When you start on the spiritual path there may be periods where you feel uncomfortable. You may begin to experience fear. There can arise an impulse to question your spiritual journey.
There are some basic reasons for these feelings. You are accustomed to a specific kind of reality; one that feels stable, even if it’s not fulfilling. You relate to yourself and the world in a specific and comfortable way; as separate individual, seeking happiness. You feel attached to the way things are, the way you are.
As you begin to expand your consciousness that sense of comfort starts to be disturbed. Your solidity begins to feel less solid. Your search for happiness or for God starts to transition from looking for God to God looking out of your eyes, from seeking joy outside to being bliss inside. That sounds great from an enlightened perspective but that is a huge shift in perspective – one that can feel as though reality is being undermined. The old you, the old way you saw reality is being destroyed and the “you” you knew is going with it. That can be scary. Your sense of having your act together and being stable can be shaken and what felt sane feels unstable. Your sense of having a set of rules to live by, of having a society, a religion and a moral compass feel in flux.
There is literally a shift in your reality and that makes you question who you are. You are going from solid ground to the ground of reality, from the known to the unknown and from the tangible to the infinite. Fear of infinity, fear of losing your stability and fear of losing your connection to old beliefs about reality and yourself can leave you in the middle. You may have started to lose connection to the past reality but not made the full transition to an enlightened state. Stuck in the middle is tough. When I became a vegetarian every meal had a blank spot in it where the meat use to be. I had lost part of the past but not replaced it with the fullness of the future.
Literally there is a rip in the fabric of your old reality. There is much less solidity in the way you see and define yourself now. There are fewer tangibles to hold onto. Infinity, emptiness, consciousness, awareness are very intangible. You are traveling from a fixed point in reality to a reality where you are becoming everything. This is the journey from separate identity to universal identity. What you trusted as reality is now being sensed as not so real.
Spirituality is a leap into the unknown, into the intangible, into the infinite. It take tremendous courage. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is seeing the fear and taking the next step outside that comfort zone. It is trusting those who have gone before and said that what lies ahead is God and your union with God.
