Thursday, October 08, 2015
John's Awakening––Part 4
But, yeah, I know the feeling that one has been told that one has won the lottery, only to be contacted later to be informed one must return to work to earn it. At least one now knows that there is a prize waiting. Or it's like being a beggar picked in a limo and told that he or she has been identified as the inheritor of billions, temporality enjoys the life style, only to informed some months down the track that they were misidentified and then promptly thrown back on the street. I believe there have been movies made of exactly this plot. Cinderella with an unhappy ending.
What John does note realize is that this "letdown" is frequently a part of the awakening experience. Evelyn Underhill, in her great classic called "Mysticism," explains that this falling back or loss of euphoria is the real dark night of the soul. One has been, in effect, transported to heaven in the initial awakening experience. Now, suddenly, all rapture, all elevated states have disappeared. With Christian mystics, the sense is that God, who so embraced them in love earlier, has deserted them and in effect turned "His"
back on them. Instead of feeling like a favored child, one now feels like an outcast, an abandoned soul.
However, this state is by no means the end of the journey. Eventually, the joy returns, the rapture repeats. With Kundalini, it is as if a higher consciousness is directing a process which the aspirant can only receive and endure. Kundalini has many "ups and downs," times of exaltation alternating with despair, all of which are part of the transformation process as the system adapts to and integrates the new energies.
