Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 24: The Fallen World

What do we mean by "the fall" or "the fallen world"? We all have intimations that the world is not what it could be, and for many, it is this confusion that launches a spiritual quest. When we take up spiritual practice we are facing the forces that keep us ignorant, asleep, and unaware of the Heaven on Earth we have within us to create. In this episode, we explore the nature of the fallen world and our relationship with it.

Transcript

We all have intimations that the world is not what it could be.

When we take up spiritual practice,

We are facing the forces that keep us ignorant,

Asleep,

And unaware.

In this episode,

We're exploring the fallen world and our relationship to it.

Have a listen and enjoy.

What should we talk about?

The fall of humanity.

I don't know.

Ooh,

That's a good one.

Let's talk about the fallen state and the fall of humanity.

Okay.

Should we?

Yeah,

Because that doesn't get explained properly,

And we have this sort of biblical understanding of what it means to be fallen.

But that's not,

Obviously that's wrapped up in myth and narrative in such a way that it's not accurate.

I don't know about that.

I don't take the Bible as strictly myth.

I mean,

Certainly there is the mythological element of it.

Well,

I didn't mean to imply that the Bible is strictly myth,

But what the Bible expounds on has been mythologized.

Tell me more about what you mean.

Well,

Just as we have this understanding of what,

And when we talk about the fall,

I think we're referring back to the garden and eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,

Which then kind of feeds into our whole understanding of what original sin is.

And of course we don't understand that correctly either.

So there's this sort of cascading effect that has come from the way our interpretation of sacred texts has been unfolded.

Yeah,

I would agree with that.

It's looking at the fall strictly as a historical event that happened X number of years ago,

I think is too limited in exploring what actually is our fallen state and what actually is the nature of original sin.

And I think that I agree with you on that because I think when people begin to look at it through that lens as purely historical or historical event,

The only logical conclusion is to say,

Well,

That's hogwash.

But there is a reality of the fallen state and there is a reality of original sin that is something that I think is worth exploring,

Right?

Yeah,

Yeah,

Definitely.

That's what I was aiming at.

I see that now.

Well,

I think the Course in Miracles attacks this rather efficiently,

But we should probably start by explaining the difference between the way you and I might describe a fallen state as opposed to what it's common or how it's commonly understood.

Yeah,

You want to go first?

Sure.

Well,

Okay.

So,

You know,

Listeners who've been with us for a while will remember that I was raised from a Catholic.

And so in that tradition,

Or at least in the specific church that I was brought up in,

The concept of original sin,

The way it's conveyed is that you are born inherently sinful in some way.

You're already a mistake when you come into the world.

And so your participation in these religious practices is meant to kind of deliver you into a more holy state eventually when you die and when you go to heaven.

But in the meantime,

The assumption is simply that you're messed up somehow,

You're wrong somehow,

You're going to be inevitably failing and sinning as a human being,

Making mistakes that need to be atoned for.

Whereas the Course in Miracles calls out that misinterpretation of the Bible in a way that after you've been doing the Course for a while,

You begin to understand that,

Oh,

It's simply our perception that is the mistake.

Our understanding of who and what we are is a mistake.

It's not something we were born with.

It was a culture and a means and narratives about the world that we absorbed.

That's the mistake.

That's the original sin,

Which of course,

As we described before,

Means simply to miss the mark.

It doesn't mean something that needs to be punished when you do it.

It's interesting.

I think there's a synthesis of the biblical view and what is shared in A Course in Miracles because I think they're both correct in different ways.

And I see the fallen state as something we are born into.

We are born into a shared delusion with our fellow human beings in a way that blinds and deafens us as we grow up.

And I do think that we are born in and of ourselves innately pure and true and you could say a creation of God or an emanation of pure being,

Pure spirit.

And that noose,

That original eye or lens of experience that we are born with is gradually dirtied and made confused by the nature of the world.

