How seriously do you take the Law of One? How has it effected you?

[rva_jeremy]

Going off of my experience, a lot of what the spiritual path of growth and evolution entails is actually taking it seriously.  For me that's a lot of what it means to walk the path -- that you actually mean it, however that is realized.  Otherwise you are simply learning a system without applying it and, as those of Ra put it, "you are not teaching what you are learning" which will amount to little effect on one's life.  

This world teaches us Orwellian doublethink all the time: don't say what you're really thinking, pretend the system works even as everybody shares in its crumbling, etc.  We have this very simian ability to separate long term, big thinking from short term, day-to-day, immediate thinking.  While we intellectually and conceptually attribute importance to a system of belief or thought, we have the ability to actually process our life, make our decisions, and act as if that system does not apply at all.  

In fact I'm so cynical about this lately that I tend to think that's what people often mean when they say they "believe in something": they want to voice their attribution of importance to the belief without actually having to live it.  I'm sure that's over the top, but when I'm honest with myself I find myself doing this all the time.  Since we live in a world in which it is constantly reinforced that what we think doesn't matter, that power will determine reality regardless of our objections, we have internalized a kind of ideological wishful thinking that pairs nicely with a sense of learned helplessness in the material world.  Our minds are ours alone; we can at least escape there to our idealistic beliefs and neat explanations for how things ought to be, even as we feel compelled to participate in systems that undermine those beliefs.  This is the doublethink we all engage in in order to have minimally acceptable yellow ray experiences.

Lately, it strikes me that those of Ra locate all of the agency for personal change in our thought, but I don't think they mean merely thinking differently.  I think there's also an aspect of will and of desire involved in interrupting the self-reinforcing sense of identity, and the kinds of lives that our ways of thinking make possible.  In our imagination, we have to step out from the known into the unknown and start acting according to new thinking.  This is the only way we can use the illusion as something to "kick off of," a spiritual inflection point that provides concrete experiences that can be used to give our lives a new trajectory.  By acting according to different thinking, we begin obtaining new evidence, new experiences that help reinforce that different thinking.  Then our new thinking can start to make sense and place us in a new context, a new system of self-reinforcing dynamics.  To put it another way, we have to try spirituality out for ourselves in order to benefit from it.

This is a big lesson I've been learning over the last three years: that you're not getting anything out of merely identifying with beliefs.  You have to act on them--try them out, as it were--in order to determine whether they're worth believing in or not.  You have to have a mechanism for knowing yourself at a deep and authentic level to have any sense of what's worth believing in.   You have to take yourself and your life seriously enough to believe growth is even possible and desirable.  Nobody is going to put aside comfort, certainty, and security in favor of something unknown, challenging, and dangerous unless they believe there's something to be gained.  Figuring out what it is that spirituality gains you is one of the first steps.

I want to stress a point from the last paragraph.  There's a line from a Wilco song that perfectly sums up my feeling about this: "Are you under the impression this isn't real life?"  I think one of the things that has held me back in the past, that has kept me in the "morass of indifference" most powerfully, is the a sincere, gut-level feeling that none of this is real, that none of it matters.  It's not a natural way of thinking, but I think we often learn lessons in our culture that allow for a kind of learned helplessness towards our own lives.  The problem is that it convinces us to believe that our thoughts and desires don't matter.  I think a lot of our dishonesty with ourselves arises this variety of defense mechanism against a world that convinces us at some point to judge ourselves and everything else according to its rules.

Now, this doublethink is actually a desirable adaptation if it is true that we have no control over our lives, because it affords us the use of the mind to escape into fantasies that don't threaten the stability and comfort of the material life.  As a discipline requiring a fine quality of honesty, sincerity, and emotional depth, the spiritual path will never really make sense and be worth investing effort into until one believes that one's life is real and worth investing in.  Much of what has allowed me to really take the Law of One seriously is a journey that I am still on towards taking myself seriously, my life seriously, to believe that there are things that matter and that are worth putting effort into.  One has to desire differently, and that is a deep mystery that will take you into the depths of who you think you are.  This is the reason I believe the Confederation always stresses our understanding of our true desire.

How does one learn that?  By hitting some kind of bottom where one simply cannot reconcile the mindset/lived experience duality any longer, I think.  That desire to really live in truth has to come from deep within, and suffering is largely an exercise in burning away all the ways we think we can hold out from growing up and taking ourselves seriously.  You can't learn how to take yourself seriously; you can only decide that its an avenue of exploration worth checking out through different thinking, and then paying attention to what the experience of the world offers you.  In my experience, just being honest with yourself has the potential to release gobs of energy to start applying towards your own discipline and growth.

I've been studying the Law of One since 2000, and grokked the intellectual stuff pretty quickly.  Learning how to apply it to my life has been a much, much longer road.  For me it had a lot to do with taking emotions seriously and being willing to risk opening the heart.  That emotional part is so crucial, because opening up to it gives all of the urgency to our experience.  Even when emotions are bitter, simply taking them seriously and allowing yourself to feel them provides the feedback that reminds you of deeper aspects of the self you think you are.  Otherwise you really are a mechanistic ego maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain within a limited but comprehensible material system.

I had a metaphysical experience over a year ago where I was given this message: "if you believe your thoughts are real, you can shape yourself".  And also, "the use of will is the fool's leap".  For me, these had the effect of making crystal clear the ways in which I was holding myself back.  I still struggle with the discipline of maintaining the type of thinking I want, of respecting and availing myself of my willpower in order to make effective choices (as well as the major choice associated with the fool archetype).  But the wonderful thing about our incarnation, where time is stretched out into a series of events we experience, is that once we start down the path, everything that happens to us can be used to walk that path.  We are perfect beings being given the gift of witnessing our perfection as a time-dilated process, and the only way to appreciate its import is to dive right into it.

That's what I'd urge anybody struggling with their sincerity in studying the Law of One: dive right in.  Don't take anybody's word for how it is: find out for yourself.  That's the only way to make the Law of One more than a philosophy book.