The Traffic Lights Within

I have recently written two essays on ‘Physcial Enlightenment’ and ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’. The former is a rarely discussed subject, certainly amongst spiritual seekers. My point was that both are not only valid but complementary.

But in a western culture that thinks in dualistic terms, there will always be the question, ‘which is the most important?’ Even in spiritual countries such as modern and ancient India, ‘godmen’ have perched themselves on top of poles or stood on one leg for literally years, thinking this was a suitable way to deny their physicality and ergo, increase their spirituality.

This is in my view, nonsense but stay there if you want to.

My sideways sliding mind brought up the famous formula of Albert Einstein and a philosophers permutation of it;

SPIRIT = PHYSICALITY (c2) or E = M (c2)

I will also give credit to Alan Watts for a lecture ( now on You Tube) he gave on why saints struggle with lust. I don’t usually pick over the bones of someone else’s feast but Alan structures his talks so superbly that I shall credit to him because his ideas remain very relevant today.

The subject of lust has of course remained taboo in polite western society for many hundreds of years, repressed largely to it’s own detriment (almost suicide), by the Church.

The irony is that those who seek to become spiritualy awakened and do so, also awaken their sensitivity to everything in the physical world. We are all, after all, spirits in an animal body.

Alan points out that with spiritual awakening induces a desire to withdraw from the world. The shallowness of values and the platitudes of conversation do not contribute to the compelling desire to know oneself. Silence and contemplation are the tools of those with this particular desire and naturally find a place and a way that enables them to do this.

It is my belief that humans are strongly controlled by their ‘chakras’. I assume I need not explain what chakras are so that when I use traffic lights as a metaphor for chakras, readers will understand.

I assume red appears at the top of automatic traffic signals as it can be seen from the furthest distance, and is the only one of the red, amber, green, that causes harm to motorists if not seen.

Let us reverse their order however and place the red light at the bottom, keep amber in the middle and place green at the top.

These three chakras, base, sacral and heart are of great interest for the purpose of this essay. The red base chakra covers our strong connection to ‘tribe’ and family and the amber sacral chakra to basically, lust and animal desire. These two chakras show our bodily physicality and how it connects us with ourselves and those around us, family, friends, lovers, colleagues, leaders, employers, politicians…you get the picture.

Yet our green heart chakra transcends all of this. It is concerned with non-instinctual desire namely, love. This is expressed as love between humans, love of nature, beauty, and our strongest excitement, Divine love.

To sustain the metaphor, these signals are changing within us all the time, red, amber, green and in doing so affecting our behaviour. As much as the traffic controller may want to, there is no point in being on green all the time and creating traffic chaos. We go up and down switching on and off our desires in response to our affairs. Importantly, as one becomes spiritually awakened, the lights get brighter and demand constant attention.

The consequence is that spiritually guided people become unconscious beacons to other people and entities. The latter includes thought forms who exist in other energetic dimensions where there is a vacuum of love. Prayer, choirs, bells, holy relics, smoke, smells, statues, architecture, geomancy, flags, gongs and other devices are employed by religions to dispel these demons from sacred places. The grinning gargoyles on mediaeval cathedrals are the embodiment of these forces that circle us day and night. Gremlins, Demons, Archons or Jinn, wish to shame and ultimately destroy spirituality awakened humans. The power and prescence of saints in any ‘tribal’ congregation is a threat to demons because ‘love conquers all’. They want to pull you down into the red and amber light and keep you there; the red devil. Their desire is to drain your battery to the last few volts.

It gets worse. A spiritually awakening person has to fight their inner demons as well. Since birth our inner lights have been frustrated and dimmed by various spiritual and emotional wounds. I remember crying on my last day of primary school when I realised I would never see my dear friends again. These were children with whom I had grown up, including one, Fiona, who I had literally been born with in the same hospital and ward. I have a photograph.

Alan Watts explains that spiritual awakening brings ‘old pains’ to the surface, such as loss, fear of abandonment, shame, fear of no love. Lustful pleasures sooth these wounds even if only temporarily. For a ‘holy’ or ‘noble’ person seeking the highest enlightenment and benefit for others, these lustful fantasies can be an embarassment if ever aired publically, depending on how unconventional, immoral or illegal they are.

Priests in the Catholic church are an example of how the desire for sexual pleasure, can become perverted and hurtful towards young impressionable children. Royal families live with the same threat of such practices becoming public. Watch out for public figures who fear media ‘intrusion’ and make ‘no comment’ responses or invent and supress ‘facts’ or create a ‘distraction’ or ‘protest too much’, when challenged by journalists and prosecutors.

The present theatre of tricks being played out in the politics of the USA around the love-less characters of the late Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell will, allegedly, reveal a full picture of perverted lust running amoke amongst an international elite, cheered on by All American demons shaking pom poms and pocket cameras.

Sprituality is not an easy path. When the highest faculties of all the chakras are awakened the challenge is to face inner and outer battles of the highest intensity. As my old teacher used to say, ‘immortality has to be earned’.

Arch Angels such as Michael carry shields and swords because this is war. Spiritual awakening unleashes human weakness of the same order of magnitude; in the words of Alan Watts, ‘as if the soul seeks balance’.

Here is what Alan suggested to overcome this dilema;

Stop pretending this battle does not exist. Flesh is real and desire is real.

Stop fighting alone. Isolation is the trap that feeds the beast. Find another who is non-judgmental with whom you can be honest. This is not confession, it’s illumination.

Attend to your old wounds – acknowledge the pain and the painful work.

Be present when you feel desire but do not act on it (this is very hard).

Do not suppress shame as this only delays advancement.

Take the middle way which allows you to be present with the feeling but not to give away your energy pursuing and enacting it.

Alan’s view and remedies are principally the way of Mahayana Buddhism. It teaches that a seeker of inner transformation must merely watch dispassionately as life rolls by to overcome desire. The adoption of extreme views (as presently seen in the USA and other countries) is not being dispassionate but passionate.

In my view there is more one can do to have the strength to carry the whispering ring to Mount Doom.

We are guided if we will, by the ‘green for go’ light as a symbol of the human heart and the love it attracts and sends out. For the Sufi’s, this is the dwelling place of Divine Love in the human body. As Divine love is by definition everywhere it is therefore within all of our chakras or centres of consciousness. Divinity is present in our most lustful desires and moments as humans share animal desires and pleasures. Sufi saints were allowed to have one or even more wives, although they did not always. The ‘sin’ of pleasure as seen by some religions, creates guilt and shame which then, only priests can forgive. Life in these religions puts ‘sinners’ on a see-saw of ‘moral and immoral’ judgement favouring only those who use this to weild power over the faithful.

But when we resonate with Divinity we allow our attention to focus on the Divine Prescence within, or in modern terms, ‘our higher self’. This focus is one of being ‘in the world but not of the world’. It is neither moral nor immoral, just being Self.

Noah and his wives collected the animals when the world was in flood. Instead of being overwhelmed and drowned by the great flood of all consuming energy which was water, he and his sons constructed a boat that floated above death and destruction.

Being an Arc is in my view the best strategy for survival in a time when there are great metaphorical floods of anarchic and parasitical energy, pervading and interfering with the normal balance of nature, the affairs of man and ultimately our spiritual well being.

So, build a boat and after great storms a small bird will land in front of you and place down a spray of green leaves from an olive tree, and the waters will slowly receed to reveal a new Earth, to observe from high.