You are a traveller, a cosmic astronaut. But to understand rightly, you must realize that your life—the living of your life—is actually not the goal or the destination or even the base of things. It’s the launching pad. You are meant to ascend from it.
Most people don’t recognize that it’s not about perfecting this life. The common idea is that if you perfect it well enough, if you fix yourself, if you grow emotionally and grow psychologically, even grow spiritually—that somehow you will get better and better and in this human form, as this human form, as this life—you will somehow get perfected; you will “get there.”
But this is incorrect. You cannot get there through this life, as it is. This life is the launching pad. Therefore the goal is to be launchable and to launch for real: to take off. All transformations are towards that. And all subsequent transformations after that are for the furtherance of that.
Which is not to say that this life isn’t necessary. After all, you can’t get off the ground without it, as obviously there’s no launch without a launching pad. But people get stuck, essentially thinking, “Well, it’s about improving the launching pad, and then I can take off.” The deeper understanding is that life has almost nothing to do with the launching pad (other than getting launched), which is utilitarian only.
You will never perfect this life. You will never make yourself so good, no matter how hard you try, that what you really want—the spiritual, the ultimate, the “great thing” itself—somehow comes out of that, somehow happens through some perfecting process. That’s not true transformation. Which is not to say that there’s no value in getting better in certain ways; in getting less emotionally dramatic, in becoming less argumentative, in getting along better with people. It doesn’t mean there aren’t issues to address. It means that addressing those issues isn’t in-and-of-itself what transforms you, what gets you to where you really want to go.
Where you really want to go has nothing to do with the mundane transformations that life both brings and requires. It is beyond that. And to get there, it’s not that you perfect this life. It’s that you develop enough understanding, enough willingness, enough openness, enough heart (essentially, enough new intelligence) that a day comes when real transformation has occurred—when you transcend this human vehicle, this life.
Suddenly, whether it takes minutes, years, or decades, this life is no longer the focus, no longer has the hold on you that it did before. Suddenly, you know, understand and feel that this is not what it’s about—that this is just the launching pad. Then, this life starts to get lived from what can rightly be called the transcendental position. Until that ascension—that transcendence—is firmly in place and unless that direction has been absolutely established, everything is a movement toward that. All growth and transformation is in the service of that transformation.
This can be precisely formulated as:
Sufficient growth = transformation;
Sufficient transformation = transcendence.
Where the “equals” sign signifies “results in”—in the sense of critical mass. Another way to say it is that enough quantitative change can lead to qualitative change.
But first, for real transformation to actually occur, you will have to come to the realization that this world is the way it has always been, and the way it will always be. Things change in it, but nothing really changes. The form changes, even our response to it changes, but it is the same old thing. It is the same wine in a different bottle. So your focus can be on the bottles, or it can transcend the bottles. It can transcend being concerned with what shape and what color and what age the bottle is, and it can concern itself with the essence, with what is in that bottle—what can be drunk, what can be taken in, what can be tasted, what can become part of you, what can flow through you. The vast majority refuses to accept, or even consider, the truth of this; that there’s nothing new under the sun. But for those who do, a shift occurs. They begin to see it as “the universe made me just as I am—so how bad can I be?”
All your self-judgments are circular; they do not get you anywhere. Spiritual maturity means that you stop beating yourself up. You start to see that things are how they are, and that you are certainly free to focus on what’s wrong and even spend the rest of your life going around in that circle. Or, you can open yourself even more to the higher call you have already heard, that you are already responding to—which is calling you to transcend, calling you to move beyond the concerns of personality, the concerns of daily life, the (over) concern for worldly events.
That is transcendence: change of focus beyond only the time-bound and space-bound and mind-bound (all of which, together, comprise the material or materialistic level of things). You develop enough understanding, enough maturity, that small things no longer occupy all your attention. Whether you are a little richer or a little poorer, a little better off or a little worse off, a little friendlier or a little less friendly, a little healthier or a little less healthy—these will not change anything important for you—these don’t touch the essential. The essential, the ultimate, is way beyond any of these material-level concerns. And this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have material concerns. It means attend to them in the proper proportion.
Yes, you have to take care of yourself. You have to have a certain minimum level of health to function. You have to have food on the table. You have to have somewhere to sleep. But many of us spend 99% of our life energy on these things. Spiritual maturity means you spend only the time and energy needed, which is far less than we usually think, whether it is 1% or 10% or even 30%—but it is definitely not 99%.
This life is a calling to a higher life that has something more to do with eternity and infinity than with your bank balance, or what kind of car you drive, or whether you will die at eighty or at ninety, or whether you will get married for a third time. Where most people are stuck is in thinking that this life is about this life: “If I can just be happier; if I could just change a few things; if I could just get this or that; if I could have a little more pleasure and a little less pain.” But this is immaturity—because this life includes all of it—pleasure and pain are part of every life. Having more and having less are part of every life. Everybody who has more has had less, and will have more and less at another time. Everybody who has less has had more, and will have less and more at another time.