I do think there is a fallen state of the world and it's often I think it's very difficult for people to actually perceive that,

To actually see it clearly and truly.

I think it is reflected in teachings like yoga and such too,

Which talk about the kleshas and the distortions and obstacles that prevent us from experiencing the pure state of yoga and the pure state of self-realization.

I don't see the original sin as something that we are born into having sort of inherited or having been created in some kind of flawed demonic way that we have to fix or change.

But I've never met any human being who is not quickly indoctrinated into consensus reality and the fallen world in a way that their lens of purity is dirtied by false ideas.

And so that's to me where the Course comes in,

Is that the cleansing of the noose,

The restoration of our true sight and our true sense of self and purpose is restored through the spiritual work.

And in some sense that is the redemption,

It is the atonement,

The salvation.

I just think it's presented in a way that allows the individual to embody their Christ-like potential versus live always in the legacy of being a condemned sinner.

Right.

Yeah,

And I think you just sort of nailed what I would or the way that I would define a fallen world,

The fallen world is that it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that heaven is already here,

That we're already capable of that condition.

And this is another aspect of where the language,

You know,

The other night I was making this point that the language we use to interpret the biblical truth is misguided.

And that's an error in itself that contributes to this global,

At least in the Roman Catholic diaspora,

Whatever the right word is here,

This global misunderstanding of what we're here for.

And this global misunderstanding,

And I think this applies to almost anybody,

That we're not good enough yet.

That we're always this work in progress that needs to be improved upon because,

You know,

Whether this is spoken in such words or not,

There's this understanding that you can always be a little bit better.

And I know we talked about this before in other contexts,

But I find that to be a very kind of corrosive influence that eats away at people in terms of their ability to see truth accurately because it's always being filtered through this perspective of being cursed somehow or unfinished or,

Again,

Inherently sinful.

Does that make sense?

It does.

I think what you're describing is unfortunately one of the byproducts of people who come out of the Catholic tradition.

Because I think it's true,

We aren't perfect as we are.

We aren't complete.

And I think everybody in their core knows that.

It's not just that the Church has taught us we're inadequate or faulty in some way.

It's that each of us knows we're not living according to our true potential.

And I think that to me the greater problem is not the way the Church has framed it as much as the falseness of those who taught it and the way that their own lack of embodiment of the Christ-like essence makes their message,

Even if the words are true,

Makes it susceptible to this falseness and that what most people end up encountering then is in the churches is the falseness of the individuals and not the teaching.

And I think that when that happens,

Unfortunately,

People discard the teachings and the path itself because,

I mean,

Why should I follow a path when the person in front of me who's telling me about it,

It has not been clearly changed by it.

And so the people themselves who aren't really disciples of that path end up distorting it.

And the same thing happens in yoga and Buddhism.

I've seen it there too.

It gets incredibly subtle,

I mean,

To try to talk about these things because it's easy to conflate the idea of being fallen or imperfect with a fundamental badness,

You know,

To take of quite personally when we could alternatively sort of perceive ourselves as being imperfect,

You know,

That there's always something to be a little bit improved,

But that that's perfectly fine.

I mean,

That's how it should be.

And it's not a condemnation of our true selves.

It's not a rejection of our true selves.

It's simply an awareness of truth without judgment.

So you can see where,

You know,

The idea of goodness and badness kind of really muddies the water here when we're trying to determine what fallen means or what sinful means or self-improvement means,

All of those things.

I'm not sure that was super clear.

Well,

I agree with you as far as the broken self-image that most people develop and end up living out.

On the other hand,

I do see utility and probably this would come as a surprise to most people that I work with or maybe even to who listen to this podcast is I see actually see great utility in the judgment aspect because if we can't discern truth from untruth,

If we can't discern what is of our spiritual essence and what is of our fallen state,

We don't have any way to actually approach the truth.

And so I actually think that there's value in the judgment aspect and there's not in the condemnation but in the sense that a discernment has to be made.

