Isaiah recently commented about how persistent the illusion is. It’s a constant. Except for those who live in a state of enlightenment or theosis, the instant you take your eyes off of the goal, off of the divine reality, the world returns.
Or another way of putting it is that the moment you stop pressing forward with your simple, unconditional, loving awareness, you experience something pushing you back, whether you notice it or not. I remember when I was taught about aerodynamics in junior high, that there are four “forces” acting on a airplane: weight, lift, thrust and drag.
What I’m talking about is spiritual drag. The very experience (or environment or phrase or thought) that helps us to see God better at one point, often hinders us from going on to the next. The instant I stop “letting the mind of Christ” be in me, “my” own mind fills me, with conflict, egoic fears, and all the rest. Jesus called the Path “the narrow Way.” The Katha Upanishad amplifies that narrowness, and calls it “walking the razor’s edge.”
So what keeps the illusion in place? Why am I always “me?” The language we were taught about “The enemy” seems so apropos. Mara, Maya, Tempter, Satan, Devil, Demiurge. Drag. In every moment, Drag seems to be an invisible force, pushing us back, in every place, ready to thwart, diminish, skew or cover up our awareness of God’s reality. Everywhere we are, the enemy seems to be, too. Yin matches Yang.
Or so it seems. The fact is, physicists laugh at the “four forces” of aerodynamics. With their higher level of understanding, where others see weight, thrust, lift and drag, they only see one: Inertia, the tendency of an object to resist change?whether being put into motion, or to change its motion.
Drag is just one more part of the illusion. And the source is simply our little selves.
And they aren’t even here, either.
“Drag is just one more part of the illusion.”
Just me- but I think of Intention as always creating…and then we choose the lable to slap on this creating process. Do looking for “drag” and you’re going to find it, it’s everywhere.
Choose to be centered, seeing “lift”, that too is everywhere.
Kathleen posted a quote yesterday by Baba Neem Karoli:
“It’s better to see God in everything,
than to try to figure it all out.”
Amen.
Good points, as always, Tommy. “Drag” isn’t negative, and really just like everything else, part of the only illusion, i.
“I Am” is the only eternal Reality. Lift and Drag, Samsara and Nirvana, Heaven and Hell… just This.
I like Karoli quote. It reminds of what St. Teresa of Avila said, “It is more important to love much than to think much. Always do that which most impels you to love.”
You got it, friend. But, um, you actually drew the four vectors of aerodynamics! *laughs*
Theosis is… reality. Enlightenment is reality. It’s how it is, most people just haven’t caught on, or they tend to forget. (I like the little disclaimer, constant state. Oh, if only! But would it be boring?) Maybe it’d be more useful to say that “we” (our egoic selves, if you will) construct a false reality on top of the real thing. And who’s to say what’s real when the answer is, none of the above?
Isn’t it amazing how easy-to-miss/hard-to-see Reality is?