Spiritual enlightenment is not about getting high.
It's not about leaving and how often you leave.
It's about coming back.
- Krishna Das

I HAD THE PLEASURE of meeting musician Krishna Das at one of his concerts - a delightful soul who lives his earthly mission with humor and grace. What he said that evening about leaving and coming back was the exact right message for me at the exact right time, as I had been experiencing many peak states that year. Like a moth to a flame, I was becoming seduced by the intensity of the light - to the possible exclusion of other things.

And so we reach the final step in our process: Integration.

As it turns out, being out of your mind is a glorious place to be. There is great peace, harmony and sweetness in this outer space (beyond the mind). It's magical to live in a world where all things, no matter how trivial, have meaning, and the universe seems to be scheming on my behalf, only for me. Its intelligent design mesmerizes and incites me. I float on Cloud 10, sublimely contented. Come down? Don't think so.

Yet as KD said, the true splendor of consciousness expansion is not in getting hooked on these peaks but in bringing the brilliance of higher realms into everyday life. This is the second coming of Christ that revered yogi Paramahansa Yogananda spoke about in his teachings. He wasn't referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth but rather our reward for purifying and expanding our inner being through meditation, to prepare the way for an inflow of Christ consciousness. "The real second coming of Christ," he said, "will take place right in the devotee's own consciousness." In other words, heaven-on-earth is us, baby.

Yes, it's tricky to integrate this without being overcome by it at times. I'm reminded of a scene in American Beauty (Best Picture of 2000). The introspective voyeur teen-ager, Ricky Fitts, is transfixed by an image he caught on video: an ordinary plastic bag dancing on the wind in a parking lot. "It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air," Ricky emotes to his girlfriend, Jane. "You can almost hear it, right? This bag was, like, dancing with me. That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things. Sometimes, I see so much beauty in the world, I can barely stand it."

Bliss states bring with them a poignant sense of joy, of being in love with everyone, everything (plastic bags included) and with life. We Intend, Practice, Pay Attention and Witness divine perfection all around. Everything oozes beauty and sanctity, even the seemingly mundane, ugly or obscene. Childlike delight seeps from our pores and we randomly gush at flowers, kitties, trash cans, the sidewalk, this sign, that symbol, these words being spoken by those people. It all converges and spreads like a delectable soup into and through every crack and seam of our existence. How else can I describe the ecstasy of it? Feel with your heart these words from the 16th century Indian poet-saint Mirabai:

One sip from the cup of that sweetness,
The world starts to spin.
Now I'm a drunk for life. Unsoberable.
Tell them it's useless to try.

To speak frankly, I've had moments when the rapture gave me pause, caused me to consider renouncing everything in my life in utter surrender, become a devotee of sorts, or get on with ascension to the nth-degree - leaving entirely. In those moments, I've wondered, "How can I return to the people and things that constitute my 'normal' life?" I've questioned, is this real? Or am I like an actor immersed so voraciously in a role so she can BE that character and play her well? (It's the existential quandary I refer to in the Introduction - which reality is really real?) When I'm on fire with a yearning for meta-phenomenal experiences, a desire to go deep, I want to live in that intensity, that deepness. I want to run towards God with my whole life. It's a quest that can never be sated because there is always more to investigate, more to master.

Even in such moments, however, I've always known it wasn't my course to take. I realized that, like most of us, I have to be amphibious - able to breathe in the vast ocean of emotional waves of divine love but also stay grounded and "live on land." And so, after fervid periods (a week or less) of spiritual work, I go back to my regularly scheduled programming: family, housekeeping, writing. Early on, the energy work was so transformational that returning to ordinary life was like the Microsoft Word prompt that you get when attempting to overwrite a file: "Normal already exists, do you want to create a new normal?"

