X Marks the Spot
"X marks the spot " was a message that came straight out of the superconscious as I awakened one morning. I got up at 5 a.m. and began to write on my computer:
You have heard of "X marks the spot", haven't you? I just found out that "AnXiety marks the spot" AnXiety marks the spot where we imagine danger to our usual story about life. AnXiety marks the spot where we have drawn a boundary line on love. AnXiety marks the spot where we are blind, where we are judging, where we are afraid to venture, where we are stubborn, where we are overlooking our potential, where our shadow exists, where we have located some pain, where we are hiding something, where we lack vision, where we feel we have to control and avoid something, where we are not at peace, where we think God is not.
AnXiety marks the spot which we consider unknown, unknowable and invaluable, worthless, useless, godless, and a direct threat to our ego goals and control. AnXiety marks our Achilles heel. AnXiety marks the spot where we must grow next. AnXiety marks the spot of our ignored potential. AnXiety marks the spot of our unacknowledged spirituality. AnXiety marks the spot which holds the key to our future health, happiness, and personal growth. AnXiety marks the spot where we have repressed, rejected, ignored and avoided our unlimited Self, the Christ within.
X marks the spot. AnXiety marks the spot where we are frightened, where we are lazy, where we are habit bound, where we are conditioned, where we are stuck, where we are afraid to look, where we think death lives. AnXiety marks the spot where we think the Infinite is not. AnXiety marks the spot where we have stopped creating, where we have stopped loving, where we have stopped living. AnXiety marks the spot of at least 90% of our problems. X marks the spot where we are proud and think we know it all. X is the unknown
AnXiety marks the spot where 90% of the self is not functioning. AnXiety marks the spot where our talents are buried. AnXiety marks the spot where our relationships are suffering. AnXiety marks the spot where our future divorce is hiding. AnXiety marks the spot where our future illnesses are breeding. AnXiety marks the boundaries of the small comfort zone in which we are willing to live and love. AnXiety is the barrier behind which the mystery of God is being kept. AnXiety is where peace is. AnXiety is where the unconditional love that we are looking for resides. AnXiety is where anger and frustration come from.
As long as anxiety is the foe, we will feel like its victim, but we will not realize that this is the case. We give ourself every reason in the story book for our suffering, our handicap, our failures, our frustrations, our unhappiness, except the truth. The ego is not a dealer in truth. AnXiety marks the spot where the ego won't go. Isn't that a hoot? Who would have thought it? Not me. To me anxiety was just the opposite of everything said above. Anxiety was dreadful, a nuisance, a weakness, a curse, a philosopher's nightmare, a result of germs, bad luck, misfortune. Anxiety was due to faulty wiring. Anxiety was the fault of society or God. Anxiety was a human error, a medical fluke, an unnecessary evil, a result of the fall or of guilt.
Now I see that anxiety is a signal of the splits in life. Anxiety is a call for reunion. Anxiety is a call for awakening. Anxiety is a call for wholeness, for holiness, for spirituality, for infinite self-realization. Anxiety is a call for a new vocabulary, a call for uncommon divine wisdom. Anxiety is a call for rebirth. Anxiety is learned. Anxiety is poor learning. Anxiety is incomplete learning. Anxiety is mistaken learning.
What are these splits? The first split was the split of God from creation, the split of the infinite from the finite. The second split was the split of the male from the female. The third split was the split of matter and spirit. X marks the spot of every split. X marks the spot of the call for reunion of all splits. X marks the spot where we assume separateness, where we assume lack, where we assume entrapment. "Assume" makes an "ass of u and me" a patient told me in the mental hospital. Yes, anxiety assumes. AnXiety marks the spot where we assume, where false beliefs rule, where we have blind spots, where we have stereotypes, where we judge our brothers, where all social problems arise, where all illnesses are bred. AnXiety marks the unknown world which we have assigned to oblivion. No wonder we take pills by the truckloads.
I can just hear clinicians saying: but everyone doesn't have anxiety, for example, psychopaths. And besides, most people are just depressed and manipulative. And what about the psychotics, only neurotics are anxious. Some people deny their anxiety and some people exaggerate it and wallow in it, etc, etc.
Essentially I am discovering that anxiety is the chief human symptom and it marks the spot where our True Self is hidden. All of the Great Ones have discovered and experienced the Infinite Radiant Self.[1] But where is it? Is it in time and space? Night and day we look in the outside world for rescue , but Jesus said the Treasure is within.
In all of the buried treasure stories, the Treasure of life is buried, lost, hidden and has to be pursued, usually within an inch of one's life, right?