It has to be integrated and I think that's the mistake that the church makes that you're speaking of is it confuses discernment and condemnation.

Yeah,

Or discernment and judgment.

That's the fundamental difference between those two things is because judgment implies a value or an assignment of good or bad.

We can't live without that.

Everybody every day virtually in every moment is deciding what's good or bad.

That's the basis of how we decide to act on anything.

It is.

I mean I agree with you.

I just think that it's not an inherent goodness or badness necessarily that we're pointing to.

Oh boy,

See this is what I mean when I say it gets really subtle because now we're talking about different shades of meaning in the word judgment between your understanding of it and mine.

Sure.

That's good.

Yeah,

It's fun.

I don't know if the listeners would appreciate it so much.

This is exactly why people listen because they want to hear ideas get hammered out and hammered into some kind of useful tool.

I can see where we might take this is like let's apply this to the yoga community.

Let's apply this idea of being able to discern good from bad in attitudes toward the world or certain movements in the world or certain kinds of people or how we progress on the path.

I mean there's all kinds of ways we could go with this.

We've talked or you've especially spoken recently about ways that the yoga community is sort of meandering off course,

Let's say to be generous.

Giving is a gentle word.

Staring straight into the brick wall.

They're going off the cliff,

I don't know.

And I think part of the reason that happens is because people are attracted to the yoga path for a variety of reasons.

And until you've really gotten deep into the work,

Oftentimes it's not easy to see where those perceptions are distorted or misguided.

So you buy into a yoga culture,

Let's say,

And you get the mala beads and you're going to class five times a week and you start to think,

Well,

I'm an enlightened yogi,

Right?

But it's not that easy.

But the danger is that you kind of buy into the whole package of what you think yoga is without doing the actual individual work.

And now you've just created,

We talked about this in the episode on spiritual materialism,

Now you've just created a whole new ego for yourself that's as lost as the previous one was.

And then you expand that so that it becomes a collective delusion in this community and now we're really in trouble.

And what you're saying is particularly important to the development of judgment as discernment or discrimination in its original sense of that word.

In the sense that without that factor,

The path gets distorted into something that doesn't really have clarity or truth in it.

It's well intentioned,

I don't doubt that.

But it becomes something else entirely that lacks real wisdom.

And I think it's very uncomfortable.

I see this in yogis,

It's very uncomfortable to have to entertain that discernment is needed.

There is actually the presence of value-based judgment.

It's not condemnatory in the way that people have been taught judgment is condemnatory,

But it does separate the wheat from the chaff.

And without being able to do that,

You don't know if you're eating nourishing food or wasted fiber.

So I think that's the direction I can see and have seen since I got involved in yoga in the West is it seriously lacks discernment in a lot of ways.

And worse,

It attempts to relinquish judgment and discernment at all costs to the degree where one can't even know truth from untruth,

Good from bad.

It all just gets mixed up into one big salad so that everything is truth.

It's like,

No,

That's not the way it works.

Yeah.

There's something very poignant about this too to me because,

As you say,

Comes from a place of good intentions and then gets distorted from there.

And especially on social media sometimes,

Like if you follow yogis or yogic accounts on Instagram,

There's a lot of very empowering content where people are finally beginning to realize that they actually have agency in the world and things like that,

Which is to a certain extent a good thing.

If you've been cowed your entire life or a people pleaser or whatever it happens to be,

And all of a sudden you begin to realize that you're an individual with agency in the world,

Like I celebrate that.

But at the same time,

There's a way in which that gets inflated grotesquely into this worship of me that people are posting for the whole world to see that's kind of toxic.

You can really see a distortion of the third chakra happening there because there's that gateway between the third and the fourth chakra where the individual personal will and empowerment has to become subservient to the deeper will and empowerment of the truth within.

And for a lot of people,

They get the taste of the beauty of that sense of empowerment.

