Long before it’s possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves.
Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn’t the only world. Because the way the mind works now, it looks out and there’s just this world with you that messes with it and me that wants it right. It’s all one world to me.
But in a true awakening, I recognize that there’s a world beneath me. And the way I know there’s a world beneath me is that I can feel something pulling on me. Something wants to drag me down into depression. Something wants to pull me into anger. Something wants to move me into a state of myself where I can justify my agitation. Then, as I start to get irritated, angry, impatient, something says, “Uh-uh -uh!” And it isn’t some moral platitude that’s been pressed into my brain. It’s an actual understanding that, “This hurts and I don’t want to act from it!”
In that moment, there is the world beneath me that I am awakened to, and by its very presence, I am made aware of the world above me – the world in which I see the right thing to do isn’t to be angry, frightened, negative, or to rush around and give away my soul. But the only way I can stay there – where the presence of the world above me is possible and the pull of the world beneath me seems impossible – is to be in that place and wait.
What does it mean to wait? My attention does not gravitate towards the resistance of the world beneath me that is trying to bully me into an action that defeats me. Rather, my attention remains in the fact that I am present to this world beneath me, and as distasteful and dark as it may be, I can remain between these two worlds. Then I am accomplishing the only thing that I am capable of in that moment, which is to bear the burden of attending to the world above me as I deny the world beneath me.
Do you see it? What a possibility!
In that moment where the lower world pulls, the attraction is there – the wish to lash out, to blame, whatever it may be – and instead of answering the call of the world beneath me, I accept the burden that I’ve been given within me, and I answer the world above me instead.
And the way that you answer the world above you is to wait in between these worlds where the instruction comes as to what to do in that moment – not by your choice but by what is revealed to you as necessary because of your placement between these worlds.
That’s patience, isn’t it? And in patience there is conscious suffering because you’re aware of what doesn’t want you to stay there. You’re aware of what wants you to be pulled into it. But by your very awareness of it, you sit in relationship with the Light that has given you this awareness. And if you stay there as you’re intended to do, you become that which marries these two worlds. And when these two worlds are married, and the Light comes into this darkness – as a result of your willingness to bear the burden of that position – something new is born.
To understand and enter into the world above you, you must first die to the world beneath you. You must first be so conscious of what you cannot be, and then remain there until you hear the faint strain of something that made it possible for you to be aware of what was beneath you. And it’s in that moment you become conscious of the world above you.
Learn to wait.
Cultivate this kind of spiritual patience.
Pay the price for it.
Because if you’ll pay the price for this patience, you’ll be introduced to the possibility of the world in which your soul is intended to ascend, and you will enter into a new relationship with every moment.