But we have "assumed" :
That the Treasure doesn't exist
That the Treasure is outside
That the Treasure is transitory
That the Treasure can be given to you or taken away from you
That the Treasure has to be bought, stolen, borrowed, or manipulated
That the Treasure is subject to coins, clocks, loss, deservingness, luck or special favor
That the Treasure is not here now today; there are only stories about it being in the past or in the future.
That the Treasure is visible
That the Treasure is not for me, until I get rid of this or find that
And so anxiety is the barrier or veil between our human story and Reality, between illusion and truth. You don't want to know that you are not your body, right? You don't want to know that this universe is not what it appears to be, right? Finally the physicists and the mystics agree that this universe is a hologram. And until we have suffered enough, why should we venture to penetrate the anxiety barrier and enter into the cosmic oneness?
Anxiety hides this secret knowledge from us innocent, sick fools, until we are ready to awake and open up to the Radiant Infinite Self. No one is forced to take this journey. Each of us will do so in our own time and in our own way. In the meantime, the Rapture continues on a daily basis.
If you are ready, just ask yourself this question on a daily basis: if the Infinite Radiant Self [2]exists, where is it? What do I think I have to do first before I can know the Christ within and behind my symptoms? Whatever it is that I believe that I have to do first is just my self-rescue plan, and will only bring more anxiety and symptoms. Hasn't that been the case so far?
The lack of serotonin balance is considered by many to be the cause of anxiety. But what causes the lack of serotonin balance? Perhaps serotonin is the peace chemical which can be artificially mimicked for a brief time, but our story creates anti-serotonin chemicals on a daily basis which overwhelms and imbalances all of the peace transmitters we could ever ingest in a pill.
The Infinite Radiant Self is not in time and space. The body can be located, but you cannot be contained anywhere at any time. If you could be contained and located, you would not be Infinite.
Anxiety is the psychological name for the gap between illusion and reality. Anxiety is the most common human experience of our story on this bi-polar plane. The things we abuse the most are our remedies for anxiety, although obviously they do not work. We are like the mice in a lab experiment, who after they push the bar several times and get rewards, continue to push the pedal until they die. We are like these hungry animals pressing on the bar. Occasional re-enforcement has made victims of us all. The Radiant Infinite Self pops into our story here and there and re-enforces the pressing of whichever bar we are attending to and we get occasional re-enforcement.
We take a drug or alcohol or we look at television or we play the slot machine and we become addicts to the Radiant Self we experience on such a random reflective basis. If a bank robbery happened to be a successful experience of the richness of the Radiant Self, we could become bank robbers. If rape fulfilled our need for the oneness and power of the Radiant Self, we could become a rapist. If we experience love with a same sex person, we could become gay. But we remain anxious because we cannot be sure that pushing the bar will bring the Radiant Self experience again. It's hit or miss. In fact, very often it brings the opposite. Hang gliding or Nascar racing loses some of the juice when there is a crash and the hero is killed.
There is tremendous anxiety when the stock market falls. We try very hard to break the 500 average in sports. The same thing happens in relationships, and even if we become cynics, we cannot escape the memory of that taste of the Radiant Self. Rumi said that there is a field beyond good and evil, and he will meet us there. He forgot to tell us that just beyond good and evil there is a gravity barrier that blocks entry to the cosmic field, and the name of that barrier is anxiety.
When you enter a Buddhist temple there are two ferocious lions guarding the entryway. One is frowning and the other is smiling, one represents the negative and the other the positive, guarding the temple, representing pain and pleasure, and you must walk between these two ferocious animals to cross the barrier into the field of the Radiant Self.
A man walks into my office and says he wants to quit his job today. And then what? I'm not sure I want to quit my job. So you are anxious about whether to quit or keep your job? Yes, and I cannot decide which to do. What would happen if you kept your job and what would happen if you did not keep your job? What is the inner conflict you are having about this? And so we suspect that this man is experiencing insecurity about keeping or quitting his job. He doesn't know which is worse or better. He may or may not be ready to deal with the meaning of this indecision and this anxiety. But if he does not deal with it now, he will relive this same story many times in the future. He will have many occasions to explore the meaning of security or insecurity and the attendant anxiety. All such struggles arise because we do not yet know the Infinite Radiant Self[3]. The anxiety about this indecision is the doorway to the Secret Knowledge.
And so it is with every decision and indecision we have. Every decision is about who I am. Am I this ego or the Infinite Radiant Self? I do not even realize that this is the issue. In this story in which we live, it is one apparent ego against another battling for survival, losing as frequently as we win, thinking there is something wrong with me or the other, neither of which is true. How do I know that? It is the Secret Knowledge, which is available right here right now, just across the anxiety barrier, which is either your friend or your foe.
