At one time or another, most of us have felt lost. Like something is missing from life—like we are missing from life. What we’re really missing is our own inner light. What we’re lost in is the illusion of duality.

But telling someone they are lost in illusion will not help them one iota in becoming found. What we need for finding ourselves is a map.

The basic shape of the map of the psyche is a mandala. In general, a mandala is a circle containing concentric inner rings that form around a focal point.

This configuration represents a spiritual journey. Starting from the outside, we travel through the layers to reach the inner core.

Of course, there are as many mandala designs as there are people. In a sense, we are each a unique colorful mandala, created with a very specific design. Yet in the end, we are all alike in that we are making the same journey inward.

Where are we all heading? What’s the destination?

To find the light at the center of our soul. This is the human journey, created by the human condition. In other words, our goal is to reach our core and let our particular light shine.

Some traditions call this reaching for enlightenment. To get there, we’ll need to overcome a few obstacles along the way.

MAP OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

Unhealed ego: Runs, denies, avoids, escapes (addictions)
Waking up ego: Starts paying attention
Shame: Feel need to hide
Mask of perfection: Ineffective strategy to get love
Defenses (Mask): Attacks • Submits • Withdraws
Little-L lower self: “I can’t”
Big-L lower self: “I won’t”
Healthy ego: Surrenders
Higher Self: I am light

What must we face?

Here’s the set-up. We all come into the world totally helpless, making it perfectly natural that babies can only receive. If we could just stop there, things might end up OK.

In fact, it’s not just that children are wired to only receive. They also want to receive all the time, in the very best way, and to always have their way.

This, friends, is impossible.

For one thing, all children have parents or guardians who are imperfect. Even the most well-meaning parents are simply not capable of giving 100% pure love. Second, this world has limits, so having good boundaries is important. Which means children can’t have their way all the time.

Introducing the reality of life on planet Earth.

This is a world built on a foundation of duality, which means there are both good and bad forces here. So good parenting must involve setting boundaries. Then, as we grow up, we must each learn the difference between what’s good and what’s bad.

It isn’t always obvious. You could even say the human experience is all about learning to discern and make better choices.

Right from the start, we are set up for struggle. No one gets it right.

Fast forward a few decades, and now we’re adults. Yet we’re languishing. The only way out of this quagmire is for humanity to come to understand why we are here.

Living in a land of low awareness

In the Spirit World, where spiritual language is quite different from our human language, they have a name for this sphere we call Earth. The name implies that Earth is a sphere of disconnection, a dimension of fragmented awareness.

There are gaps in our awareness.

These interruptions create missing links in our understanding of what’s happening in our lives. These gaps, then, often mislead us and distort our understanding of reality.

All of us are blind to certain things. The thing we are most unaware of is the landscape of our own inner selves.

That’s why we’ve lost ourselves.

Often, we don’t know the true depth of our magnificent Higher Self. So we don’t deeply know how much we each matter.

We also don’t yet realize our positive essential qualities and may still be acting them out in a distorted way. We don’t yet see that we have everything we need, deep inside.

That we’re enough.

Becoming vulnerable and imperfect

One thing we’ll need to work on is becoming vulnerable. We must learn to let people see us—and learn to see ourselves—even if at first what we’ll find are our faults. But our faults are nothing other than aspects we are here to convert back to their underlying goodness.

To get to these darker, denser layers, we’ll need to stop pretending we’re currently more perfect than we are. This pride is actually part of the problem—one of our main faults.

Perfectionism stems from our desire to be approved of and loved. Our mistaken belief is that if we’re perfect, then we’ll have everything. But we already have everything—albeit currently in a distorted form—and we don’t know it.

In reality, on this dualistic plane, perfection doesn’t exist. Remember, good is always a package deal with bad. What we’ll learn is that being vulnerable and real will take us much further on our path.

Unhealthy letting go into addiction

There are two stages we must travel through on a spiritual path of healing. In the first stage, we’re clearing away our inner obstacles. This includes our rebelliousness, destructiveness, resistance and defiance. We’ve also got buried misunderstandings to unearth and frozen blocks of energy to release.

There’s much work to do.

The part of ourselves that orchestrates the healing process is our ego. To do this, we’ll need to develop self-discipline, creating a healthy ego that becomes strong enough to eventually let go of itself.

Holding back, holding on and not letting go are classic moves of an ego that hasn’t yet helped clear away our inner obstacles. Such an unhealthy ego refuses to give up control, believing that letting go means death for the ego.

In the long run, letting go is the ultimate destination of the ego. But we must learn to let go in the right way.

The idea is to let go into our own deep connection with the truth, including the truth of who we are. This is not a one-time event. It’s something we must practice doing, over and over, until dying into the truth of each moment is our natural movement.

This is how we learn to truly live.

What happens if the ego tries to let go without first doing the work of self-healing? It will let go in an unhealthy way. This is the fundamental reason for addictions.

On a path toward self-enlightenment, we must first clear up our addictions before we can make any true progress. They are an escape from doing the work of healing, not a path to freedom.

Addictions are traps that lock us out of our divinity.

