Falling Within: Dissolving a Cloud’s Worth of Ego.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” ~ Socrates
As a child, I loved to climb trees. The taller the better. I found peace when the harsh challenges endured fell away to the ground far below. They lacked the ability to climb with me.
I once fell from the top of a giant old oak. In the air, time stopped. All fear, along with my too early developed past resentments and future anxieties, vanished. I was given a glimpse behind the scene of reality, and saw, in a flash, Reality. It awed me, stunned me with wonder. A moment of pure uniting with Source.
The experience temporarily dispelled ego, leaving spiritual residuals. But it didn’t take long for ego to reassert itself. In response to my desire to understand the experience and acquire more permanently that state of being, ego unfortunately concluded it could only be found through creating conditions for the extreme.
Thus I embraced the fall, becoming an adrenaline junkie. I’d jump off bridges, from cliff-sides, and out of perfectly good airplanes. It wasn’t so much the adrenaline I sought, my primary goal being the vanishing. But I did it for the wrong reasons and went about it the wrong way. I did it to escape the merry-go-round of my memories.
I sought escape from life by chasing only connections to infinity.
Overwhelming the mind with wonder turned all thinking off, leaving me in the space between thoughts where only truth resides. But I treated it like a drug. I lived from the outside inward.
Truth can’t be obtained externally in any meaningful way. Drugs, whatever their form, only serve to suppress ego temporarily, allowing our true nature to be experienced in a flash. But then its gone. It’s not the drug that’s addicting. It’s the peace and joy that surpasses understanding that is.
But then ego, with its insistence to hold on to painful memories and to play the victim, returns, leaving us with rapidly accumulating loss.
It wasn’t until I took the biggest jump of my life and fell further than most people will ever experience, causing the near total loss of the external world, that I realized lasting wonder, found by choosing a different way — by going within. It was the only choice I had left, having never really explored the inner world before. And so I jumped directly into the pain within me, and that’s when it revealed to me its gift.
Once skydiving, a small cloud floated beneath my feet. Chute already drawn, I targeted to fall directly through its middle. The sun was at my back. The moment my eyes passed into its cool embrace, I was suddenly transported into an enormous room of rainbows, the sun’s light exploding inside the cloud in a brilliance of color. I was in that moment for one-tenth of a second, but it felt like an hour.
The same thing happened when I chose to target my held-on-to pain. Falling into it, the light of consciousness revealed inside it beauty beyond description. I was overwhelmed with an infinite love that transmuted and integrated the pain into true nature, letting everything else go. Consequently, a cloud’s worth of ego was dissolved.
And the mirage of ego has been fading ever since, internal jump by jump, cloud by cloud. The tree of life is within.
Now I’m always in awe, an eternally grateful vessel of wonder’s wisdom, and it cost nothing. It only rewards with riches far more valuable than gold or money. I stand on the ground rooted, and I’ve never been higher. Stand with me. Seek wonder within. Live from the inside outward. The world could really use right now the light of life and love contained inside your pain.
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For 18 years, Brian Zater has been developing for and providing to federal prisoners’ rehabilitation and reentry preparation classes based on higher consciousness studies. Learning from his own struggles and personal growth, his work has done the difficult job of equipping broken men with the tools to put themselves back together again. Those who’ve since released from prison have all become contributing members of society, most now successful family-men and small business owners. A strong advocate for positive social change, he serves as a teacher, mentor and life coach, helping people from all walks of life break free from their personal chains of limitation, find their life’s purpose, and achieve their full potentials.
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