Secret awakening energy
Knowing me, or having read some of my posts, you might think I stay away from metaphysical lingo and obscure, lofty concepts. I don't talk about consciousness being everything there is, I don't discuss deities or chakras, nor do I concern you with anything supernatural. This time is a little bit different because I'm going to mention a great and invisible force that is to be reckoned with. An overarching energy that defines large chunks of your everyday experience. It's this powerful force that is both a barrier to your natural state as well as a tool to maintain it, if applied properly. This magical energy is... the force of habit.
I hope this elicits at least a minor smirk. No reason to be too serious about this whole affair. And yet, your habitual functioning is in fact a very important and palatable factor that influences what we talk about here. It's the force of habit that keeps redirecting you from seeing clearly every day. It's the ingrained reflex to escape from the stillness and the discomfort of the disembodied, that keeps sending you on mind-generated pursuits that never get you here, where you belong. This same force reasserts itself when you're glimpsing and tries to hijack you back into seeking. Your brain is so severely conditioned into its own ways that it needs either radical stimuli or frequent reminders to unlearn its patterns.
This might be one of the reasons so many schools of no-thought fail at producing results. It is unbelievably difficult to consciously traverse the bridge from construct to no-construct. After we've talked, you will have been reminded of where you belonged, and yet there's a high chance you'll wake up the next day thinking you're back to square one. Willing yourself back here tends to be counterproductive and, if anything, it reaffirms you in a pattern of seeking and hoping for the next big thing.
This has to keep happening without your intervention, without this striving that sends you looking for answers, practices, and experiences. In a way, it has to happen on its own. This is not the part where I say you need to surrender, have humility, or that you need a higher power to descend upon you. You need the force of habit to work your way. You need to keep finding yourself here, flabbergasted, asking yourself how you got here. You need to keep waking yourself up here, in the non-conceptual, without having the recollection of striving to get here.
This is why the sessions help, and this is why sometimes you might need more than one. Don't expect your glimpse to necessarily follow a one-and-done scenario. Stories of such occurrences are usually spontaneous awakenings where the contrast between regular non-introspective life and a realization of this shapelessness is such that it singlehandedly produces enough of a nudge to shift their tracks. Don't fret, however, because at the end of the day there really is no difference between a "sudden death" or a "gradual undoing". We all end up in the same place.
What might be needed is a series of nudges, enough that a permanent indent happens somewhere within you. More often than not, the ball will jump into that indent and you will find yourself here spontaneously. The more that happens, the larger the indent. At some point, perhaps, the whole fabric breaks and everything flows through. That's when the past life becomes a distant memory. Which won't be the end, of course; there will always be a dynamic to it, like an infinitely looped gif image of stuff falling in through that ghastly hole in the place of your past beliefs.
I like to be practical about it. To use the force of habit, you don't violate your nature with a cataclysmic shift of circumstances. You ease yourself into it, you accept a series of reminders - repetition is key. You can also work with an already developed habit which, for me, was simply sitting on my balcony overseeing the sunset. It's about creating routines that naturally lead to moments of clarity, without you trying to force them. It's not about sitting here and saying "now I must be here" to yourself. Just a routine of frequent moments of letting go.
