The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation--Part 2 Introduction

The experience of spiritual awakening represents a quantum leap in consciousness. Part I of Lambsprinck's process alludes to a "tuning up" of the personality, making it more effective in the world. Psychologically, it is an exploration of the depths leading to increased self-acceptance. Now the seeker gains access to the heights.

Prior to spiritual awakening, you spent a lot of your existence "holding back". At first it seemed like holding back the pain of your own personal traumas and tragedies. Then the focus shifted to the emerging subconscious whose downward pull definitely provokes defensiveness. From this point on, you are strenuously holding back your enlightenment. Every itch and ache during meditation helps to protect your ego. When both of these levels are processing or clearing, awareness of an emerging spiritual reality begins to build within you. Seeking release, you begin on the spiritual path.

Your life is a process of Self-Realization. Your consciousness is rising to a new level. You are maturing away from rationalization, fear, resistance, escape, commitment-phobia, ego-death paranoia, profaning the sacred. Your movement is toward creativity, joy, contentment, transcendence, insight, harmony, beauty, compassion, bliss and Higher Power.

This is the realm of the subtle or causal body, sometimes referred to as the Body of Light. For mystics, the goal is union with the Higher Power, and meditation is the method of choice. Through meditation, you climb to the summit of your own consciousness, and there you find God. The spiritual mandate of human evolution is unity. This evolutionary process initiates transformation through symbols, and imagery.

This evokes a responsive series of refinements which move consciousness to ever-higher levels. You find your awareness transcends your personal self, and enters the realm of the transpersonal. Your values widen into the ethical, aesthetic, heroic, humanitarian, altruistic, and creative. You learn to live your mythology consciously. You are becoming transparent to transcendence, and experience what it means to suspend time, space, and your personal identity.

Through following your spiritual path, you come to awareness of the Whole and holy nature of reality. Joseph Campbell called it learning to see yourself "depersonalized in the mirror of the human spirit." By practicing seeing through the eyes of the collective human spirit, you develop a radically different perspective on life. This eye of the human spirit, the Third Eye of the mystic east, is the transpersonal self. The seeker of the awakening becomes the seer.

The seer views the transcendent self and is seen by it. Over time the seer identifies with the Self, and I-Thou polarity dissolves. From the holistic perspective you embrace higher values, realize your inherent divinity, and enlarge your potentials. The boundary between the seer and the seen collapses into cosmic consciousness. The seer becomes a Sage.