Another Choice

If such an absorption allows us to pass beyond the heaviness and inertia that afflict and overwhelm our physical consciousness and can take us to a state of wakeful receptivity more propitious and conducive to progress and renewal, why, in the name of which higher principle, should we deprive ourselves of it?

Most probably and chiefly, here too, this is a matter of our sincerity.

For, through the ages, wherever societies were including and integrating in their collective reality the necessity for the development of the individual consciousness, all ritual and guided initiation was utilizing the input of some ingested external substance which would help to momentarily take down the barriers of the ordinary consciousness.

But in our world of today, the demons of profit have taken over.

One would have to ensure a truly dedicated environment, truly shared motivations and an enlightened company – conditions that are hard to assemble, yet without which one risks exposure to a growing dependency and addiction and to tyrannical habits which will soon take us away from our own inner resources and will reduce us to mere shadows.

***

What we thought of or used to consider as “me”, in this new perspective shows itself as some kind of ill-joined and dysfunctional family, the members of which ceaselessly bicker and quarrel and compete for usage of the house or refuse to contribute any effort.

And one discerns there a sort of cleverness, almost a cunning, aiming at outplaying any central attempt to achieve some viable harmony.

And in this regard one must learn to repel or to silence the many voices that imitate and the various claimants to inspiration: as if the very energy of the ego, of the separateness, wanted to hold us back, to prevent this return to the source or at least to postpone and delay it, or else to derive from it some sort of advantage.

Thus entire graceless periods pass, interposed between one progress and another.

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