According to Pearce, our culture is based on and obsessed with error correction. There is a problem and we fix it. Another problem and we fix it. Our days are composed of to-do lists correcting problems – “fixing”. And all this fixing and busyness is designed to reduce our anxiety about not being whole – not being all-together – not totally in control of our Fate. Pearce claims that, our anxiety is about being off-course, but having shifted our focus to error or errors, “we interpret our anxiety as over having made an error” or needing to fix a problem. Someday, we will have fixed all of our problems and be happy. But if we approach our lives differently, as either on-course or off-course, rather than as error-prone and needing constant correcting, then life is more playful, fairly effortless and all energies remain coordinated.
So how do we stay on-course and out of error-correction mode? In our materialistic culture, we tend to think of ourselves as our Thoughts, that we are nothing but thoughts. Pearce notes that what is missing is Consciousness and Insight/Intelligence, which together with Thoughts forms a triad of wholeness. One way to look at it is: Thought is Earth and Insight/Intelligence is Heaven, with Consciousness as the life force and energies connecting the two. When I center my Self and find the peaceful spot within me, I can feel my Consciousness and then Insight/Intelligence, as the still inner voice, is perceivable. The anxiety dissipates – I am on-course.
Recently, I was taking a Spiritual Directions online course with 900+ other people taught by Caroline Myss. Caroline would say, “listen to God”. And students would say, “I cannot hear anything”. The “God” word is so loaded, that we freeze at the thought of having a conversation with God. What I think Caroline was saying was: get in a quiet place with yourself and let Insight in. Insight for me is the spontaneous images and thoughts that arise while I am journaling, as journaling is generally a peaceful practice with no goal than to just Be. Thoughts and images are not always our own – we need to listen to this other aspect of our Be-ing.
While reading Pearce, I had a sense of how the human race could reach its full maturity or potential. The stumbling block, the thing that is impeding our full development is, according to Pearce, that we have been vaccinated against Spirit. “Spirit is Shakti, energy, the particular aspect of energy that bonds together, that connects, that lifts order out of chaos as a unit in unity, with the whole of things.” Our vaccination against Spirit is a vaccination against the bonding-force within us, against the Consciousness/Energy and Insight functions. No wonder that we do not feel or hear God. “Isolated in our thought, we are seldom conscious and only rarely experience insight”. To reach spiritual maturity, we need experiences of Shakti and the bonding-force. Where to find these type of experiences? Shaktipat – direct contact with someone who is in touch with Shakti, like an Eastern guru is one possibility. Modern sci-tech practices like lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences is another.