And like you said,

It is a beautiful thing.

It's a necessary thing,

But it has to go further.

It has to keep developing.

Otherwise it turns into a self-empowerment without being embedded within any greater context.

And I don't just mean like group empowerment or global empowerment.

I don't even mean it that way,

But in the sense that there is a deeper expression that we're capable of,

That that limited version of personal empowerment doesn't,

It's not big enough.

Yeah,

It's still within the paradigm.

It's still within the egoic paradigm.

And so yeah,

I can be empowered,

But if I'm feeling that as a,

Well,

It's just enlarging my own ego or presenting it in a different way and then expecting accolades for that from the outside.

And it's not to be expected too,

Because virtually all of us go through this experience and consensus reality of being disempowered.

So there is a point where we discover a power within us and an agency,

But it's not the end as you're saying,

It's not the end.

Yeah,

It's sort of like realizing that you have a very powerful horse available to you and then just letting it run wild as opposed to giving it a little bit of training and discipline and then you can have a horse that's useful,

That's suitable for pulling the carriage of the king as opposed to one that people are running around the racetrack and people are betting and making money off of.

I love that.

That's a weird metaphor.

No,

It's very appropriate,

Because it sort of gets at the question of what is your life serving?

And if your life is just serving personal freedom or personal empowerment,

Well,

Certainly that's better than just being a blind slave to the consensus or to your conditioning,

But by no means is it the full aspect of service.

And that's what the ego doesn't want to hear.

The ego doesn't get into the game of yoga or spirituality to become a servant.

It gets in for its own sense of expansion and glorification and that has its place,

No doubt,

But it's not what the fine,

I mean,

We are here to be made the vessel,

The agent,

The instrument for serving the king,

As you said.

I like the way you said it.

And without that understanding,

The question is,

Who's the king?

Who am I serving here in my empowerment?

Right,

Right.

And this is where the fallen world,

We can circle back to that,

Because the fallen world celebrates the unruly horse as opposed to the one that has discipline and is drawing the king's courage because it looks at that animal and thinks that's a slave and there's no glory in that.

Would you talk a little bit further about what the fallen world encourages in that way?

Well,

You know,

It's such an incestuous thing,

If that's the right word.

It's a perfect word.

The way we feed off of and use each other's egos to advance.

It's almost like the collective ego has an agenda that we all serve without even realizing it.

And every message we get,

Especially in a capitalistic society,

Is that it's for your own glory,

It's for your own self elevation and hopefully money enriches.

And so we see ourselves as these agents of achievement,

I guess,

Or self-aggrandizement,

Even if we don't call it that,

When the truth would have us,

As you say,

Be a vessel for the divine,

To be the horse pulling the king's chariot and holy in that way.

I mean,

No one wants to be a slave and that is a natural expression of truth.

But when the ego gets hold of it,

It uses that idea to obviate any idea of ever serving in any other capacity.

So services seem to be this sort of low status place in society as opposed to being the king of yourself.

And as we know,

The ego is always trying to be God.

God,

There's so much contained within what you're saying.

I mean,

My mind goes at about 50 different directions with that because,

You know,

I don't have a problem with capitalism like I once did.

If I had been talking about this maybe,

Gosh,

Even eight,

Nine years ago,

I probably would be very condemning toward capitalism.

I actually see the motivation of capitalism very differently now than I did at once.

The piece of it that's important though that I think is within what you're saying is,

In some sense,

That way of living keeps us oriented around our own security,

Pleasure and status.

We were talking about this before we started recording.

It keeps us within the first three chakras.

It keeps us housed within the limited domain of those drives for security and safety,

For pleasure and comfort,

For status and control and power.

And that to me is the real bondage,

Right?

I also see within the capitalist structure,

I imagine this is going to be very unpopular with the Marxist listeners of the yoga community,

Is what capitalism also does is it puts a certain degree of power in the individual's hands to shape their world any way they want to some degree.

