Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of January 17, 2005


A New Floor

Both life and the spiritual path put us on a roller coaster of inner states, limited to a range that characterizes our level of being. Sometimes we rise to our personal heights, our ceiling, consisting of, for example, certain degrees of presence in joy, love, kindness, generosity, responsibility, excellence, and so on. At other times we fall to our personal lows, our floor, consisting of, for example, certain degrees of reactive emotions like anger, greed, jealousy, fear, and self-pity, our own menagerie of destructive habits, inappropriate or unethical acts, and our favorite flavors of self-centeredness. Usually, though, we live in a kind of muddle in the region between our two extremes, between our individual floor and ceiling.

A change in our level of being, a permanent transformation, promises to raise both our floor and our ceiling. If our being were to change, we would no longer fall into the same old problematic patterns and we would occasionally rise to new, unexpected heights. These great milestones in our personal journey result from the whole array of inner work and outer actions we bring to bear on our life. We work to raise our ceiling through the quality of our meditation and prayer. In the middle region, we work to increase the frequency, duration, and quality of our presence, as well as the quality of our interaction with the world.

But working to raise our floor is crucial to transforming being. This is where our energy and our will drain away, wasted. This is where we disappear, having surrendered to the impulses of an upside-down existence. We need to learn to not identify with all those things and events that drag us down into our lower states, to not follow the siren song of anger, greed, jealousy, fear, self-pity, gluttony, pride, lust, destructive habits and the rest. If we can raise ourselves out of this muck, so that we no longer fall into it so completely, then we will have raised the floor of the inner states we live in, and our being will have changed. This is not the end of the spiritual path, but it is a major step toward that end. Without the baggage of identification, we can travel much more lightly and quickly.

Through the steady work of non-clinging, letting go, plank by plank we build a new floor under ourselves, so that we live with greater ease and no longer drop as low as we once did. This enables us to conserve our energy for raising our ceiling.

For this week, look at your own floor and see what you can do, specifically, to begin to raise it.

 


     

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