THE CHOICE
A young healthy person lives the thrills and excitement of the body-personality naturally. As long as there is a promise of pleasure and satisfaction, there is no need to look elsewhere. The expectation and challenge of more complex issues, further ground to conquer, and the possibility of a wide variety of emotional and physical sensations is enough. But when the person is older, it is not so “natural”, but rather sad. Spiritual life is awakened in those who have lived, not necessarily years but depth.
The idea of going beyond a sensory paradise doesn’t make itself known in the absence of pleasure but in its transcendence. The choice for amplitude, depth and contact with unknown states of being is not made in conjunction with physical life; it is made when mastery over it has been reached and energetic capacity has enlarged and refined. In other words, spirituality is not an addendum or an accident. It is an extension and amplification of the life we know. Other than as spontaneous reprieve, spiritual experience happens when we pierce through the habitual perceptual veils of the personality. Rather than being a random act it entails deliberation.
Spirit life is a conscious choice made in maturity and intelligence that implies having embraced physical life.
It is not fashionable today to tell the truth. Spirituality is sold as a material aggregate or as an escape. We are promised the cake as well as the pleasure of eating it, and often we are seduced into believing that we do not even need to eat the cake to taste it. We are not informed that body and spirit are two interconnected but wholly different dimensions of being.
The body and the linear mind have a limit to the frequencies they can sustain.
As long as we are interested in and aimed towards the material world, we proportionately limit the quality of energies we are capable of experiencing. There is a ceiling to the kind of holistic sensation we have whilst in the heights and depths of physical life. Equally, we are limited to the kind of spiritual experience we can have if we avoid physical life.
Physical, emotional and mentally, our senses do not reach the finer range of perception that composes spiritual reality without the sensory capacity itself altering radically. Alternately, spiritual sensibility is devoid of depth if we have missed out on ordinary joys and adventures. Orgasmic surrender requires complete abandonment; spiritual perception involves discrimination. Each reflects a different posture. The first kind “happens” organically while the latter requires awareness, discipline, and intent. The second is an extension of the first; we lose control and yet maintain stability and management of subtle intensities, something that is not trained in ordinary physical life. Usual boundaries of experience are transcended. Deeper perception is indirectly provoked by soul desire and physical and mental readiness.
Ordinarily, a person who has made the leap asks himself, “Is the life that I am leading the kind of life I want to lead?” This is the prelude to making the choice. Different worlds are revealed, and the energies and forces that comprise each. Understanding dawns on us: it is impossible to change one single aspect without shifting the entire balance and purpose of a life. We grow up.
Spirituality is many things but spiritual life is a deliberate choice. It can be experienced for sheer delight at any moment, or it can reveal and trigger an entirely different way of being. In this case it becomes the ground for a special kind of activity and inquiry. When such a decision is reached that changes your life circumstances, the world of the alchemist and the occultist is revealed. You are born anew.