Which if that's done not under the guise of the three drives,

The security,

Pleasure and power principle,

But done instead for some very useful,

Very serving purpose,

Then the capitalist model becomes something that benefits the individual and the whole at the same time.

So it begs the question for me,

This gets into a little bit of,

I suppose,

Economics and world structure,

But it begs the question is,

Is the problem of capitalism,

Is it in the system itself or is it in the individuals who are operating within it?

Because if we are largely slave to our own drives for security and pleasure and power,

Then the system that develops as a result of that is going to reflect that,

Right?

Just as easily it could go the other way.

Right,

Right.

I think the fundamental problem with capitalism is,

Well,

I mean,

If you boil it down to the basic expression,

I trade something of value to you for something that's of value to me.

Right?

So that's very pure and that's honest and individuals can agree on whether it works for them or not.

So you're empowered.

When we then scale that up and now we're locked into a system that determines how we do those things and is subject to manipulation by outside forces at the same time as we're participating in it and very dependent on the gaze of others as we're participating in it.

Like we're almost performatively participating in capitalism so that we can show the results like we can amass the lucre of this system and then enhance our own status in the eyes of other people.

Then it's very toxic.

But if you're simply participating in it in an honest way,

Honest exchanges with no manipulation,

Then as you say,

I think it does serve a higher goal.

And when you can take whatever profit you're amassing and use that for something true,

Then the system itself is neutral.

I totally agree with you.

It's what we impose on it or what we project into it or how we perceive ourselves within it that becomes the problem.

Now you get into some of the – I like this because this circles right back to the fallen world again.

Now we get into this notion of empire or sometimes called Babylon.

I like to use a more gentle term,

Consensus reality,

In that it fundamentally promotes a way of thinking,

A way of operating in the world that keeps us bound to those objectives for security,

Pleasure,

Power,

What have you.

And you're right,

I so much agree with you.

It's like the system itself is actually neutral,

But the way the individuals participate in it develops it.

Same way with the conversation we were having around the church.

It's like the church itself has almost a neutral if not positive component,

But when the individuals within it distort that,

It becomes something else.

And that's exactly getting at the essence of the fallen world.

It's not the pristine world.

You go out into the trees or out to the ocean.

It's not the ocean or the trees that are corrupt.

It's this potential within human nature to be bound to those lesser objectives.

And I don't even just mean selfish as much as destructive,

But it informs capitalism,

It informs the church,

It informs government,

It can inform communities,

It can inform friendships.

Because it's that fallen state of awareness that we're operating from in those objectives.

That's a nice loop there.

It reminds me of what you just said.

I know some people who are long distance backpackers and they'll go out and do like the Appalachian Trail or be out for months on the trail and the re-entry into society after coming from just pure experience of nature and coming back into this world with the noise and the money concerns and all that stuff,

It's like traumatizing almost.

They have to take a week or so to reorient.

So that kind of tells you just how out of alignment we are in terms of consensus reality.

Absolutely.

I can verify that.

When I worked in the wilderness,

We did two or three week trips and to come out,

It took a couple of days,

Especially early on in that work.

The fluorescent lights,

The money,

The costumes,

The packaging,

Everything was so false.

There's maybe no better way that we have than to contact nature and see its undisguised,

Raw,

Beautiful simplicity and to contrast that with this fallen world.

The problem with the fallen world isn't even in any one of those areas,

But the whole collective participation that tells us this is what's real,

This is how people live.

This is important.

How else could you stare at a computer screen all day and take all of that seriously?

You step outside.

I live in Mexico.

We've got a ton of birds in nature here.

This is actually,

I'm harkening back to the Dow episodes we did right now because just watching the interplay and the pure exchanges between bees and flowers,

For example,

Or hummingbirds in nectar or I've got a feral cat in the neighborhood that takes advantage of certain situations around here that I won't go into because they're kind of violent and gory.

