The Great and Ancient Secret

If you don't recognise your vulnerability and levels of stress you will probably find the expansion of awareness and depth of experience that arises as you uncover the Secret to be intolerable. Your ego or sense of self has to be strengthened.

I know some approaches, some traditions, give a very simple method for transformation and touching the wonderful freedom the Secret brings. For instance I know a woman who practised Transcendental Meditation for twenty five years and yet had never dipped under the surface of her conscious mind, and didn't know how to when I sat with her. Of course we have the other end of the spectrum in Suzanne Segal who experienced continuous expanded awareness after using TM. However, Suzanne is an exception not a norm. Uncovering the Secret takes work and as the parable of the pearl of great price suggests, we need to give all of ourselves to it.

The sphinx depicts human nature or self awareness emerging from and in contact with its animal background.

At first these sound like all that stuff in religion about being good - doing the right things. Well, if you take them at face value without understanding things, that is what they would be. But what other way can we see them?

Well, yama is important because as human beings we are largely the slave of our instincts, emotions and mental conceptions. Members of opposing political or religious factions may fight to the death. This is not because there is a basic enmity, but because neither can let go of their opinions or their social indoctrinations. Remember also what was said previously about being victims. Becoming free of such habitual motives, fears and responses is not done by simply visualising a happy ending or financial success. Facing the internal reservoir of past experience and trauma is not achieved by someone who cannot deal with their own emotions and sexuality, and are the victims of their own urges and darkness. If we lie, we have not the courage to face that which made us lie, and therefore lack the courage to meet ourselves. The desire to injure includes the ability to injure or destroy subtle parts of your own nature that are struggling to be expressed, and so on. The rules are not intended to be merely moralistic, but to awaken latent possibilities within the individual. The Secret is the core of yourself. You cannot get there except by meeting yourself - all of yourself, and allowing it to live.

I agree that is a heavy bundle up there under the definition of yama. But you need to start somewhere, and what you can't manage at the beginning will gradually become possible as you grow. But do NOT take those disciplines on yourself as if they are somehow spiritual needs. You will not get there by being good and doing all the 'right' things. They are simply guidelines, and something as simple as fasting or trying to move toward non-attachment can develop a great deal of personal strength and decisiveness. Believe me, you need to develop some level of strength, otherwise you will run away like a scared child when you start to meet your own inner depths of feelings and the enormity of the being you are. Your ego, what you usually call, self, is a tiny fraction of who you are. If you are scared you cannot let go of your defences.