Not surprising, people with addictions often partner with people who won’t let go—who won’t give up ego control. These are two sides of the same coin. There may well be a tendency to alternate between these two wrong extremes.

The right way to let go

In the second stage of our healing work, the ego must actively work to surrender and align with the guidance that flows from within. Whereas we need others to help us with the first stage—for our lack of awareness prevents us from seeing ourselves in truth—we must learn to do the second stage by ourselves.

“If we want to learn to trust God, we will need to travel through some interim self-created states of mind. But as so often happens, we are hoping we can avoid what we ourselves have created, including pain, confusion, emptiness and fear.

Nonetheless, these are the things we’re going to need to embrace so we can come to understand them on our way to dissolving them…

Often the thing that limits our wish fulfillment is our insistence that fulfillment can only come in one specific way. But if we let the creative process have some rope and margin, we’ll experience that it by far surpasses what we hoped for or could visualize.

Our ego mind can hardly conceive of the richness of the universe. We need to learn to empty ourselves in the moment so the divine can reveal itself to us.

This is what it means to “let God”…

The key to creating an open energy system is letting go into trust. But we can’t get there in one giant step. We must lay down some intermediate links, without skipping steps along the way.

These links will build a bridge to having genuine, positive expectations about life free from pressure, anxiety and doubt. We’ll develop a deep faith in a kind and caring universe where we can have the very best, in every possible way.

What a valuable key.”

– Pearls, Chapter 17: Discovering the key to letting go and letting God

Getting unstuck

The reason so many people are languishing today is that we’re stuck. This is the human condition. Everyone has a Lower Self that is stuck in some way, as well as being numb, rigid and unchanging. Such qualities are what the Lower Self uses to build inner walls that create our self-made prisons.

“Our desire to dodge self-responsibility clouds our understanding and distorts our judgment. It’s our attempts to escape and deceive ourselves that keep us stuck.

The solution is always the same: look within…

Accepting self-responsibility is the way to eliminate self-pity and get past resignation. It moves us beyond endless endurance and motivates us to unpack our smoldering resentments against the injustices of life.

It also asks us to stop building cases against others. This is a Lower Self game we play that needs to end.

By contrast, if we refuse self-responsibility, we will stay stuck in being dependent on others. The byproduct of this is feeling helpless and powerless. This inevitably leads to resentments because it’s not possible for others to fulfill all our expectations.

We will live in fear that we’ll “never get it” and therefore needlessly defend ourselves. But our defenses will only serve to cut us off further from the source of life that lives inside us.”

– Spiritual Laws, Chapter 2: Law of Self-Responsibility

Over time, we will resolve what’s blocking our light. To do this, we must:

• Drop our defenses
• Develop the right kind of selfish
• Overcome our hate, spite and greed
• Uncover and dispense with half-truths
• Stop hiding and keeping secrets
• Let go of control
• Move from “me versus you,” to “me and you”
• Tackle our “no” to life
• Release the wrong kind of shame

“We will begin to gain clarity and insight as we start to unwind the seemingly unshakable false conclusions we formed as children. Self-liking and self-respect will naturally arise from no longer thinking our misunderstandings are unquestionable “facts” to be glossed over and taken for granted.

Even before we are able to live by it, knowing the way life really works creates a sense of freedom.

That’s how inner order builds outer beauty.

Inner peace creates outer harmony.

Inner riches lead to outer abundance.”

– Spiritual Laws, Epilogue: Living in Alignment

Therapy versus a spiritual path

The work of personal healing is largely what people are doing in all the various forms of therapy available today. A key difference between therapy and a spiritual path is that therapy is usually a limited-time treatment for dealing with a particular life problem. A spiritual path, on the other hand, deals with any and all disharmonies in life.

All our problems in life are pointing us toward our inner work.

Both, however, are valid and effective vehicles for working through the first stage of our personal healing work. And we’re never too old to start. There is no other reason for the human experience than transforming our negativity and getting to know our true selves.

Guidance for getting started

“Let us all become very still, and I will say the words, and inside of you try to go along with these words: Be still and know I am God, the ultimate power. Listen to this power within, to this presence and to these intentions.

I am God, everyone is God. God is all, in everything that lives and moves, that breathes and knows, that feels and is.

God in me has the power to make the separated little ego know the ultimate power to integrate this ego. I have the possibility to feel all my feelings—to deal with and handle all my feelings.

This possibility is there in me, and I know this potentiality can be realized the moment I know it. And I now choose to know I can be alive; Yes, I have the strength to be weak and vulnerable.

I can accept my numbness now, my insecurities, my feeling state and my nonfeeling state. And I can listen into this state and wait. I can be still and feel into me. Also, I can be still and hear my superior intelligence, the God intelligence, instruct me. If I try, I can establish this contact.

I will pay the price by giving the best I have and am to life. I will live my life honestly in wanting to give the best. For then I will be able to receive the best without cringing.

I do not fear to invest the best of myself into life.”

– The Pathwork^® Guide Q&A #201

Key Aspects of the Spiritual Journey: Appendix B

Next Essay

Return to Get a Better Boat Contents