That is such an honest form of being in the world without all of this enhancement and false concerns that we apply to it in our human consensus reality,

I guess.

I think you're saying something very important there,

Which is part of the purpose of the fallen world,

The consensus reality,

Is to insulate us against the horrors of humanity,

The horrors of nature.

There's a way in which that orientation around being safe and secure,

Being comfortable and feeling pleasure,

Being in control and being somebody important,

Those all insulate us from our real contact with the world,

Which is not just butterflies and rainbows and floating on clouds.

It's rigorous.

It's intense.

What people don't,

I think this is a little bit of my beef with the yoga community,

Which I'm clearly operating within in some sense,

Is there's not enough Jedi in it.

It's not just that it's colorful.

There is this weird social justice warrior component that is involved,

But it's not necessarily driven by this deep Jedi component to master oneself and live that mastery.

Instead,

We trade that for the comforts and the pleasures of the fallen world as a way of insulating against the responsibility,

The power,

The freedom,

And as we've said,

Being a servant.

Right,

Right.

Oh God,

There's so much going on there.

That just really struck me what you said about insulating ourselves against the horrors of the natural world because isn't that what civilization is ultimately,

Is an attempt to gain this collective security.

But I think you're talking about also another level on which we're distracting ourselves constantly with these petty,

Made up,

Egoic concerns as a way of never seeing that as part of this natural world,

We're supremely vulnerable all the time.

If I come face to face with a tiger,

It's a pretty good bet that I'm not going to survive that fight.

We don't want to see that.

We don't want to think that a tidal wave could come and wipe us out in the next 10 minutes,

Or to use recent events,

A building could fall on our heads.

That was tragic.

I maybe shouldn't include that.

No,

Well,

It's the horror of the world.

Yeah,

That uncertainty that we're always trying to keep at bay.

We never want to look at the reality of our own eventual deaths.

We never want to look at this possibility that we could be gravely harmed by people or anything else.

So we have this sort of code of denial going on.

Code of denial.

Yeah,

I like that.

Yeah.

Well,

And that's where we get into,

What is the solution to the fallen world?

Well,

If you look at it through the lens of the Christian logos,

It is to become the thing that is not fallen anymore,

And to walk into the world to share that,

To demonstrate that,

To extend that.

That's exactly what I hear you describing,

Because there is no such thing as a spirituality that transcends the fallen world.

The only thing that exists is a spirituality that engages with the fallen world.

We become dumb and blind when we just subject ourselves to becoming oriented around security,

Pleasure,

Power,

Because we miss out on this tremendous capacity to become the solution that we're looking for.

But that can only happen,

As you just stated,

By turning and facing the nature of it,

That it's vicious,

It's horrible,

There's floods,

There's buildings collapsing,

There's tigers,

There's disease,

There's death,

There's decay,

There's heartbreak.

There is no path outside of that.

I like what you said about being more Jedi,

That we need to be more Jedi in our approach to this,

Because that would require us assuming all of the responsibility,

That mantle of self-determination and discovering our own power in such a way that we understand it is not something the ego generates,

But it's derived from a higher source.

I'm also thinking of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita,

Because that is exactly the battle that he was forced to march into.

He didn't want to be a warrior.

He didn't want to go through the trials that he was being pointed at by Krishna,

And Krishna was like,

Nope,

You got to do this.

Sorry.

This is your lot.

Yep,

There is a very real and very literal spiritual warfare that's taking place here.

When we talk about spiritual warfare,

Obviously we're not saying that it includes violence,

Because that would negate the word spiritual.

But what you said there,

The mantle of self-determination,

Is that how you said it?

Something like that,

Yeah.

That's like,

Yeah,

Exactly.

That's Arjuna with Krishna.

That's Christ taking up the cross.

It's all of those gestures of moving into the battlefield when everything in you is reluctant to do so,

To take up this fight in parentheses or in quotation marks against the fallen world,

Not against the fallen world,

But to work within the fallen world.

