Transforming

Transforming

[An excerpt from our friend Sergio Antonio’s recent book, A Map to Awakening.]

From time to time I get a taste of the transformation of negative emotions, or of suffering. It is a feeling that cannot be compared with any other.

This is one of the most difficult Fourth Way topics to illustrate. Both because there are enormous biases, which we have discussed many times. They are many and varied, but in all of them they take the 'machine' as the only reality and say that you need to gain self-esteem, or that you need to express negativity in order to free yourself and purify yourself, maintain psychic health and so on. But also, perhaps, because it is a field about which I don't have a good understanding yet. Maybe that's why I find it difficult to write about it.

Transformation is an experience of Higher Centers, of the soul. I find it similar to having to wake up very early even though you went to bed late and are very tired. The body rebels, it seems impossible to succeed. Yet, that plane must be catched, and we get up. Surprisingly, something separates from the body that doesn't want to, and this thing wants to, and can. The two experiences happen simultaneously, but the ability to wash, dress and get out wins out over the offended body that still screams, "No, I want to sleep," and may even give way to a special, nonphysical energy, a kind of euphoria where we see our surroundings and ourselves more clearly than usual.

If I fall prey to a negative emotion, I will not be able to get out of it if I want to remain what I am. To solve the problem, I must necessarily be transformed. Christ spoke of the narrow gate, of the eye of the needle: all images that indicate that in order to pass a certain threshold, it is necessary to get rid of certain ballasts that encumber us. These ballasts are the identifications that sustain negative emotion.

The idea of giving up ballast (just that certain ballast that the moment requires), will appear to us as impossible; it seems to us that the thing, if it happened, would tear our being apart, and by giving it up, we would no longer exist. "That's not fair." “I am right." "I can give up everything but this." "If I give it up, justice will be buried and lies will win." "If I drop this thing, on which I have based my whole life, nothing remains of me," and so on.

When we think this, we do not realize that the part that would die, by giving up expressing negativity, is in the machine - and that is exactly what keeps us asleep. We are fond of our sleep, we love it, for we are founded on it. To wake up requires war, casualties are inevitable.

If we drop what seems most valuable to us, what is really valuable will appear.

When this happens, we realize that this new organ with which we are perceiving the world, this attentive, curious, neutral, simple gaze, has arisen and taken to directing our being for some time, not -- as my teacher says -- in spite of the negativity, which is still felt in the background: but because of it. Feeding off its energy. The result of the transformation is a reversal of perspective and the beginning of a completely new perception untethered from what has happened to us and what we were complaining about until a moment before: the rare untellable light that Walt Whitman describes.

"One effort more, my altar this bleak sand;

That Thou O God my life hast lighted,

With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,

Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,

Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages;

For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees,

Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee."

Sergio Antonio’s “A Map to Awakening” is available from Amazon, at this link: https://www.amazon.com/Map-Awakening-Sergio-Antonio/dp/8894546969.

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A Balloon in Mid-Air, Jules Tavernier