Chuck’s blog is ready today so we are publishing it ahead of schedule. Jan’s blog will appear later in the week.

If we are in this world we are in it for a physical reason. There may be other reasons, but we cannot escape the primary truth that we are physical beings that require sustenance and attachment to the world around us to survive and grow. Failures in attachment at the most basic level can be fatal in what’s called “Failure To Thrive” Syndrome (FTT).

Though most humans pass through the first challenge of survival, the subsequent journey to adulthood is fraught with significant challenges as the molding of a solid physical and emotional self is prepared in order to enter and thrive in the unfolding challenges of independence and adulthood. In fact, much of the first half of life is spent trying to successfully navigate adult challenges with a fragile foundation of security.

Regardless of whether our foundations were secure and loving or filled with abuse and neglect, we are all confronted, by midlife, with the growing awareness of the universal equalizer: death. And with that awareness we are confronted with the meaning of life, the meaning of being born into a physical world. Why am I here?

And when we take up the Grail of that question we begin our spiritual journey, our inward journey. We turn, as Jeanne’s message on Monday suggests: Within. Jeanne speaks of building a relationship with the higher self within. This requires that we draw in our mental activity that has appropriately attached to the sensate world for many years. Regardless of success or failure in that physical world, it is time to turn inward and take up the next challenge of why: why am I here? It is time to open to the resources latent within that have waited all these years for attention so that we may be guided to fulfillment and illumination.

To persist in spending energy on the physical world for answers, at this stage, results in confusion and loss of purpose. The Bhagavad-Gita states:

Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.

The inner journey begins with a full recapitulation of the journey thus far taken. We must first settle with the truth of what has happened in this life. The inner higher self will sprinkle plenty of guidance along the path—calm and illuminating moments—as you take that inner journey, guiding and supporting you with dreams, visions, synchronicities, channelings, etc.

The completion of our lives in this physical realm is likely to require that we indeed reengage our extroverted focus, our sensual life, as beings in this world. However, return to that world after recapitulation is no longer a journey of craving but one of loving completion, the completion of the journey within without.

Journeying within and without,
Chuck

Note: Quote from the Bhagavad-Gita by Swami Prabhavananda; page 49; copyright 1944.