Right.

And I remember,

Now I don't want to get too above my pay grade here,

But when the War on Terror was being talked about frequently,

The concept of jihad came into the American consciousness in a way it never had before.

And Western commentators interpret that as a war against the infidel,

When in fact my understanding,

My minimal understanding of Islam,

Is that the jihad actually refers to the same inner war,

The same warrior stance in the world with regard to your own self-realization and responsibility in it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And the fundamentalist religions and the Western interpretation get it all wrong,

Because obviously it gets framed and practiced as some sort of violence.

But you're right,

That's the real essence of jihad.

And it's there in every spiritual tradition.

The problem,

It seems to me,

Is that one needs the proper orientation and guidance around understanding how to properly conduct warfare.

Because if it's turned into violence,

If it's turned into divisiveness,

Then it's not true anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the enemy that you're engaging with is really within you,

As opposed to projecting it outward.

Yeah,

Essentially.

Right?

So if you can't master your own inner conflicts and appetites and passions,

Then any attempt you make to go out and heal the fallen world is going to be misguided.

Do you want to talk about,

What's the antidote to that?

The antidote.

Well,

Maybe that's the wrong word.

No,

I think it's the perfect word,

Actually.

Because I think there is an antidote to this poison,

If you will.

I think we're covering many of the things.

I think for a lot of individuals,

And I'm speaking,

I suppose,

To probably,

I would guess,

Folks who would be listening to this.

First it's acknowledging that there is a need to engage the battlefield,

To become Neo entering the matrix again,

Or that there is a purpose served by you being awake.

And not just awake within your comfortable bubble or in a cave or within your own little altar room,

But in a way that actually comes out and engages the world fully.

I think there's an antidote right there in what you said,

The mantle.

How did you say it again?

The mantle of self-determination.

That's an important ingredient,

As are all of the divine attributes that we cultivate,

Like a real love,

A real discernment,

Real equanimity,

Real relationship.

All of those qualities that real spiritual practice cultivates,

They're all antidotes to the fallen state,

Every single one of them.

And they're all going to be very individual since we all have our individual assortment and collection of delusions and misguided narratives and the rest.

I think that point needs to be made more forcefully,

I think,

Maybe in the yoga community as far as you may think you've arrived,

But until you've really,

Really gone down all of those multiple rabbit holes in your own self or the way you've constructed your identity over the years,

Then you don't really know.

You said something there that really caught me and I think that's an important part of the antidote question is that it's individual.

Because take for example,

Someone who develops a pattern of being self-effacing versus someone who is narcissistically self,

Let's say,

Possessive or controlling,

What have you,

The remedy for those two different individuals and how they deal with the fallen world are very different.

I think one of the things that makes the antidote difficult is that it's a very individual unfolding.

We have universal qualities that we develop,

But for every individual,

They arrive at those qualities in a very unique way,

Which is one of the reasons I love the Enneagram because it helps detail that individual unfolding.

Oh,

That's a really good point.

I was about to say something about how there's really not a syllabus for any of this.

There's no map to follow because it does differ for everyone depending on the level of awareness with where you're starting from because we're all different to begin with and then we see a glimpse of something divine and then whatever happens after that is going to vary a lot by individual.

Yeah.

We have different levels of self-awareness.

We have different levels of fixation.

We have different past situations.

The work for a person who's undergone severe trauma is going to be very different for a person who hasn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The situations that we will find ourselves in that facilitate that unfolding are going to be very different.

What triggers one person into a higher experience or understanding or insight is going to be very different from what triggers another person into seeing it.

We're not cookie cutter yogis and yet we tend to move as a pack sometimes that way assuming that we all believe or understand or perceive the world in a certain way.

For that reason,

I've always felt that people need to do individual work.

