Stealth Mode

You are trapped in Maya’s web. She’s already got you immobilized and narcotized, but now you’re experiencing a moment of lucidity, brought about, I assume, by the initial nondual insight. From this point of partial lucidity, you can either relax or resist – settle deeper in or start fighting your way out – but as soon as you move a muscle, spider Maya will know you’re emerging from the effects of her venom. She’ll increase your dosage to put you back under, and your brief glimpse of the light will be lost and forgotten. Thus it is said, think first and plan carefully. Don’t start shaking the web until you’re ready to act. Lay low, stay still, don’t call attention to yourself. Play a stealth game. Don’t share your insights or seek support; anyone who can hear you is in the same predicament you are, so all you’ll do is alert Maya to your alertness.

The reason we’re held in a sub-lucid state is because that’s what it takes to make this highly dubious dreamstate imaginarium pass as plausible. We’re satisfied to keep our eyes closed and to feel and believe, rather than open our eyes and think and see, which anyone could do at any time. This is the time to run a tight ship with a one-man crew. Stealth-mode won’t be your natural inclination, but that’s how you make your way out of Maya’s web, and into whatever lies beyond.

I myself never even considered talking to anyone about anything. It was just me and a lot of reading, writing and reckoning. There was no internet, no chatrooms or forums, no amateur spiritual trail guides junking up the terrain. There was no parking lot or trailhead; just a single outbound progression that eventually led, in my case, all the way to terminal perspective. However far your fuel takes you, it all starts with a spark.

Winston Smith hid outside the view of Big Brother’s panopticon, and used his journal to start asking questions. He began by establishing a baseline truth; if two and two make four is granted, then all else follows. Two and two don’t make four because two itself can’t be granted, but to his endarkened mind it made good sense. Chela Winston was getting off to a bad start by not going back and revisiting assumptions (like two), so he would never have made any real progress on his own. Fortunately, or not, Guru O’Brien came along to challenge Winston’s assumptions and get him off to a proper start. From one point of view, O’Brien and the party and Big Brother detected Winston’s aberrant behavior, but from a higher elevation of perspective, above the party, we see that, by taking action – asking forbidden questions – Winston expressed a wish, and the universe granted it. Once that dangerous wish is granted, all control is lost and the wild ride begins. The moral of the story, I guess, is be careful what you wish for – or wish a whole lot harder.

We subscribe to a sweetness-and-light version of awakening, but waking in or from the dreamstate is really a war against the most powerful and cunning adversary in creation, who exists for no other purpose than to deter you from breaking herd ranks and going solo. You won’t see this yet if you haven’t launched yet, but that’s what lies ahead when you do. If all this war and enemy jazz sounds hyperbolic, histrionic and overblown, I’d remind you that Maya’s success rate is nearly absolute, and that man’s search for the only thing that actually exists has a near-total rate of failure. Maya has defenses you can’t imagine until you trigger them and see for yourself, but in the end, you can defeat her because truth is your superpower, and she is powerless against it.

The real reason you’re trapped in Maya’s web is not because she wants to suck out your fluids and leave you a withered husk (not right away, anyway). She wants you in a high-emotion/low-mentation mode to best serve the needs, not of you, who knowably does not exist, but of the godmind, Alfie, which knowably does exist. Maya keeps her hand on the dial that adjusts your mental-emotional balance in the 24-to-1 range; never too asleep, never too awake, always hovering in the just-right middle; the Goldilocks zone.

The realer reason you’re trapped in Maya’s web is because that’s where you want to be; at least, that’s where your currently-dominant fear-based emotional aspect wants you to be. Now, however, for reasons probably involving the initial nondual insight, another aspect of you is growing in size and making itself heard. Your Little Bastard is emerging; a rational but emotion-based hatred of living a lie. A whimpering infant at the moment, your inner savage can grow quickly and pose a viable threat to Maya. Now we begin to see where the real battle of awakening is fought, and between whom. This is the real David and Goliath story; Maya with every advantage, you with your tiny stone of truth. Aim wisely.

