I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who’ve been doing a bit of exploring—about how they’re experiencing life and who they really are—and they’ve slowed down enough, and got curious enough to have a huge insight.
Which in some ways is fantastic, but in others can be a bit troublesome.
For most people it’s a steady chipping-away at conditioned beliefs, which is why I describe my work mostly as being a guide for your journey through this stuff. Usually, it takes time!
The problem
The problem with these big, sudden insights is that it’s a pretty exciting experience to have. It’s like a veil is temporarily drawn back, we suddenly realise something truly colossal about the nature of things, and life looks completely different as a result.
The aftermath of this (speaking from personal experience here) can be a heavenly time. As one client put it the other day,
“I was floating around on the ceiling for about a month.”
I myself was so relieved/excited/ecstatic when I had an experience of my own Innate Health, I would definitely have qualified for a diagnosis or two, had I been examined by a traditional psychiatrist, during that period.
(I have heard first hand tales of people failing Mini Mental State tests, and in one extreme example, being sectioned, as a result of a profound insight! 😱)
Now, can you imagine what a mind makes of all this?!?!
🤯
I can tell you pretty much the first thing it will say:
Which kind of makes sense, because so much useless mind rubbish (i.e. all the stuff that was giving the impression of everything not being ok) has been cleared out of the way by the insight.
Why would we go back to believing all that nonsense? Surely we’ll feel this good for the rest of our lives? This total clarity must remain, because we’ve seen that clarity is our true nature? 🤷🏻♂️
Nothing will upset us ever again, hurrah!!
🥳
I’ve got bad news
But it doesn’t appear to work like that, I’m afraid.
Because minds are tricky little bastards and nature abhors a vacuum.
😆
So we come back down to earth.
And that’s where the problems start.
I’ve seen minds go in several different directions from this point, but all of them have been pretty much variations on a theme around ‘doing it wrong’ or ‘having lost it’ or even thinking it didn’t really happen in the first place.
It can be profoundly dispiriting (I mean, who wouldn’t want to feel totally f***ing brilliant ALL THE TIME?!) and it can lead people to innocently spend many years chasing that original high, as their mind desperately craves another hit of pure, unadulterated presence.
If this is all sounding worryingly familiar to you, then I’ve a metaphor to share with you, that might help and reassure.
It’s not mine, I heard Jamie Smart talking about it once and it instantly made sense to me.
The Beachball
It’s like for most of our lives we’re holding a massive beach ball under water. This takes effort and is a constant, huge struggle – the struggle of life lived in the thrall of the outside-in illusion.
Then some cheeky sod comes along (Hi 👋🏻) and points out the true nature of things—“Umm, had you noticed, it actually works the other way: inside-out”—we have that big insight and all of a sudden, it’s like we’ve taken our hand off the beach ball (because we hadn’t even noticed we were doing that).
What’s going to happen to it? It’s going to fly up in the air, right?
This is the high that can follow a really big, sudden insight, and it’s why they’re sometimes a bit of an issue.
Because, while effortless, this is no more of a natural situation than us actively holding it underwater – gravity’s still acting on it, so it’s going to come back down to sit on, and bob up and down on the water.
And minds, being particularly sensitive to sharp contrasts, interprets this as ‘having lost clarity’.
So no, you don’t get to live in ecstasy for the rest of your life, BUT at the same time you don’t go back to struggling to hold that ball under the water either.
(Why would you?)
So life gets a lot easier, and you have way more perspective on that bobbing-around on life’s ups and downs, going forwards.
And the ups and downs are still there. Because as Syd Banks once said,
“Life is like any other contact sport; you're going to get your knocks. But it's not the knocks that count, it's how you handle them.”
💟
Giles
p.s. There are 8+ billion people on planet earth, we all have totally unique experiences and I’ve just outlined the one I had, and that a tiny proportion of my clients have described to me. That still leaves another 8+ billion readings of this process. So take it all with a pinch of salt! 😘
p.p.s Go back and read the title again. What have I told you about the word ‘should’?!?! 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
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Giles P Croft
Here's what I have told you about the word ‘should’