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Ramakrishna Ananda

The Threshold

How to survive the Terror of the Threshold

The seeker who doesn’t have an enlightened teacher needs to be warned about two experiences along the way. This knowledge may not be necessary for everyone to know. However, when you don’t have a teacher, it is essential to be forewarned. These two potential threats to your advancement are called the Terror of the Threshold and the Dark Night of the Soul.

Relating with Spirit, Self-Study, Awakening

If you’ve been progressing steadily and are deeply honest with yourself, you may bypass both of these events. You may not need them in order to overcome your blind spots. Your journey, because of your painstaking steadiness and continual growth, will likely spare you from these emotionally jarring times. It is especially true that you will bypass these events if you develop your whole being evenly. That is:

  • maintain good physical health
  • do not waste or dissipate your life force
  • develop emotional balance and consistency, maintaining a sense of well being
  • develop a clear, efficient mind
  • develop devotion and a humble ego.

Having made it clear then that you may never know these two frightening experiences personally, and may wonder why some people are going through them, let’s explore “The Terror.”

Pretensions of Goodness

Usually you embark on the path to higher consciousness with some very good opinions of yourself. You know you’re not perfect but you’re certainly as good as others — perhaps a little better. You’ve often observed many times in life that you were the correct one or did the right thing. Perhaps you’ve been misunderstood but you’ve generally, nevertheless, been in the right. Most often, you feel, people have hurt you, or outraged you, far and away more than you have hurt or outraged them.

Proceeding for a few weeks or months down the road toward higher consciousness, you may begin to get the hunch you’re not as okay as you first thought. In fact, there are times, you now recognize, you behaved like a creep. At other times you did the right deed but for the wrong reason. Your motivation seemed to be kindly but it was — you know within your heart — covertly selfish. You recall you often tried to take the advantage, even with your friends. Indeed, you begin to see you have pretensions of goodness at times without the substance of goodness inside.

Becoming more thoughtful, you easily observe during your daily life that there are times you’re ashamed or embarrassed by your old feelings of jealousy or unreasonable anger toward another person. “No,” you tell yourself, “perhaps I’m not as great as I like to think.”

Your reflections and observations intensify in the cold light of truth.

Terror of the Threshold

Suddenly, in the middle of the night or during meditation, you, in your search for truth, have a frightening experience. It’s called the terror of the threshold, and the word terror is apt. Striving to enter into a higher realm of consciousness — striving to enter the portal of greater love, truth, and beauty — you, all at once, in one total impression, find yourself gazing into a horrifying sight. You perceive your evil. There, ever so vividly, your cruel and thoughtless actions stand revealed to your inner sight. You see these ghastly images, while feeling deep pain. Remorse wells up; but in your terror you cannot stop the sight of such selfishness, such foul thinking, such egocentricity. Your emotions seem so base, you feel you’re looking at an animal. Yet, in all the terror, you know, inescapably, you are seeing yourself. That’s the terror of it.

You clearly see yourself, in myriad examples, as an enemy of Light. You have, for your own purposes, limited or denied goodness. You have hurt others. You have, for some personal gain, conspired against good people — or blocked them. You have spoken ill of others. You have tormented people with your insults. With tears you realize you have often been given a choice of light or darkness and you have, sometimes eagerly, sometimes slowly after great pondering, chosen the darkness. Oh, the revulsion of it all! You see your evil in such detail, with so many proofs.

“Oh, what a horrible person I’ve been!” you say from the agony of your soul. “So manipulative! So conniving! How like a cunning animal! How unlike a human being. How unlike my dreams and pretensions of my true nature have I behaved! In thought, word, and deed I have stood against life and goodness itself. It is undeniably evident.

“Oh, I’m terrified,” you cry. “A thousand years of remorse will still not relieve my guilt about what I have done to others, to myself, to my Lord. How silly are my pretensions to goodness. How foolish to conceive of myself entering higher consciousness. I tremble in shock, convicted.”

Much weeping happens. Your whole body sobs. You have a growing sense of helplessness due to the acknowledgement of your allegiance to evil thoughts, words, and actions. You feel you stink at every level, and oh, how putridly.

Convicted and Purged

Then morning arrives and you go about your daily life smiling, doing your job, but feeling empty inside — empty and very clean. In your terror of the threshold and your profound remorse, many longtime personal blockages and obstacles are released. In your admissions of self-centered evil and insufferable pettiness, your inner cleansing is so great that a new life can begin. Through the terror of the threshold, months, perhaps years, or even greater time spans of limitations within your mental and emotional nature are released. You become able to think and feel love at extremely subtle and satisfying levels. Your remorse and terror make you very humble and ever so appreciative of that grace or goodness which sustains your life — even though you have been an opponent of life.

Convicted, and also purged, you vigorously turn to a higher life. Your condemnation of others is totally gone. Your reliance on higher mercy and a new way of life is readily enforced.

You become, through the terror of the threshold, humbled and all the readier for the pursuit of higher consciousness, even if it should take you forever to find it. Abhorring what you have seen in yourself, you actively seek healing. You will do anything you can to become a better person each day.

Sometimes men and women are not capable of beholding the whole terror in a two or three-hour period. In these instances, the terror experience occurs five or six times perhaps, over a period of several weeks with the process fulfilling itself in specific stages. Each stage relates to a general area in which you have denied yourself and others the fullness of life.

The terror experience is so powerful that your hair seems to stand on end. You have to be in a very healthy state of mind for such a powerful event to occur. Those who are suffering some degree of mental illness are denied this experience because it would be too crushing. Instead, they live with the sense there is an explosive guilt welling up within them. They need the tender lancing of a professional counselor.

