The Battlefield of Life

July 7, 2013

  As transcendent as the Ananda/traveling experience has been, the fellow karma yogis and I all share a similar worry. Going home.
 Environment is stronger than will. We all sought out a spiritual place because we fell out of balance in the lives we were living. Reintegrating back into society with its distractions and temptations is a real threat to the stillness we're working to create in ourselves.
 The spiritual path isn't an easy one. It's a constant test of faith, not just in universal energies but also faith that only we truly know what's best for ourselves. Obtaining inner peace isn't a passive process, it is a battle. It's easy to surrender to life's chaos in tumultuous duality, to give in to the ebb and flow of worldly happiness and sadness. In the Bhagavad Gita it describes the constant battle between dark and light within the consciousness of man. But we mustn't repress the dark, we must accept it and outshine the dark with the light. One can never find peace through passivity, it's through the noble fight of overcoming all negative aspects of life and of our consciousness.
 In alchemy our consciousness is represented by a dark cave, and our shadow consciousness, (where the negative aspects of ourselves and the things we repress live) is represented by a fierce dragon. We can never kill this dragon, though. We can only hope to tame it to the point where it no longer serves as a threat. After we tame the fierce dragon he is represented as the friendly green dragon.
 It takes a determined mind to obtain clarity in the face of duality. Because of the very nature of duality, there is joy in painful experience, and pain in joy. Mostly we discover this in retrospect, but even in immense worldly happiness we can find darkness as we understand the inevitable end to such happiness. Knowledge itself is a source of great pain as well as happiness. Life is a constant roller coaster of ups and downs and we are not easily detached from this relative, cyclical, and contradictory world. It takes a spiritual warrior to drown darkness with light and to also stay detached from worldly happiness and sadness as they understand it is transient. Yogananda said, "A saint is just a sinner who never gave up."
 Real joy lays in the application of ones will, in giving, in expansion. In divine bliss there is no opposite. It's complete freedom, overcoming all obstacles in our consciousness where we can thrive in a reality with no boundaries. It's here we can dance along the boarders of parallel realities, feel the pulse of the universe in our cells and understand our power as divine creators.

"Defeat exists, but not suffering. A true warrior knows that when he loses a battle he is improving the skill with which he wields a sword. He will be able to fight more skillfully next time. "
Paulo Coelho