It is hard to escape the bondage to our story and all of its remedies. We do not see that the story itself and its author are the problem. Neither the story nor the author can go through the anxiety barrier. How can the caterpillar fly? The worm cannot fly, only the butterfly can fly. The lilies do not work, they are still instinctively connected to the Infinite Radiance. How can those annoying birds sing every morning about the glory of God?
There are thousands of temporary solutions to the problem of symptomatic anxiety. I am not interested in quibbling with them. You can create serotonin with a pill and you can block out the anxiety-manufacturing ego story with hypnotism, with an orgasm, with a business sale, with jogging, with some foods, and with music, but there is a ceiling on all of these things, and they are time-limited. A little bit of heaven is available and we keep pressing the bar. But then we come to the dark night of the soul, to that mid-life crisis where nothing works or satisfies. Whatever had looked good, now goes sour. Anxiety looms larger than life in front of us.
We are invited again to become the cosmic astronaut, to wake up the Master, the sleeping beauty, the Infinite Radiant Self[4]. To take the anxiety of nonbeing into yourself. Nonbeing is just an idea that we made up when we saw the invisible. Whatever you are holding onto for security, you will not be able to take through the barrier. The author of the anxiety experiences about "this money" or "this house" or "this body" is misleading me. This money, this house, this car, this body is not "mine." "Today" is not mine. I cannot control all of these things. All of this belongs to the Infinite Radiant Self. All of this is the Infinite Radiant Self. No wonder I can't manage it. The Holy Spirit is the manager. Bouncing back and forth between being generous and being selfish is just my ego story in full operation. Me, me , me, my generosity, my stinginess, my wisdom, my ignorance, my credit, my fault. Is that true? This kind of belief system is the root of the problem. I am concerned about my security, my money, my debt.
The Infinite lives here. I am not separate from the Infinite except in my ego belief system. This belief in separateness is the source of all of my anxiety. This is why anxiety is my best friend this side of awakening. I am learning to allow, to permit. The name for my Infinite Radiant Self is Lou-ash, the faithful one. He has winged feet, rubies and diamonds and gold rings on his fingers. His eyes flash with light. The stars and the moon and the sun is within. He travels on the winged horse. He is faithful to God and to me. He is the symbol of the Infinite Radiant Self. But do I remember that?
The author of the anxiety experiences of greed, jealousy, guilt, grief and hostility is our victim story. It is this story which sickens us to the point that we are ready to take the journey through the anxiety barrier.
There are so many payoffs for pretending to be a victim that it is indeed strange to even consider that we created such an experience in our own blindness and deafness. The only thing that keeps us from the cosmic journey through the barrier is our beliefs and the payoff we seem to get as innocent righteous victims. For, after all, that is what we are married to and refuse to divorce because we do not see through it. Without vision, the people perish. All that we have is sight. Until our double sight becomes single, we cannot go through the veil and enter our true home. We have double sight and not single vision.
I am a Pisces and I see everything double. The fishes swim in opposite directions. But this is the Age of Aquarius, the age of water. This new age is about the water and not about the fishes in the water who swim in opposite directions. There were many things that Jesus could not tell the Piscean fishermen, but now those things can be told. Dyed in the wool Piscees have trouble deciding to go through the barrier.
When a man looks at a pornographic image in a magazine or on the computer or when he sees a woman on the street, he is indeed searching for that which is beyond the image, he is searching for the Infinite Radiant Self[5]. But does he know that? When we go to the bar or to the casino or to the football game, we are longing for the experience of the Infinite Radiant Self, for the experience of winning, for the experience of teamwork, riches and power. We want to be the winner, the rich, the beautiful, that which lasts forever. In country music we sing about forever and ever, the joining of the male and female split, but we also sing the blues because the joinings were not on the right level, and become dis-joined.
All of this is about the longing for the experience of the Infinite Radiant Self. Everyone who sings, writes, paints or dances is searching for the creative experience of the Infinite Radiant Self. All of the hero worshippers, the American idols, and the survivor episodes are about the search for the Infinite Radiant Self. All of the wars, jails, divorces, surgeries, and the inheritance squabbles are about the lack of the courage to go through the anxiety barrier. It is not a question of will power over anxiety. It is a question about the presence of conflict. The Infinite Radiant Self is not divided and there is nothing to overcome, fight or conquer.
Exercise, diversion, yoga, refocusing your thinking and behavior, taking up a hobby, giving less energy to your symptoms, are all practical aids. The anxious patient tends to focus on his symptoms, talks about his symptoms, goes to many doctors, reads about his condition, seeks assurance about his condition, etc.
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