“Crossing the threshold”

25 Feb “Crossing the threshold”

In the last post Dr Watkins observed that many people when they experience the “disease of meaning” go on to “spend their life stuck in this ‘meaningless’ swamp of early transpersonal awareness without realizing that it’s just a developmental stage. Instead of moving on to higher levels of consciousness, they wrongly believe it’s something they have to live with and set out on a quest to dull the pain.”

This process of moving on to higher levels of consciousness through vertical development is described by Joseph Campbell as ‘crossing the threshold’.

There are many ways that people have used to cross the threshold. Sometimes it is a slow methodical method. For other people it has been sudden and dramatic.

Here are a few examples of people who have crossed the threshold. I will be devoting at least one future post to each of them.

Eknath Easwaran crossed the threshold through the practice of Swadhyaya;

Swadhyaya – self-study; study of the Self; study of psychology, philosophy, scriptures etc. Swadhyaya is not mere intellectual gathering of information. The knowledge must be lived and turned into wisdom.

This then lead him to other practices such as meditation. He then formulated an 8 point program for vertical development which he and many others have used successfully. We will examine Eknath Easwaran and his life, work and experience in more depth in the next post.

The supermodel Petra Nemcova’s journey was much more tragic and dramatic. The course of her life was suddenly changed by the tsunami of Christmas Day 2004. Her story is deeply moving and inspiring and I will devote a future post to it.

For Adam Leipzig the difference between people stuck at the disease of meaning stage and those who go on to cross the threshold came down to whether they could answer 5 questions. We will look at these 5 questions in a future post.

Dr Gregg Steinberg experienced the disease of meaning, fought it at first and then found his way over the threshold. He then started to study to process and formulated his theory of the fives steps to transcendence. I will cover these steps in a future post.

Jamie Wheal, the co-director of the flow genome project, decided the way out of the disease of meaning stage was to take greater and greater risks with his life out on the sea and up in the mountains. In his own words “either I would get it or it would get me”. He experienced a deep state of flow which permanently changed him and carried over the threshold. I will cover his story last in this series of posts on vertical development and crossing the threshold.