The Inner Path

Consciousness is the foundation and creator of the outer world. If you do not find this, the inner path, and understand it correctly, your life will be spent with the secondary creations and will not have reached that which creates. We start out on the external path because the externals are urgent. The survival of the organism depends on these. This is the first possible pitfall – getting caught forever with the externals.

The externals may be overwhelming, and it may be essential to attend to them to the extent that there is no time or energy to go any further.

Or, we may get attached to a particular external aspect, such as addictions and habits of any kind. We may get caught by them and stay with them for an entire lifetime.

Further, we may not have any idea that an internal aspect even exists; or we may know that it exists, and even, at times, feel that it is very valuable, but we don’t know how to access it.

Finally, we may be able to access it, but not know how to explore it. Or we may have some idea of how to explore it, but be unskilled at doing so. There are few who are able to teach skillful exploration of the inner world.

So, there are these obstacles:

1. Stuck in the external.
2. Ignorance of the existence of the internal cosmos, or of its value.
3. Inability to enter the internal cosmos, and
4. Inability to explore it skillfully.

It is #4, the skillful exploration of the inner cosmos, that is the main concern at thezone.earth.

Skillful exploration of the inner cosmos can be impeded by a lack of adequate effort, lack of immersion, and clumsy methods, such as literalism.

The effort required is great. It appears to be quite uncommon for a human to perceive that which underlies and gives form to the material world without great effort. Moments of insight may occur, but to perceive the context rather than the individual objects and events, for example, is not easy. To perceive motivations and causes is more difficult than to identify isolated physical events.

Immersion in the world beyond physical aspects is usually essential, as the physical world becomes a self-evident reality for humans from infancy. The deeper realities require experience to recognize. Meanwhile, the social realm reinforces the superficial, the lowest common denominator reality every day. To identify the nonphysical perspective requires the strength to recognize that general public opinion is wrong. The parable of Plato’s cave describes this situation.

Clumsy methods are hard to avoid as there are few teachers, and the skill is complex. Literalism means to follow words literally. The inner cosmos is beyond words, and so following words as if all that is necessary is to accept what the words seem to mean is bound to lead to error. It’s right up there with being caught by the external and not knowing that the internal exists. The most obvious example of this is literalism as applied to religion and the law, or to scientific or philosophic aspects.