The Spiral Towards Life

Most of us have had a glimpse of what an addiction feels like. It starts with a nagging voice that you want to have a little happiness, or perhaps that you want to plaster over some pain with the help of a substance or an activity. You can spot this tendency in many little things: the unnecessary shopping trip that nevertheless makes you feel good about yourself, reading that next self-help book that will finally turn your life around, the power work-out that makes you feel alive, the urge to drown a stressful workweek with food, sex or alcohol. We all hear this nagging noise sometimes and feel the emptiness inside that we want to shut out. All that is perhaps just the price we pay for living a stressful life,  but unfortunately for some these little steps are just the beginning of a long road to nowhere.

For those who get ever more dependent on the mood booster and the pain killer, the road into nowhere becomes soon clear. Step by step, life is being shut out; an auto-pilot takes over until  little vitality is left. Hard as it is, it is always possible to turn this ship around. The further down the addict goes the road of destruction, the louder life screams to wake up. Chances are the addict has something holy to hang onto, the screaming children, the care and the pleas of the soul partner, or the help from a community of recovering addicts who have been done this road before.

If addiction is a road into nowhere, a spiritual path would be the opposite. Addiction is the spiral away from life, a spiritual path is a spiral towards life, towards love and into the arms of God. Just as everyone has experienced the whisper of a dark voice inside, everyone probably also had a glimpse of magic in the air. God is real and She can be experienced; as every novelist would tell you, there is divinity and magic in life. But you have to be 100 percent open to receive it. If you just live in your own world life indeed will look random to you.

How can you you experience this divine force - the Tao - all the time? If you look carefully you can observe that the Tao is always there. But unfortunately sometimes you are not. Instead you experience spirals, periods of extreme connectedness followed by periods of emptiness and dread.These spirals that you experience are caused by your pain body and the fluctuating energy of your environment. Sometimes the voice in your head screams so loudly that it drowns out everything; sometimes something in your environment activates a painful memory and you shut down in response.

The universe works in spirals, you can even see star formations and galaxies arranged that way. A spiral is a convenient way of bringing you towards God just because you have to live out previous life-patterns and the Source will make sure that you only get exposed to as much as you can handle psychologically. With every iteration you will face some stress, some tears, some pain, but also experience plenty of joy, love and laughter along the way.

Think of yourself as the ancient voice that is finally returning home. You have experienced it all, you have been the sinner and the saint, the lover and the villain, the addict and the sacrificing mother. Let this all pass now, you are ready to go Home. You actually don't really need to do anything. Just look for the magic in the air, recognize the love for your foe without wishing for it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Experience the pain of dealing with the monsters of the past and see it disappear in front of your astonished eyes. Let the Tao show you how to say yes to life. It can look scary at times, but after a few steps towards it, it is easy to make a habit out of it. The divine spiral will lead you safely home.