The realest reason you’re trapped in Maya’s web – in terms we can understand – is because this is how Alfie dreams you. Despite appearances, there is only one truth, and Alfie is it. We can say tat tvam alfie – thou art atman and atman art brahman, so thou art Alfie – and we can know it’s true, but that doesn’t mean you as a person or entity are the godmind, only you as featureless awareness. For what shall it profit an actor if he gains the stage, but loses his role?

This is not a war that has been declared against you, but that you are declaring against the forces of containment. You are the belligerent party, the rebel upstart, the agitator and malcontent. You are the one who threatens to undermine the established order. You’re the one who’s coming out from under the effects of anesthesia, Maya’s venom, so you are the one who will draw her attention.

In the same sense that you seem to be the author of your nighttime dreams, you also provide the context in which they make sense. As long as you believe it’s real when you’re in it, that’s all that matters. Anything goes and the purpose is served; all is well and life goes on. Now, however, you’re starting to disbelieve, to unsuspend your disbelief, and that triggers alarms in Maya’s web.

Maya is monitoring you, constantly tuning and adjusting your sleepstate to keep you hovering in the optimal range. When she turns her dial to the right, your brain starts percolating and you start rising up out of your sleepstate. When she turns it to the left, you float softly back down and get cozy in the dreamstate again. If you get too heart-centric, you start slurring your lines, missing your cues and marks; too sloppy to perform your dramatic function. If you get too mind-centric, you start rising up out of the fog into an uncomfortable state of lucidity. Maya is hovering inches from your sleeping face, watching for any signs that you’re not in the zone, that your eyes are moving behind the lids. As soon as she sees a change, she turns the dial. Your only hope is to take up the sword of the pen and start slicing the web before she shuts you back down; not wildly, but with quiet calculation and malice aforethought.

This stage of transition parallels Dr. Stanislav Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrices, in which the oceanic bliss of the womb turns toxic and puts us in a no-escape death-squeeze, culminating, if all goes well, in our birth into a new and unsuspected reality. (Unless you were delivered by c-section, you know what I’m talking about. You may not remember, but you’ve been here before.) That’s what Maya is trying to protect you from. She wants you to stay safe and happy in the protective sheath of the blissful womb, not flopping around like a fish out of water, or just laying there like you’re dead. That’s what you want too, but now, the voice of your agitator, the Little Bastard Within, is increasing in volume and making itself heard over mama’s soothing heartbeat. Where there was just one reality vying for your attention – the bliss of ignorance – now, with the advent of your mental aspect rising, there are two; each with their own pros and cons.

That’s where you are now, somewhere in the BPM2 and BPM3 range. This is the beginning of the death-rebirth struggle that you must win to lose and lose to win. The Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita are all about this moment, and here you are. 

What victory can bring delight, what rich spoils could profit;
what rule recompense; what span of life itself seem sweet,
bought with such blood?

That’s fallen Arjuna speaking. In a few minutes, he’ll stand up and launch the war that will bring about the end of the world as he knows it. That’s a grand and mythic way of describing your current predicament. Nonduality is Pashupata!, the thought that can destroy the universe, and now, thanks to the initial nondual insight, you are in possession of it. What you’ll do with it is yet to be seen. Somewhere inside, at the Little Bastard level, you know what it does and what it means, just like Arjuna knew what blowing that horn and launching that war would mean. Pre-fall Arjuna feared it would cost everything; post-rise Arjuna knows it costs nothing.

Assuming a hundred-billion humans ever, how many do you suppose ever got as far as you are right now? Ponder thereon. If you’ve experienced the initial nondual insight, then it’s not hype or hyperbole to say that you’ve gone beyond virtually everyone you’ve ever known or known of, including all the wonderful saints and sages. Just a wee bit o’ thinking got you this far, imagine what a wee bit more’ll do. 

You’ve received your call to adventure – so now what?