The Great and Ancient Secret – Part Three

Releasing the Infinite Potential

How Can We Release that Infinite Potential?

A couple of times in recent months I heard a well known public figure saying with great enthusiasm that we all have within us a wonderful central self that if we access it brings bliss, health and creativity. He was almost shouting this message, and he said it was open to everyone of any age. He made it seem incredibly easy to find.

Personally I started a search for that Secret when I was thirteen. But it wasn’t until my mid thirties that I experienced it in any depth. And it wasn’t that I didn’t throw myself into the quest fully – I did. I really needed to find the release promised.

After years of depression and emotional pain I was desperate. But there are, for many of us, hurdles to overcome. I write this feature because of that. As far as I am capable I want to define the stages, the barriers and the needs of the journey. I want to do this by looking at all the many pathways to this core experience and comparing them so you can see what is at the heart of them all. I hope this will enable you to see more clearly where you are going and how to get there. I want to give you a better map than I had.

Well, we are all unique, so each of us starts from a different place. But you have to remember from the very beginning that you already have what you seek. You must know there is nowhere to go, nothing to attain or grasp. You are already what you seek. Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land.” But we live a paradox, so there is a journey and a path to follow. You will move from darkness to light, but you will arrive at where you began, at the paradoxical nowhere.

BUT – you probably exist in a state of blindness or unconsciousness, so you cannot ‘see’ or realise who and what you are.

What the secret methods of the past and present help you to do is to heal or change that blindness and unconsciousness. You are brought to life – full wonderful life – from a condition of dormancy. That lack of life, that unconsciousness, is a deeply engrained habit. In most cases deepened and fastened to you by generations of forebears living in a similar condition. It takes work to gradually confront those habits. It takes courage and determination to meet and acknowledge your own part in killing the wonder that you are. It takes the ability to feel great emotion and excitation in order to allow the pains and traumas of yesterday and past upheavals to surface and be healed. It takes patience to allow the growth of what is dormant within you take place, and to be the careful detective investigating your own life path.

That is the equipment you will need. Take heed.

First Steps on the Trackless Way

So where do we start, and what equipment do we need?

To quote Krishnamurti more fully:

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.

In 2005 I went to San Francisco to be with a friend. While there I had a very unusual experience. While wide awake and sitting alone I was suddenly shot into a dream state, yet I was still awake. In this state I had a very distinct image and sensation of a small bird fluttering close to my head. What was incredibly clear and real was the way its wings were fluttering. I could really see and feel that they were not simply waving up-and-down but vibrating at great speed. The bird kept fluttering near me, and I realised it was trying to attract my attention so I would follow it. So I did and it led me into a condition of great darkness. I could see or hear nothing except the bird. It led on and I trusted it, and we came to what was recognisably a dark cave from which were slowly emerging hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. I understood as I saw this that an enormous number of people throughout the world were now emerging from a dark place. I realised that there was the need for many workers to meet them and help them to learn to live life within the light.

Of course the darkness mentioned is what was called ‘blindness’ earlier on. It is a situation millions of people exist in without realising it, and in our present times a huge number of people are slowly emerging from it.

To understand that more clearly, think of the time when everybody was convinced the earth was the centre of the universe, and the sun and stars all circled it. Then Galileo stated that Copernicus’s theory of the sun being the centre of our solar system – heliocentrism – was correct from his observations. At the time this was so shocking the Catholic Church tried to make him withdraw his statement. So in the conviction the earth was central to the universe the people of the time exhibited the sort of blindness mentioned. They were living in a darkness of the mind that later generations emerged from.

Nevertheless Krishnamurti spent his adult life teaching this pathless way.

As another example of this, Dr. Karagulla, a famous neurologist, in her book Breakthrough to Creativity, has described an experiment she made with two doctors. To test heightened sensory perception she blindfolded one of the doctors and gave him a photograph. It was a medical picture of a pregnant woman. He was asked to pass his fingertips over the photograph and report any impressions and sensations. At this the other doctor began to protest that what she was asking was not possible. But at this point the blindfolded doctor began to speak of impressions which vividly described the picture he held. The other doctor began to protest so violently, and began to feel so ill, the experiment had to be terminated.

