The Eleventh Day

There is an activity that may sound familiar to you. It can happen after a deeply revelatory experience. A whole-self begins to emerge. A real self that must deal with all the complexities of being a human in a contemporary world, rather than a stony faced idealized Buddha.

Many people incarnate into physical lives so that they can deal with all of the challenges that this entails, within the limitations that the physical world imposes. This concentrated focus that the physical life imposes brings choices and confrontations that are meaningful, relevant, and demanding (because one cannot easily escape them).

And, by focusing on these issues so intently, the greater self grows in its wisdom, experience and compassion. Thus, a great deal of personal development of the Self is accomplished.

A revelatory experience can intensify this process, because against this greater perspective of reality, many more issues are questioned and evaluated, no longer as easily taken for granted. In this process, there is much confusion, up one day and down the next, because the old firm assumptions of the previous, as you say “smaller’ self, can no longer be readily relied upon.

Slowly, a whole-self emerges, bit by bit sometimes, from this great reworking as it reestablishes a new reliable footing. A footing, this time, that is upon the transcendent, ineffable, greater sense of being.