They need to do one-on-one work with a wise teacher and they need to be involved in groups because the perspectives you get in those two different environments and then all on top of that engaging in the marketplace,

The world,

You're placing yourself within all of these ripe containers to mature and develop yourself that you wouldn't otherwise – a person might not otherwise do that.

People who try to practice their own individually guided path almost never develop anything.

Yeah.

Well,

It's all too easy to fall into that pattern with the internet and with there being all these courses available online that you can just sit in your living room and leisurely evolve,

I guess,

In a leisurely fashion.

The other thing that springs to mind about what you said.

Let's tell our listeners for a moment,

Do not be leisure about this.

Your life depends on it.

Yeah,

Very much so.

I was also going to say that this is a place where we can see the importance of not practicing the kind of judgment that we normally would in terms of right and wrong regarding our experience.

Like,

I don't want this situation.

I don't want this difficulty with my partner.

I don't want this thing with my car because all of those things feed into the unfolding because they force you – it's the sand in the oyster that unveils the pearl eventually.

They are furthering our self-realization in the world and so why would you reject that?

Yeah.

Now,

That's a good detailed point for us to make here is that that's actually correct,

Right?

That's a place where we don't want to exercise judgment.

We don't want to be – that's the warning in the Garden of Eden is don't become the God who's deciding what's right and what's wrong in your experience all the time because then you lead yourself astray,

Right?

So there it is important.

It's like – and I think to some degree,

It's that very gesture that helps us cultivate real discernment because we're not trying to eliminate certain parts of our experience and holding on to others.

We're exposing ourselves to the full range of our experience which then allows us to have a discerning eye toward all the different things that are happening.

Right,

Right.

There's a freedom that comes with that that you wouldn't otherwise experience.

For example,

If I fall down the stairs and I break my leg,

That's an experience I don't want because it's painful and it's inconvenient.

And yet,

If I have an attitude of allowing around that and I understand that there may be something greater that is unfolding and I can't determine what that is.

I can't know even though the ego wants to predict but I really can't know what's going to happen.

But six months down the road,

I may look back at that experience and go,

Oh,

Look what flowered out of that.

Yes.

Or there's some piece of myself that I was able to develop while I was on bed rest or something that wouldn't otherwise have come out of it.

That speaks again to the fallen world and the antidote because what it says is if you can learn to see with the eyes of real vision,

Real truth,

Then you won't see the fallen world anymore.

You'll see the new world.

You'll see heaven.

And as you see heaven,

It comes into being.

It's actually emergent with your vision.

Oh,

That's beautiful.

And it's exactly what you're saying.

It's like when we've relinquished our false discernment,

Our false judgment and we've learned to see the world properly,

Then it's not the fallen world anymore at all.

Yeah.

And you see that it's there for you as well.

At the same time that you're envisioning it into reality,

There's like a feedback loop where it supports you as a result.

It can't help but support you because it is you.

It supports you.

It loves you.

It quickens you.

It makes you wise.

It makes you strong.

That's what reality is doing within us as we realize it,

As we come to that realization.

Here again,

The mantle of self-determination.

That's going to be my new.

.

.

I'm going to write a book called that now.

I'm going to steal your title.

The mantle of self-determination.

Jesus,

That's such a good phrase.

So amazing.

Maybe the best phrase I've ever heard.

It's that cultivation of heaven within oneself,

Becoming that full expression of who we are.

That's the antidote.

And then the world is no longer fallen.

Right.

And then from there,

It's just a matter of sharing that with everyone,

Saying,

Look,

Look here.

This isn't the fallen world.

There's heaven underneath you.

Be a Jedi.

Be a Jedi.

Right.

Spread that message.

Use the force.

Use it wisely.

Don't use it for destruction or it becomes empire.

Right.

Right.

UM,

Alk to you.

Right.

Right in the name.

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Curious explanation of various world views and schools of thought, though provoking in my own faith journey as a spiritual warrior. 🙏🏽 namaste