So that is the first basic understanding, the initiatory element of a new intelligence: it is not about this life. Once that is understood—really understood and established—it starts to fan out inside of you. It starts to touch everything that you touch. It starts coming into more and more thoughts that are already there, more and more feelings that are already there, more and more experiences that would have happened anyway. But now it is all happening from a different perspective.
The call gets louder; the call to the beyond becomes more audible, the demand of transformation becomes more insistent and more urgent. And as you are more responsive to it, consequently it responds more to you. A deeper exchange between you and the universe starts to take place. A more direct connection starts and you begin to see something different in a stranger’s eyes, you begin to taste something different in your dinner and you begin to feel something different, for no particular reason other than that now you have gone further.
There is nothing in this life or in this world that is not teaching you something. But are you a learner? Are you a rocket willing to launch?
That’s not a frivolous question to ask yourself; we are often not the learners we think we are. We are not as willing as we might tell ourselves, simply because it means leaving the launching pad, it means actually giving up certain concerns, it means actually allowing transformation—which means actually stopping to focus so much on getting a better car, or finding a relationship, or losing that ten pounds.
Get a better car—nothing wrong with that—but it means you stop devoting your life to the pursuit of a better car, or at least “X” amount of energy and time and effort and thought to acquiring it. Give it the thought and the time and the energy it needs: very little. But most of us give it fifty times what it needs. Let go of that. It is not enough to understand; you have to do it. And then you are lighter. Then your attention is freer for what is more important. If you are moved by a sunset, can you be really moved, all of you? Can you be willing in that moment of being moved, to open your whole self totally to what is stirred in you?
Most of us are holding back. We “allow” only a little bit, we allow here or there. This is a great clue. If something moves you at all, let it move you much more. If something opens your heart a little, throw yourself into it completely. We miss these clues—we don’t interpret them rightly. Anything that stirs you, anything that moves you, anything that opens you, is helping you first towards transformation and ultimately towards transcendence. Can you give yourself more fully when those moments happen? Those moments happen to everyone. And they happen to you. They can act as a signal: “Now—now is the moment, be more willing now. Drop my defenses now.”
The universe is always ready to help you, in any moment, in any form. Everything is a message directly to you: every word you hear from whatever source, everything your eyes see, anywhere you go, anything your skin touches or feels, any experience or perception inside or outside—let me say it bluntly—is a direct message to you from God.
How huge is that! Every second, every breath you take, God is trying to reach you. How important is that! Every second, there’s actually a force trying to pull you upward, and it comes to you in the form of everything that comes to you, and anything that comes to you, good or bad, painful or pleasurable. No matter what your perception of it or your interpretation of it, it is the beyond, text-messaging you. The more you recognize that, the more the message becomes intelligible—the more clues you get about what it means.
Of course, the launching pad is in full communication with control-central. Otherwise, how can there be a launch? So every communication is about launching and about climbing higher. Every communication is about the flight plan for transcendence. That includes every thought that goes through your mind. That includes every sensation that arises in your body. That includes every emotion you have ever felt or ever will feel.
I say to you; you lack absolutely nothing. Nothing additional is required for that launching pad ascent. Nothing more required for that absolute transcendence. You are fueled and ready to go.
That is what being alive means: fueled and ready to go. If you are alive, that is the position you are in. But most of us get stuck sitting on the launching pad. Let me say it again: it is not about this life. It is not about how this life turns out. It is not about how good or bad this life is, how bad it started and how good it can be; how good it started and how bad it is getting. It is not about any of that. It is about transcending this life and starting to see that this life is happening in something that is much bigger than this life, much truer and clearer than this one little life. You have heard the call. Maybe even you have deeply answered the call, but have you given everything? Have you allowed it to launch you?
And what is it we are transcending? This limited life that arises and occurs in an eternal, much larger life; this infinite eternity that this life happens in; this eternal infinity that this life happens in.
Yet again: it is not about this life. It is about the eternity and infinity that this life happens in. That is where you really are, because that is where this life is. And this is why everything carries the potential for the divine. But that potential has to be actualized.
And help is available for that, in the form of a teacher, a philosophy, or beauty, or nature, or art. So whatever form of help allows you to climb higher, please cooperate with it more fully. Let it take you over. You have nothing to lose. It may be the one that launches you once and for all, so that there is no going back and sitting on the launching pad.
It is not about this life, it is about what this life exists in. Let everything that comes to you help you to understand that more deeply. Let everything that calls to you or touches you bring you more fully to that. Then life itself is transforming you, existence itself is helping you transcend. And you have the support of all of existence. You always have, whether you know it or not. And you always will, whether you believe it or not.
Transformation is not what most people think it is i.e., some sort of “improvement” of you. The transformations you undergo are not the ends, they are the means. The goal is transcendence. Transformation is the technology of transcendence.