Upchara remembers Castaneda’s 4th stumbling block on our journey: old age! “…that had me very perplexed!”
Just in case: I am not trying to ‘teach’ anything nor to affirm this is the ‘truth’. Perhaps I just needed to put all this in words for myself.
I feel to share a few little things with those (friends, fellow travellers and teachers) with whom I have learnt much and ‘bounced off’ a lot…
Particularly, I would like to share some thoughts around a part of Castaneda’s teachings… (I heard them through my teacher Faisal). He says that during the journey, the seeker meets four big stumbling blocks. The first three are fairly easy to understand, because… I hope we all have battled with them already.
The 1st is Fear. We are challenged to learn to face fear and take it by the hand, and walk with it rather than be stopped by it.
The 2nd is Power. All forms and types of desire for power – more or less concealed. The need to control and dominate (situations, others, oneself). So, we learn hopefully to unmask power, make it come out from the unconscious into the light – and do our best not to allow it to trick us. And… discover what True Power is.
The 3rd is Knowledge. Aha! The plot thickens… When having had, if we are blessed, quite a few direct experiences of Truth and Being, we fall into the illusion of ‘Now I know, now I have understood.’ It is here, if we are lucky, that life itself takes real good care, and makes us fall on our noses here and there to force us to see and feel that the immensity of the mystery is infinite and one cannot, must not, stop anywhere.
The 4th one is the one that had me very perplexed: old age!
I asked myself, “What? The body and its aches and pains; or the denial and refusal of the ageing process?” But I felt there was much more in it.
Only recently have I started to have the intuition that this part is much deeper, more subtle, and is meta-physical. Of course, I have probably only seen a little piece, but I seem to recognize that now.
1 – All the latent tendencies of my personality (which the Indian mystics call ‘innate tendencies’ or vasanas) with which, however, I have not done any deep work of enquiry and, above all, I have not faced, recognized, and compassionately embraced… will come up with a terrible force! (Here we talk, of course, of what lies in the ‘shadow’ of our personality, of which Jung wrote about so profoundly.)
They will come up now, hiding more cunningly from my own eyes, and lash out from the deepest unconscious at any moment – quite often hurting others. They are incredibly hidden from my conscious mind.
They harden and ‘crystallize’ and become inbuilt blind spots.
2 – Also this last month I have had the intuition that, during the ageing process, the subtle ‘membrane’ that separates the conscious from the unconscious becomes less elastic, less porous, less permeable – and becomes more like a rigidified barrier. Like our bones: less hydrated, they get brittle! And it is probably because of this that I become even more unconscious than before of what lashes out from my shadow!
All this makes me long for close and conscious-enough friends who can mirror objectively, in an unemotional way, my many blind spots!
Featured image by Gligor Andrei Lazar: unsplash.com
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