Mudfun ·
The greatest and most exciting challenge for mankind is to become free from what I wanna call “the cage of the persona and its milleu ” which is the program we are born into that restricts and limits our soul from its grand ultimate potential.
The opposite of being trapped in the program is something like a child’s state of mind that is an effortless endless new beginning where everything feels fresh and limitless and one feels regenerated by all of existence, experiencing the moment as something like bliss, such that time and even death loses its sting.
The program and the persona is the cage that separates our soul from our heavenly source so that if and when we become released from it, it makes the ultimate freedom and reunion possible.
The ultimate goal described by mystics and spiritual teachings is to reunite with our source and go beyond our persona. The path of the mystic is to honour the needs of the soul.
The human soul yearns for this freedom and union. It likes to swim in the sea of infinite possibilities and return to its heavenly source. It wants to merge with the infinite love of the universe and the oneness of existence. Mind altering substances can feed this need but that activates the law of diminishing returns which is one step forward towards the freedom of the divine in exchange for two steps back - less time and energy ahead and now more subconscious craving for that relief.
The soul wants ultimate union and freedom from the cycles and the persona craves the program’s cycles of pleasure and pain, success and failure, acceptance and rejection, satisfaction and disappointment and sickness and wellness and the constant striving between.
The soul wants union with its source and the persona is wired for a different outcome. It is geared to find belonging, and quench its desires through the senses. It needs relationships which also bring pleasure and connection and also friction from the opposing norms, desires needs and wants of others. Relationships feed the persona’s hunger for the cycle of pleasure and pain.
The persona is driven by quenching its desires before time and energy runs out. It is fixed on securing a foundation of earthly worldly, material comfort and stability and thereby pulled into the competitive, material and physical nature of the program. This involves finding and establishing personal boundaries and a voice that protects itself and asserts itself to own the time, space and energy that it wants and needs to claim as its own. This is a case of survival and self preservation which must come first.
Falling in love creates moments where the stability and predictability of the persona disappears or “dies”. It causes us to “fall free” from the confines of the persona and the program, and lose our sense of self and feel connected to something bigger and fills us with moments of bliss where the mundane world and its cycles including time seem irrelevant. And this is awkward for the persona, especially with age because the persona increasingly needs the comfort of predictability, control and logic and needs to feed its ever increasing addiction to its routines and the predictability and control.
The persona is driven to use up every moment of a lifetime chasing this security and will gladly accept only a few accidental, fleeting moments of freedom before death. The persona does not gel with those “free moments” and perceives them as some sort of a glitch in the matrix at best or as a threat to “sanity” at worst.
The persona gets addicted to the predictable cycles of pleasure and pain which accelerate until death.
As the program and its cycles accelerate, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and shortens the period of time between tension building up and needing to be released.
Unresolved issues, unmet goals and promises, and unfulfilled dreams and desires creates tension that is often released in ways that create more tension and each time the cycle begins again with less energy and less time ahead , taking us closer and closer to a breaking point or death which ever comes first.
The goal of the mystic, through a practice of meditation or prayer is to learn to experience moments where we can gain relief and break free from the cycles and let go of our persona and merge with existence which creates awareness of the cycle and allows us to rise above it.
Meditation and prayer is a form of letting go that is something like falling in love with existence.
The freedom and replenishing force of prayer or meditation is available at all times, but our programming makes it difficult to go there.
Moments of dropping free from the program can happen by themselves at any time and if and when they do, our persona is geared to revert us back to our default programmed state.
A practice of meditation and prayer can give us access to this freedom but the persona and tge program is so powerful it can make our practice into another routine of predictable li…