It's no use Mr. James - it's turtles all the way down."
There are so many more paradoxes we could discuss:
We spend our lives protecting ourselves, only to find that there's no self to protect.
In the heart of darkest despair and futility, paradoxically, we find surrender that brings freedom and abundance.
Instead of avoiding the darkness or spiritually bypassing it, we actually find light by diving deeper into the darkness and watching it burn out and reveal its true Love.
Ultimately, structures and thoughts don't get us to love. Only Love gets us to love. Will and Mind and Action without love only gets us more corruption, distortion and conflict.
On the path Beyond 3D, eventually we paradoxically stop spending all our time mapping the territory ahead, and instead just reside in Love and in the Now, and let the territory walk us up the mountainside.
The rules are easy.
Just be the Love that you Are.
What's next? Love.
Who/what? Whom/what's in front of you?
How? Listen to your love. Love is it's own direction.
With delicious and spicy blessings,
Maya
