The Mystical Path - Living an Unreasonable Life

Swami Muktananda could not have described the mystical path better when he wrote in his spiritual autobiography Play of Consciousness, “The mystical path is best not taken. But once begun, there is no turning back.” Like discovering a truth one would rather not know, once the cat is out of the bag, you can’t get it back in. And yet, inevitably, the alert individual will also say, “And it feels good to be released from the prison of denial and falsehood.” Regardless of how much truth changes the content of a person’s life, truth is always the better companion than deceit. And like the mystical path, once the path of truth is taken, there is no turning back.

What exactly makes the mystical path so compelling and yet, at the same time, so ominous? Why would a great spiritual master caution his disciples that it is better not to walk the very path that brought him to his own enlightenment? The simple answer is that the mystical path is the path of the unreasonable life. All your life you have relied on your five senses and your base of intellectual and street knowledge to chart a reasonable course. That is to say, logic and order govern our choices, because none of us deliberately wants to throw our life into chaos by making decisions that ignore the fundamental rules of common sense. Our five senses combined with our trust of logic and rational thought seek to maintain a structure for the sake of physical survival, and that is appropriate, as we all need to find a comfort zone with survival. But let us penetrate a bit more deeply into how and why we cling so ardently to our love of our five sensory perceptual system and our adoration of reason and order, because there we find our first insight into why Swami Muktananda would warn the novice sojourner to be cautious about taking the mystical path.

Of the many characteristics and features of this force called life, such as the continual cycle of creation and destruction that expresses itself in hope emerging out of despair, love out of hatred, and the need to produce life after massive loss through wars and natural upheavals, we fear life’s chaos the most. We fear what we cannot control, and so, our lowest, irrational instincts, can drive us out of fear to destroy what threatens us, as in the invasion of Iraq. When we function from our lowest level of consciousness, it is nearly impossible to reason with us, much less to get us to grasp a greater symbolic portrait of what is unfolding in the cosmos. From that level of consciousness, when someone or something – an event such as 9/11 – has threatened us, all we can focus on is to gain control of what is out of control for the sake of survival.

Most people are not so intensely fearful as to think that in order to protect their physical world they have to destroy the life around them, so let us move up a notch on the spiral of the five senses to what we could consider ordinary life. (And yet, ordinary life for us must now include the fact that we are a nation at war, and the impact of that war is such a factor within our psychic field that it has to be included in this discussion.) You are not, however, driven by the chaos of war and the fears of those living on the streets of Iraq, (unless, of course, you have family serving there). You are driven by a subtler but no less real need to maintain order in your life, and this need is so strong that it can drive you to “destroy” that which you perceive to be a threat to your survival. We are going to explore this topic a bit more, because to grasp this is to pierce through Swami Muktananda’s mystic’s veil.

Your methods for destruction are, of course, appropriately subtle. They are, to say this in terms of the subject at hand, fully reasonable, at least as far as you are concerned. Criticizing someone you perceive as a threat, for example, is a “reasonable” act. Or, if you perceive that an individual has violated you in emotional, psychological, or financial ways, you are (still) free to file a lawsuit, which again is something we consider a completely rational thing to do if circumstances merit such action. (You realize I’m tempted to say that even if circumstances don’t merit a lawsuit, that doesn’t stop anyone these days….) Just consider how many divorces turn into courtroom war games in which both sides are participating in acts of destruction of which they would have never thought themselves capable prior to the division of the goods accumulated during their marriage, all of which represent how each party will survive without the other.

Blessings,
Caroline

(Caroline Myss)