Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Alice in Wonderland

One of the important insights of the Three Stages of Awakening is that you cannot ask a question that’s appropriate to a different stage than the one you’re in and expect any kind of valid answer or any answer that rings true or makes sense to you -- it's impossible. For example, if you are in the process of first-stage awakening, which is where most people are, and you ask a spiritual question, the answer, the confusion or the terms in which you think of the answer will be dictated by the first stage of awakening. Since first-stage awakening is all to do with transcending your family and early conditioning you see the spiritual only in familial terms through the lens of early life experience.

Everything you see will be in a context of dependency, rejection, and disillusionment, because these are the fundamental themes of the first seven years of life. This is really the conditions for creating religions; they have all been formed in this way and that is why they lack true spiritual depth. They are merely extensions of family dynamics and dilemmas projected onto a larger canvas. Thus, God is the father and Jesus is the son, prayer is for receiving what we want when we ask for it in the right way (from our father-god). Hinduism regales us with many different kinds of familial relationships, and so on.

Looking into the three stages as a composite whole, you see contradiction and paradox, which began my work into this model. However, if you dissemble the three stages one from the other, clearly knowing how to identify each, you will see that there is no contradiction within any one given stage. This is an explanation for how we are faced, after fifty years of serious psycho-spiritual effort, with a mostly unsatisfactory result. 

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice may be the voice of reason, while in this case the Queen is the mad one. However, I advocate the impossible, wherever you are inspired to try it. If you are to believe in six "impossible" things before your next breakfast, then try these:

• I can shed my early life conditioning
• My survival strategies have no relevance to my present life
• There is a way through the mire of my character and personality constraints
• Human beings are infinitely more powerful and amazing than I can imagine
• I will live my life in freedom and realize my spiritual self
• Everything is Love

... and you may hear Alice laughing... but don't let that put you off.

BLOG entry #34