​A few days after I had led a retreat on the feminine side of the absolute, the article : Rueckkehr aus der Tranzendenz by Dr Thomas Wachter came my way.
A wave of compassion arose for these women and for all those who go through similar experiences in their process of self realization and I feel compelled to write a few words.
 
My own big bang awakening happened around 1998, I shared satsang for some years and then crashed. Outer circumstances plummeted me into a huge deep dark hole. Depression, fear and suicide thoughts became my companions for some years, in which I prayed day and night for help. I had no way to understand what had happened to me.
Was awakening not irreversible? Had it not been real then? The anguish I was facing was often unbearable.

What do they have to do with each other?
What if spirituality and spiritual work is not what most of us thought it was? 
What if it is actually all about becoming human, about arriving here and partaking in life.  What if our understanding of spirituality is radically changing, just like everything else?
Our whole world is shifting and changing so rapidly that we can hardly keep up with it.
The digital world soars in clouds over our heads, the climate changes so fast that we can’t keep up with it. Our understanding of life and science is practically being modified by the day and so of course also the spiritual paradigm is shifting. 
It has to be so. Alive spirituality is always in harmony with the time it appears in.

​Chapter 1
 
Entering the fire
 
If your knowledge of fire has been turned
To certainty by words alone
Then seek to be cooked by the fire itself.
Don’t abide in borrowed certainty,
There is no real certainty until you burn;
If you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
Rumi
 
Naked in the hot sun I turned the dead jellyfish over several times on the beach with a stick to find its center.
There was none. With a shock I realized that I also had no center and that I was just a mishmash of unfocused and accidental happenings.
And just like that, all of a sudden, completely out of the blue, I knew with great certainty that I needed to find my center!
 
Amazing how Grace finds us and puts us on the path toward self-realization. I could have never come up with that by myself.
I write this now that I am 64 years old and I have lived a rich and abundant life because of that initial spark.
At that time I did not realize what an initiating moment this was. Neither did I know that it would guide me to several enlightened masters and gurus and open doors in my consciousness that had been closed and were forgotten during many lifetimes.
Had I known what hardship the journey would bring in its wake I might have quickly thrown the jellyfish away and pretend to never have seen it.  At the same time, if I had imagined the glory that would be revealed to me, I would have clung to it for dear life.
Luckily Grace itself did the job and put a flame in my heart that took care of everything.

Much water went down the Ganges since my first awakening in 1998.
(See article: Enlightenment, before during and after).
16 years of integration and opening lay behind me, years that brought so many pieces of the puzzle together. 
All this time, I was waiting for this integration to come full circle, to be complete. Not noticing that I was falling into the same trap again as I did then: Believing that there is finality to the journey.

Resurfacing now, from my yearly solitary silent retreat, it has finally landed that there is no completion ever. That God is an endless journey. If one circle closes it is only for another one to open to go the same round only from a higher and different perspective. What a relaxation!!

Trust is an absolute necessity for our spiritual development. Without it, it is difficult to even enter the path and transformation will be nearly impossible.
Transformation means that something changes into something else. Copper turns to gold. After transformation the copper is not the same anymore and it cannot know the gold until it becomes it. In the same way the butterfly cannot know itself while being a caterpillar.
In other words, we have no idea what will happen when we let go of our old familiar ego structure.

I use the word trust here in the sense of basic trust. This is something else than psychological trust, which is based on trustworthiness.
Basic trust means that we have the feeling that our life naturally unfolds and evolves in the right direction.
That whatever happens, it will always be good, even though we don’t know yet what it will be.
Basic trust seems to be a pre condition for us to let go into the unknown and not knowing.
You may have noticed already that not knowing is one of the most difficult things for our ego to tolerate, while for the aware part in us it is the most natural state.

My spiritual journey started in 1976 at the red sea in Israel. I felt lost in this world, there was so much pain in and around me, and I had hoped that a trip around the world (on bicycle) would bring a change. Of course the traveling only accentuated that the pain and the restlessness were inside of me.
One day, I saw a big jellyfish lying on the beach and I was looking for the center, for the core of the animal and I could not find it.
Out of nowhere I realized that I also did not have a center, and that it was very important to find that.
At that time I also often mindlessly drew the Möbius sign in the sand (the sign of infinity, or an eight lying on its back).
Without knowing the sign, it evoked a feeling in me that everything was somehow eternally connected.
My energy and attention turned towards the inside.
Of course I had no idea that this was the irrevocable beginning of a life long journey of self discovery.

Every seeker wants Enlightenment. Most people perceive that to be a state of ongoing bliss and oneness and believe that after that, life is easy and simple forever after, because of the eternal expansion into the beyond.
While it is true that there is something called “the enlightenment experience” which has all of these characteristics, the true enlightened life is something quite different. The bliss is not the emotional experience we can know through the ego. It is beyond that.
This truth is revealed overtime, bit-by-bit as we grow into who we are and loose our ego identity.
Some parts of the learning are guaranteed; 
We have to first recognize who we are beyond our mind and body to the point that a shift of perspective, of context occurs, but then we have to crash and come down from the enlightenment high. We need the courage to admit that every experience wears off, even after a few years, that clarity can be lost again and that identification with the mind can come back. That nothing is permanent and that to reach higher peaks we need to pass through different valleys.


Failing is an essential part of the path. When we have spiritual success our ego grows side by side, when we fail, it is diminished and is ground down.

Trust is an absolute necessity for our spiritual development. Without it, it is difficult to even enter the path and transformation will be nearly impossible.
Transformation means that something changes into something else. Copper turns to gold. After transformation the copper is not the same anymore and it cannot know the gold until it becomes it. In the same way the butterfly cannot know itself while being a caterpillar.
In other words, we don’t know yet exactly what the new more evolved version of ourselves will be. We have no idea what will happen when we let go of our old familiar ego structure.

I use the word trust here in the sense of basic trust. This is something else than psychological trust, which is based on trustworthiness.
Basic trust means that we have the feeling that our life naturally unfolds and evolves in the right direction.
That whatever happens, it will always be good, even though we don’t know yet what it will be.
Basic trust seems to be a pre condition for us to let go into the unknown and not knowing.
Not knowing is one of the most difficult things for our ego while for the awakened part in us it is the most natural state.

Unconditional inner support.
Who am I without my inner judge?
 
Who am I?
This is the age old question that accompanies every seeker on the path. It is the koan that makes us take risks, jump out of our habitual ways of being and living, challenges the boundaries of our personality and makes us reach for the impossible.
 
We follow different teachings to show us the way back to ourselves.
We may travel to the other side of the globe to be with our master or teacher; no mountain is too high, no valley too low…
Once the question has arisen, the thirst is here and wants to be quenched.
Through all kinds of groups and practices of meditation, inquiry and prayer we reach great openings and experience states of freedom, often only to fall back into old patterns.
 
How come this happens again and again?