A Cleansed Heart

Through your personal terror and remorse, your emotional nature becomes so free of condemnation of others that you are capable of a greater fellowship with all people. The heart, often so full of negativity, deeply needs to be cleaned out if love is ever to dwell in it for any length of time. Certainly, if your love is to be ongoing and a constant state of relationship is to occur, a clearing away is absolutely essential.

The ordeal of your private terror brings renewal. You are mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and often physically refreshed. Through the Terror of the Threshold a new, humble, and eager seeker steps from the dark way, from old tendencies, into the light, and into a life of light.

Reflection

The truth I fear
Is my only hope.

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#2 THE MYSTIC GAZE
A Classic Technique

This classic technique is one of the mystic’s greatest treasures.

It is designed to stimulate your mystical faculties and begin the process of spiritual awakening.

With the Mystic Gaze enjoy the developing sense of clarity, coordination and attunement with life in all you do.

  1. Sit calmly and relax your eyes
  2. Gaze slightly upwards 20-30 degrees
  3. Look into space 20 feet or more
  4. Gaze, don’t stare or strain your eyes
  5. Simply observe and appreciate your awareness of space
  6. Enjoy the dawning wholeness for several minutes
  7. Gear down and go about your day

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#7 EXPANSION THROUGH ATTITUDE AND GOOD WILL
Change Your Heart

Your practice of good will cultivates the heart’s truest, deepest feeling:  love.

These good will practices are a boon to mystical study.

The goal of good will practice is the change of the heart.

When your heart naturally and spontaneously radiates forth a palpable good will, then you are a changed person.

  1. Consciously direct your thoughts and feelings toward an attitude of good will
  2. Bring a person to mind
  3. Or place your awareness on a person closest to you
  4. Direct good will toward this person
  5. Feel free to add specific well-wishes like health, love, courage, etc.
  6. Allow your heart to expand, to change

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#6 EXPANSION LEVEL ONE
Quality of Life

Mystics break out of body bondage through numerous expansions of the heart — of the sense of self.

Your feeling of self-awareness imprisons or frees you.

Happily, you can do something powerfully liberating about the state of your heart and the quality of your life.

  1. Sit comfortably for 15 minutes
  2. Choose a person you know
  3. Imagine you’re walking in his/her shoes
  4. Feel you’re inside this person
  5. Say “If I were (name), I’d feel and think…”
  6. Have fun with it and let your heart expand

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#5 THE HEART AND ITS LIBERATION
Your Sense of Self

Mystics break out of mind and body bondage through expansions, expansions of consciousness.

Your “Heart” is your sense of self, your feeling about who you are.

Who are you as a distinct person from everyone else? This is your core individuality, your mystical heart.

  1. Focus on your mystic heart
  2. It is located in the right-central chest or inside the spine behind the heart
  3. Practice The Radiance or The Mist:
  4. Feel that your mystic heart…
  5. Radiates love, light and energy, or
  6. Generates a white mist flowing outward

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#4 THE MYSTIC BREATH
Your Window

Your breath is the key to the mystery of your life. The Mystic Breath is conscious use of this key.

Our individual natures will require different windows — different energy centers — from which to view the life force.

Allow the mystic breath to reveal your personal window.

  1. Stretch and then sit comfortably
  2. Take 5 to 7 deep breaths
  3. Focus on the center of your upper lip
  4. Witness the breath come and go
  5. Let your mind move to a natural center
  6. Watch your breath and the life force from this “window”

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#3 THE ASCENT
The Essence of Your Life

We begin meditation on the Infinite by focusing our awareness on Spirit, the life essence within us.

How can we do something so seemingly abstract? It’s easy. Spirit empowers your breath night and day.

Let the life force reveal itself to you. Sense the higher power which flows through you.

You’ll feel more alive.

  1. Stretch and relax your body
  2. Sit comfortably
  3. Take 5 to 7 deep breaths
  4. Focus on your nostril rims
  5. Witness the breath come and go
  6. Enjoy for 10 to 12 minutes
  7. Inhale deeply and stretch

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#0 THE MYSTIC SELF
Our True Nature

In the view of mystics, the major problem in life for most of us is ignorance of our true natures.

The Mysteries reveal many ways that you can actually contact your mystic self — and the Infinite Consciousness.

Do you, can you, contact your Mystic Self? Yes, indeed!

  1. Practice this anytime you like
  2. Probably your mind wanders quite often
  3. At times during the day, look at your mind and notice when it’s wandering
  4. Then, turn your attention to that part of your consciousness which observes that your mind is wandering
  5. That special overseeing awareness is part of your marvelous mystic self

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#1 MYSTIC AWAKENING
Benefits

Stimulate your mystical awakening.

When you wake up from a dream you realize you were only dreaming.

Consider too that this normal state of awareness in which you live may be a kind of sleep also.

As you do this technique you’ll find the world becomes more beautiful and enjoyable.

  1. Try this many times a day
  2. Whisper to yourself, “Wake up!”
  3. Mentally say, “Wake up!”
  4. Increase your attention, appreciation and feeling of love
  5. Just cheerfully exhort yourself
  6. Wake up!

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How to Succeed

As you may know, we do not charge for our courses. All Yoga World content is free and available to you with our blessings. However, we do have a simple, but important request that’s key to the transformations necessary to succeed on the path.

We ask you to commit two hours a week to selfless service. This service can be anything you choose ranging from helping a family member or neighbor to volunteering at a nonprofit organization.

I Commit to Serve

This commitment is solely between you and your inner self.

Why the Commitment?

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