My re-entries have gradually become more seamless but it hasn't always been pleasant returning to the denser energies of the 3-D world. Part of that return is the inevitability that we'll be faced with the next round of lessons necessary to our growth - unless, of course, we decide to stop the bullet train and get off for a while. I actually said to a friend after a recent crazy ride of challenges that hit one after the other, "I could use a little mediocrity right now, a little status quo." Then I reminded myself of a few truths: I intended this ride, I invented this train, I've set the destination and, come what may, I'm the conductor on this trip. So after a few days of idling, it was back to here we grow again.

Dr. Hawkins has an interesting term for why facing the initial set of challenges of our next higher level is no picnic. He calls it "being above your karma" and explained it to me this way: "When you're above your karma - meaning, when you've successfully resolved or reframed the events that have happened in your prior life up to that moment - you're feeling beatific until the next thing comes up; then you feel like you've crashed. Well, you haven't really crashed, it's just that you're not above your karma anymore. You've brought up the next layer to be worked on. It actually means you're making progress, that's why it's coming up.

"When you're working on deep issues and feeling the pain of them, you're far from blissful," he continued. "You have definitely moved ahead, although psychologically and emotionally you're not feeling high. You're still better than before when you were in denial. So you come out of denial, you go through the pain of facing what you're facing and work out the guilt about it, the self-recrimination, and forgive yourself, then life gets beautiful again until the next thing comes up. This is characteristic of the entire spiritual pathway."

So, given the choice (which we all have) between coasting and accelerated personal growth, I will probably always ask God to bring it on - because even when the going gets really tough, the only way out is through.

Once a Facet, Now the Diamond
We are in human bodies on Planet Earth and, as such, our imperative is to assimilate into our material-world existence the spiritual wisdom we acquire within a lifetime. As Hawkins says, every time we crash through an old paradigm and break the mold of our former, smaller selves, we eventually adjust to the next higher plane of vibration and reshape ourselves into that new way of being - until the next level of attainable proficiency, our next mountain, becomes apparent on the horizon. This is what being spiritual means - not seeing the Divine as just one facet of life, but realizing that it is the entire diamond, the vibrant foundation that gives all aspects of our existence greater sparkle. SFF Dan calls this spiritual marbling, the sacred richness that ripples through everything, giving life its juice and complex flavor.

A successful businesswoman once expressed to me: "I fear that I have to give up my family and walk away from my career in order to embrace spirituality." Not! Spirituality isn't something to be compartmentalized, something we pull out of a box when we meditate or retrieve from a shelf whenever we have a crisis. We don't give up a certain lifestyle in order to gain a spiritual lifestyle; it's a matter of keeping our ordinary life and making it extraordinary by spiritualizing everything in it.

If we're working long-term on expanding our consciousness and our creative potential, then integration becomes a necessity - at least if we're going to be of any real use to the world. I mentioned in an earlier chapter about a shaman gifting me with a rare Night Whitehawk feather - a symbol of those who work in other realms. I didn't know before that evening event that we were going to construct a medicine wheel, and that everyone was to bring an offering to place on it. Luckily, in my sweater pocket, I rediscovered a piece of tree bark that a friend had brought back for me from a national forest in Oregon. So I made this my offering to the medicine wheel. After receiving the feather, the "reason" for the bark made sense. The Night Whitehawk - a true light in the dark - soars to other realms, transmitting spirit messages beyond the stratosphere; but in between flights, it safely returns to the tree and perches on the bark. The tree is deep rooted, secure, intransient. And so the medicine wheel's personal message for me was this: both soaring and landing are essential. I've seen what happens to those who fly but don't come to ground - especially individuals who work in the healing arts. They crash and burn eventually because they're not able to integrate ego-soul, human-spiritual, light-dark, vertical-horizontal.

Our Work in the World
Here's my definition of inspired higher creativity: it's the outward expression of our internal beauty, revealed through our chosen endeavors. Of course we can decide to create something with an eye on the external (perhaps mimicking others' inventions) and whip up some pretty good stuff, but all work that is truly inspired emanates from a pure, clear connection to two things: the deepest truth that your soul yearns to express and the highest devotion to rebirthing Creation through your Self. That is what the seven concepts in this book lead us towards - shining forth our truest nature in some form that is practical and useful in the world.

"Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world" - another of my favorite lines from David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea. "This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's." At a Vermont writers retreat a few years ago, I listened as David spoke movingly about the importance of having "the courageous interior conversation" with ourselves - and how if we don't, everything else is leaden in our hands. "The courageous conversation is the one in which you don't know who you'd be if you had it," he articulated. "The great thing about conversation is you don't know what it will be. Just begin. If you can stop telling yourself all the things you say that dominate your psyche, you'll actually be in the proper conversation."

For me, the proper conversation is the one in which I'm able to uncloak some as-of-yet unspoken truth - something about this human life or myself that has mystified even me - and offer it to up as a prayer. Every time I've been brave enough to do this, I've received a gift in return: creative inspiration of the highest measure. When we say that certain artists, athletes or CEOs are gifted, who is doing the gifting? Some of us may have more natural ability than others but we are all born through and with a creative spark. We all have something to express, or a pull towards something that wants to be expressed. Sure, we may not know what it is or what shape it will take in the material world. That's no problem, really. Just begin. Along the way, you will find that the soul recognizes it, intuition captures it, the heart feels it, the mind shapes it and hands birth it. We keep the conversation alive among all these aspects - we integrate ourselves. And we, as creator, become one with Creator.

CONTEMPLATION

Live in the Pre-O
Don't wait for the Big O, the crescendo, the ephemeral brass ring of future success, wealth, personal achievement or self-improvement. Opt right now to live in the pre-O, the splendor of becoming, where anything is possible in this moment. Savor the fullness of your emerging potential, instead of the lack of what hasn't yet come to fruition in your life. Integration isn't about waiting for the climactic highs. It's about the heart being perpetually aroused. The way to achieve this is by allowing the ordinary to open you over and over again, as if you're a rose that can't stop blooming. Take this idea into your daily meditations.

So... Be It
Integration occurs when we decide to be the change that we want to see in the world, our relationships, our work, our own home. How to do this? Ignite your passions, burn down any resistances to them, be a flame of dynamic light, warmth and quiet, humble strength wherever you go - and stay ablaze regardless of what happens to you. Integration is not about avoiding our feelings and emotions, but being conscious of how we react to them no matter what the outer circumstances. So feel whatever issues arise in as non-personal a way as possible, and help those around you to do the same. Be the change.

Here ends our serialization of Gina's book,
Everything Matters, Nothing Matters.

Readers, please note that each excerpt - taken from a chapter of the book - has been heavily trimmed to fit the PlanetLightworker format. There is MUCH more to be reaped from Gina's book, and we encourage you to peruse the full length print version.

Click on the cover thumbnail below to purchase this book at Amazon.com.

© Gina Mazza Hillier, 2008

Excerpted with permission from Everything Matters, Nothing Matters: For Women Who Dare to Live with Exquisite Calm, Euphoric Creativity and Divine Clarity (St. Lynn's Press, April 2008, ISBN: 978-0-9767631-8-5, $17.95) is available at bookstores nationwide and major online booksellers. Visit www.EverythingmattersNothingmatters.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gina Mazza Hillier is nationally published freelance journalist, editor, writing consultant, dance enthusiast and advocate of living with creative abandon and full-frontal consciousness. She is known for being a source of inspiration - or, a muse - to others in their writing and in their spiritual-personal development. Gina is a partner and founder of Epiphany Works, LLC, an "inspired events" planning company that creates public entertainment and forums of inquiry to celebrate and integrate world cultures and spiritual traditions.

In addition to Everything Matters, Nothing Matters, she is the co-author of Romancing with Future (Findhorn Press, 2008) and The Highest and The Best (Xlibris, 2000). Gina can be reached at inspire@zoominternet.net. For more information, visit www.Ginawriter.com, www.epiphanyworks.org or http://museyoucanuse-gina.blogspot.com.