The Spiritual Crisis

The relentless pressure of the spirit, when invoked by the seeker of truth, can bring about a crisis of utter despair and hopelessness. The person reaches a point where they feel abandoned, not only by those closest to them but also by God. It’s at this time that some may even contemplate taking their own life to escape from the turmoil within. The battle for supremacy between the possessive force of self and the spirit represents the eternal struggle to reconcile the separation that has occurred in time from the source of original love.

Why is such pain and suffering necessary when someone is truly resolved to discover a deeper love than the world of transient forms?  lt’s because the resistance to the truth within the body extends back to the centre of the earth, represented by the nucleus centre within the most protected part of the brain. This originating point of consciousness is the permanent open portal to the psyche and higher realms of mind. From birth, even within the developing foetus, this light of consciousness functions not unlike the way a star guides mariners to steer their vessel through the challenges of life at sea. But only in the human animal is the light diffused due to the accumulation of past, which is the unresolved emotional residue of experience that, layer by layer, wraps around the enlightenment point within the brain.

Human beings exist at odds with nature due to the alien presence of an emotional entity of self. There is no provision for emotion in the natural creatures of the earth. Only human animals assume the right to defend their negativity and profane the planet by reducing the environment to the same level as their own interior wasteland. Because virtually everyone on earth is possessed by this psychic body of self, the psychological protection to examine the often irrational behaviour in people is to accept their emotional fluctuations as normal – that is until someone has suffered enough and begun to reclaim the ground of their own inner kingdom. This ongoing process of consciously addressing the life with an ever deepening scrutiny inevitably brings about a spiritual crisis to shatter the husk of the old way of life.

A spiritual crisis for someone engaged in discovering the truth differs from that of the normal citizen who has yet to turn inwards as a conscious action of self-enquiry. For an individual living the mystic life, every moment and experience of living presents a new opportunity to discard more of the ballast of past which has stifled the pure creativity of life. What differentiates the spiritual practitioner in a crisis, for example when a partner leaves them unexpectedly and the whole life appears to be falling down around them, is that they are able to contain the inner pressure and confusion with the knowledge that what is happening is right. Somehow, whatever the crisis, the man or woman holds to the deeper purpose of their life and accepts the situation, even though a part of them is dying.

Eventually, as the relentless pressure to surrender the most entrenched attachments to the world are exposed, events and circumstances converge to a crisis point. There is no way left to go except through what had hitherto appeared to be impossible. The realm of reality or God is impossible – but only while the possibility of escaping back into the world of time and experience can entice the dreamer to continue dreaming in existence. Right suffering provides the dynamic for the lover of truth to persevere on the long road back though their self as each layer of unconscious living is accounted for and resolved.

Without a discovered life purpose of service to a higher love, the crises of living (which all must face in one way or another) roll on indefinitely until death mercifully brings respite for a while. Life on earth is magnificent in its management of crises, which from the spiritual vision creates the beauty and uncertainty of the ever changing moment. Only by passing through the originating trauma of being born to die can an individual be free of the fear and uncertainty of life. To be willing to invoke the events and circumstances to bring the ultimate spiritual crisis that will wipe the slate clean is all that is necessary. It’s to know that no one ever has to suffer more than they can endure. For life is compassionate in its unswerving love of all its abundant forms.