Are YOU Ready to MAKE a BREAK?-4

Are YOU Ready to MAKE a BREAK?-4

Breaking OUT

It obviously requires some form of courage to ‘break out’ of any prison or penitentiary. The authorities will have to be defied. The rules of the institution will have to be broken. New alliances may have to be formed. Clever strategies to break out of ones cell and then out of the building, will need to be created. Patience, determination, discipline and flexibility will rise to the top of the list of character traits required to ensure the whole ‘break out’ process is successful.

Such are the ingredients of any film or TV series about inmates breaking out of their enclosure! They also provide us with the perfect metaphors for our own spiritual liberation.

First however, there is one missing ingredient in the above scenario. And that is accepting that we are in a ‘self made’ prison. That we are entirely responsible for our own incarceration! We are responsible for the imprisonment of our self behind the bars of our attachment to our beliefs, perceptions and habits to which we ‘hold on’ and therefore hold in place. We are responsible for the cage of dependencies and addictions, many of which we sustain and strengthen every day in various ways. We are each responsible for forfeiting the freedom of our spirit! If we don’t realize this then it is likely we will spend large chunks of our time and energy raging against the world around us. As many do! And that not only kills our happiness it destroys both our strength and our capacity to be creative.

So lets explore those metaphors. Within our consciousness the ‘authorities’ will have to be defied. These are the voices of our parents, teachers and sometimes society, recorded within our consciousness. In other words our conditioning will need to be challenged, exposed and discredited. It was ‘they’ who led us into illusions such as love is attachment, happiness is dependent on others, peace of mind is only possible when our bank balance has the right amount..etc.! But ‘they’ are not to blame. They only led us into the same illusions within which they had spent their life unknowingly imprisoning themselves. We chose to follow. A few don’t and never did. They are often known as mavericks!

We will need to break some of the so-called rules. Not the laws of society however necessary or misguided they may be. But the subtle, often unstated rules and expectations that define culture. Rules that sound like collective norms, that sound like the things you ‘have to’ do to ‘fit in’. You don’t ‘have to’ do anything. You don’t ‘have to’ talk in a certain way about certain things. You don’t ‘have to’ follow the norms and conventions that you see around you. Tradition and culture ‘can be’ more like the heavy chains of an anchor than the string that flies the kite. However it’s not a collective rebellion we are attempting ferment, simply the breaking out of some of the strictures of tradition.

New alliances will have to be made which, in a spiritual context, i.e. the context of our consciousness, means we will need to stop hanging out with those old beliefs and habits that constituted our comfort zones. We will need to consciously seek out and keep the inner company of deeper truths. And then cultivate the patience to allow those truths to come through consistently into action. That may mean some discomfort is inevitable when we ‘break out’ of our comfort zones defined by these old beliefs.

‘Clever’ also means being clever enough to ‘create’ a strategic plan, an exit strategy, in order to free our self. This means we will need to learn some method of meditation and spend time in contemplation in order to induce our own insights and realizations. These are necessary in order to fully dispel the illusions and delusions that keep us trapped. It could also involve consulting those who are already internally free, the ones who have done their inner work, broken the chains of attachment and dependency, and broken out of their old mindsets! What did they do, what have they realized, what did they encounter as they broke down, broke up, broke through and broke out, on the way to their own authentic freedom. They are likely to have a map of where all the tunnels are...so to speak!

All of which will require the ability to be disciplined and flexible as each bar of our self created cell i.e. each attachment, dependency and addiction that keeps us trapped, is clearly seen and permanently removed.

Om Namah Shivay