A Clean Conscience

When you come home each day from a hard day of work or study, why do you think you are mentally so exhausted? Perhaps it is not the hard work per se but the way how you have spent your psychic energy; torn by your conflicting desires, your fears, your ambitions and worries. I have a hunch that a spiritual path traveler has an advantage over the ordinary folks in this direction since the further down the road you travel, the less you have to decide and even to do. Over and over you decide for love, for compassion and against your own personal agenda until at one point your subconscious gets it and with every 'automatic' choice your psychic energy is no longer being drained. You also trust that whatever the Tao throws your way is important and meaningful in its own way, so sooner or later the worries and fears start disappearing. "Be ye as little children" says the bible. Yes, children are tired when they go to bed, but their psychic energies haven't been drained. That is why you only see adults with alcohol in front of the television or the Internet; the zombie state happens when your psychic energy is gone.

There are interesting psychological experiments that state that simply thinking about stabbing a coworker in the back leaves people more inclined to buy soap, disinfectant or detergent. The point is that your system absorbs every mental conflict and anguish. If you want to have access to 100 % of your psychic energy, you need to have a perfectly clean conscience. Spiritual path travelers who manage to become as little children have a shot at that. Gary Lachman presented a weird hypothesis about our ancestors in "A Secret History of Consciousness", what, he asks, if they always heard a voice in their head telling them what to do. There can be no conflict of interest if you always have a straight line to your personal God. While I have little to say about that theory, but it did strike me when I read his book that the Tao traveler intuitively ends up in a similar state. You just follow clues, sooner or later all choices along your path are just obvious. With a clean conscious you can lighten up on cleaning products, alcohol and media. Perhaps you have even the energy to play with your children tonight.