The water’s fine! The expanded self, or luminosity–entering it is like learning to dive into a river. Over time and with practice, it becomes easier. You may still lose your synchrony with the currents, but then you just dive back in, and diving becomes easier until eventually there is no trick to it, no accidental grace necessary. You just do it.
I’m learning how to enter luminosity more easily and voluntarily. I can still choose not to enter it, apparently (sigh), but then I retrace the steps once more, and they’ve become more well worn so that it isn’t a magical accident anymore when I end up there. Just magical. The transition is very easy. You just–die. Die in that the small self offers no resistance to what is but instead, and this is the important part, trusts it completely.
When I moved to another city at the end of June, I didn’t realize that my trust, which was very deep, contained this unconscious belief that with that trust, I would experience no discomfort, and if things were really uncomfortable, I wasn’t doing it right. In this sense, my trust became tied to form, an insidious shift.
My new city is full of discomforts. Foremost is the terrible heat and humidity. At 110 degrees, going outside is out of the question. Then I noticed a total lack of sacred natural settings. The whole city is like a giant strip mall. Parks in which I once communed with nature as a child are now trashed. And the social scene is dominated by fundamentalism. Finding kindred spirits seems impossible (although they are rising up as I plan the ecstatic dance event). Nature, tribe, sun… these are sources of life force for me. I didn’t realize how deeply they sustained me until I lost them.
For the first several weeks, I was in real withdrawal. The withdrawal pains dug into me and became an unconscious bitter resistance, and of course with resistance comes the “me against the world” perspective. You may not think you see things that way, but look hard. Do you feel like you are arm wrestling the world for your highest good?
As I rebelled against the discomforts, I fell asleep to the luminosity. With that came suffering. I resisted the suffering, and I suffered more.
“Bleargh, what happened to my connection with the light at the source of this movie?” I thought. “Slipping away again?” So I took a bubble bath and watched a good movie, danced to a heart pounding song in my living room until my calves were sore, and went to bed with a prayer on my lips: “Please wake me up, universe!”
The beauty is that you can ask for this even from within the darkest confusion and most convincing illusion. You don’t even need to know what you are asking for. How could you anyway? You are essentially asking for a shift in how you perceive, so if you could envision what you are asking for, you would not need to ask. You only need to know that you need it more than anything.
Then you get it. Every time. I slept well, finally, like I did before–that peaceful comforting sleep, like being cradled all night. It should always be that way.
When I woke up, I was compelled to stop whining, let go of my attachments to sacred places and sacred people, and live where I was put. The moment I surrendered, there it was again–right there–engulfing me and sweeping me into itself–the euphoric, ineffably present, healing flow.
You can never acquire it–you just jump back in, jump back in, jump back in. Until one day you get over that silly compulsion to crawl out looking for a drink!