The blindness is not skin deep. When we confront something that questions the blindness we may feel very threatened and even ill. The way must be walked with care.

So in regard to the first steps on this journey we have to go slowly. Strangely, the great Secret could be told you now in as little as three words. Unfortunately it would be very, very difficult for you to believe it or understand its truth. If that were not so you would already know it from personal experience, and it is certainly stated openly enough and frequently enough.

The direction most traditions and teachers of the Secret have taken is not to state it outright, but to give people ways of experiencing it for themselves. The first steps of this are given in slightly different forms by different traditional paths.

In the yoga teaching the first step is the practice of yama and niyama. Roughly translated these mean restraint and non-restraint, and will be looked at more closely shortly.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, wrote that the first step for a Christian would be fasting. Obviously this is another statement of restraint of ones appetites.

In a Chinese teaching of the steps on the journey of discovery it is illustrated by what are known as the Ox Herding Pictures. In different versions of these there are from nine to twelve pictures illustrating the stages of finding and living the Secret. But in each of them the first picture shows the person going along in their daily life on a country track and suddenly becoming aware of an Ox’s footprints in the mud.

Victor Gollancz the famous publisher, in his book From Darkness to Light, tells of his own first step. He says:

For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognise my old enemy – – – It is a sense of void and anguish; a sense of something lacking: what? Love, peace, God perhaps? The essence of my hell was outlawry. By the sin which, as I felt, I had committed, I had broken the links that united me with universal living: I was separate, alone, without lot or part in the everything. I had deprived myself, treacherously, of it: I had deprived it, quite as treacherously, of me.

One forenoon, when my terror and despair seemed to be at their height, and after a total insomnia that had lasted for twenty-two days, and every muscle and nerve ached, I set out for a walk with my wife. We went very slowly. About half an hour later we turned, sharply, left, into a dark and narrow path that descended: and soon came out into a great open space – a sort of water meadow, with herds grazing, and a high inland cliff just in front of us. There was dappled sunlight everywhere, and a slight breeze. I felt suddenly very still: and then I heard the inland cliff, and the grass and water and sky, say very distinctly to me “A humble and a contrite heart He will not despise.” When I say I heard them say it, I mean, quite literally, that I heard them say it; a voice came from them: but they were also themselves the voice, and the voice was also within me I said to my wife “The trouble is over”, and that night I slept a little.

For many this is the first step. The events of their life, their health, their inner state of pain or loss, of emptiness and lack of meaning, helps that initial shift.

In Sufism, the side of Islam that seeks direct experience rather than intellectual information or dogma. Ansari of Herat wrote that, ‘When you lose yourself, you find the Beloved.” There is no other secret. I don’t know any more than this. Ansari is saying something similar to what Victor Gollancz has shown – when you are ready to let go of your old life, or have outgrown it, the new will appear.

But there is also a mention of another great doorway to the Secret – love and the beloved. For some it is not pain, ill health or despair that brings the first steps, but wonder and love of what they recognise as that which gives them life.

Opening the Door

To draw sense out of the several viewpoints mentioned above, we can say there are two or three aspects to the first steps. One is discipline as suggested by yama and niyama. There are several reasons this is a part of discovering what you already are. Firstly the habits, then the blindness. The past we carry is often so deeply engraved, that it is only passed through with perseverance. It doesn’t usually melt without a struggle.

Also we are often only half alive. As we unfurl the enormous energies that have been buried or suppressed they begin to flow and express. That is fine, but habits have dug deep channels in us through which those energy xpressed in the past. As the new energy flows it will by habit course through those old channels; channels of anger, depression; feelings of abandonment; failure – surely you know them well?

Those were difficult enough to meet in the past, but think what they will feel like with an increased flow.

Yama and Niyama are to train yourself in new ways of meeting this energy, as well as learning what are new skills enabling you to deal with those energies in a new way.