Much of my life was passed in a certain malaise that I’ve come to recognize is common among spiritual aspirants. Because of our condition it doesn’t appear this stage of development can be avoided. Being an i dotter and a t crosser is something I acquired very early in life, always striving to get it right, whatever it happened to be at the moment. What is it that incites us to seek out another way of understanding ourselves and the Universe in which we find ourselves? The short answer is suffering. It’s what started Siddhartha Gautama searching for the answers that led him to becoming a Buddha (enlightened). Why do people suffer sickness, old age and death? Many wailing Westerners moan, If there is a God how could He let this happen? Why is there so much injustice in the world? Usually they’re not really looking for an answer. It’s a justification for casting off any self-restraint that may be encouraged by a society, religion or philosophy that requires something of the individual or places the blame on some individual.

It’s easy to see how spiritual seekers can come to see the world as a dystopia (an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia). The search then becomes an escape from the dystopian world in which they now live. On a very basic level it becomes an escape from this imperfect world to a perfect utopian paradise where there will be no suffering. Religious sales of Paradise, heaven or the Sweet By and By have kept the organizations that peddle them rich and powerful for many centuries. Even after one has gone beyond the very basic idea to something more esoteric there are still remnants of dissatisfaction that cling to us like smoke and spoil the potential peace of the moment. It takes the form of a kind of anti-materialism that leads one to denial of pleasure in almost any accepted form. We like to blame the religious organizations for doing it to us but there is no prison as strong as the one we build around ourselves.

Slowly I began to see how spiritually waterlogged I’d become but lacked any power to do anything about it. Instead I found ways to justify my condition until one day, quite inexplicably, I was freed from that state. It turned out to be a temporary freedom but it assured me there was something beyond the limits within which I’d lived. Not just something but a very real, palpable state of consciousness in which my perception of everything had been adjusted. Because I had no power to get myself into that state I also had no power to keep myself there once my perception began to fade and distort to something with which I was more familiar. I’m aware of the arguments that insist I’m really in that state all the time, etc., but I have little interest in arguing. What I sense is that I will live in that state sometime but that is not permanent either. It’s a stage through which we must all pass on our journey. A stage that may be difficult to release if we make it another Utopia. Nothing in our universe is static so there’s no point in imagining that we will one day reach a static state where we can live happily ever after. If you want to live happily ever after learn to do it where you are. It is this skill that esoteric ideas aim at teaching us.