When you begin to awaken, you see how caught you have been in the prison of your mind about certain reality… and how caught everybody else seems to be.
That awakening begins a journey and the tendency is, because you realize how trapped you’ve been in the prison, to push against it and develop an aversion to the things that have caught you, even when it comes to your own desire system.
And that’s part of what is called ‘the ascent’, the way into, and higher doesn’t mean better, it just means more Metta [loving awareness], more Metta, and each one embraces the ones below it in that hierarchal sense, because you’re so yearning to have the freedom of feeling and awareness to be somebody who sees the storyline unfolding without being so trapped in it all the time, that you’re yearning to come up for air and you start pushing against it.
What happened to me in the mid-seventies is I got incredibly high from all my practices, but I realized that I was not free, and the reason I wasn’t free was because of the aversion I had to what I pushed against, because free means free from pushing against anything! Free for all of it, free to be at every plane…and I recognized that I had to re-embrace the form, embrace mother, embrace shadow. I can go through every different metaphorical system you’d like to play in. Embrace, embrace, embrace… all of it. Embrace the evil. Accept the fact of what nature is, on this plane, without losing these awakenings that I had had to these other planes.
-Ram Dass
