The Transcendental: The Church Project

The Dropout

February 11, 2024

Do you want to be a spiritual teacher or do you want to develop spirituality? This one's for you.

So, I started the day making coffee and washing the dishes while listening to a Tao Te Ching audiobook. Tao Te Ching is a book that appears to have this ever changing landscape to me. It doesn't matter if I've finished listening to the audiobook or I have listened to parts of it a number of times already, I feel like I get something different every time. And anyway, developing spirituality is similar, it's finding something different, something you didn't see before, and I think that's what they mean by 'seeing deeper truths'.

Anyway, I was listening to it and this verse had me finding something different. It goes: The master stays behind, that is why she is ahead. And in the same verse was also mention of detachment.

There's a lot of mentions of detachment in the spiritual community, and there's focus on desire and how detachment is achieved by way of elimination of desire. But what I found is that you don't actually try and achieve detachment by conscious elimination, it is something that the person meets along the path of what the master referred to as 'darkness' which is the source of all things. And developing spirituality is actually devoting yourself to the search or study of transcendence, I think, because people find the concept of 'darkness' frightening that when they are confronted by it, what they see is a dead end, and so it's not unusual to hear someone on the spiritual journey say it's not worth it - developing spirituality is not worth it, it just drains or sucks the light - but it does, you know. It does do that. It propels you to darkness. The transition would be from light to dark, from the known to the unknown. And transcendence is key, to go beyond is how you proceed. What actually happens to people when they say it's not worth it is they're stuck in the darkness, they don't find the door to the beyond. But it is actually in this darkness where the detachment begins, and the person kind of desperately holds on to what he knows because he fears the emptying of the mind that happens in the darkness. But this emptying is necessary to make room for what they call transcendental truths. And this emptying could look like the rug being pulled from under your feet. So, that's actually frightening. People kind of miss the part where when the rug is pulled from under their feet, that actually reveals things they've swept under - which is a spiritual mine, it is from these things where you're actually gonna develop that spirituality, from your fears. And that's why it's called shadow work, because your fears are actually shadow aspects of yourself that you need to work on. There would be a lot of transmuting work to do here. And you're gonna begin with the fear and transmute it to strength. This is where you transmute insecurity to security, this is where you empty the cup of things you were told or had been conditioned to believe and so you can get the 'epiphany', the clarity or what is called in the spiritual community 'enlightenment'. But first, you have to overcome your fear of this darkness, of this feeling of emptiness or being without. Another way I see why people kind of get stuck is instead of overcoming this fear of the darkness, they embrace the darkness and the empty, and actually, that's not what they're supposed to do there. Because they'd only end up embracing their shadow aspect instead of doing shadow work. It's like embracing the wrong and the broken instead of working on and fixing it. So, what people call detachment when they get stuck in the darkness this way, it's gonna feel like being dead, walking dead. Like they were petrified after the rug had been pulled from under their feet.

And that's kind of where the spiritual teacher steps in. You would find the spiritual teacher where people find themselves stuck and can't find the door. To be fair, the door is not readily or blatantly visible. And it's kind of like being stuck in a horror house.

Spiritual teachers have been in the horror house. And after finding the door and going beyond, transcending, these people return to the horror house and this time, it is to study spiritual teaching. This horror house becomes their academy. They go back and like the average student would be exploring and while in there, they get these homeworks and tests also which involves a lot of shadow work or transmutation thing to find the door. So again and again, they would be finding the door. And maybe somebody would be like: Who fucking does that? You already found the door to the beyond, then you stay there. Well, people who want to be spiritual teachers or further develop their spirituality do that. How they guide people to the door or 'the way' is finding the door and sort of creating this map. People who wanna be spiritual teachers study the horror house maze, kind of like going: Okay, this is the toilet, and from here, you gotta walk to here and then blah and then there's the door. But instead of toilets, you would get concepts that would then provide perspectives.

Spiritual teachers - Have you heard the song 'I Alone' by Live? It's a song about spiritual teachers. Another one would be 'Turn My Head'. In 'I Alone', there's this line that goes: The greatest of teachers won't hesitate to leave you there by yourself, chained to fate.' Spiritual teachers would have you experience a range of negative emotions - they will upset you, annoy you. It's not unusual for you to hear people just expressing these emotions when talking about spiritual teachers. Why is this? Spiritual teachers have these views that challenge the existing and prevalent, the status quo. And you don't shake the status quo and expect people from the tower to be happy - for reference, see The Tower card - because people will struggle to get back their comfort and footing. Some people, they like to cling or hold on to what they know, and because that's how they feel that they're in control. But then you have spiritual teachers doing this and it's what they do, they get you questioning what you know. They propel you to the darkness or to the horror house. That's why.

Why do that? It's to encourage growth. It's for alignment. It's to provide the opportunity to correct and fix things. It's to provide the opportunity to gain more stability.

Spiritual teachers are society dropouts. Like hermits. Monks. Shamans. Race dropouts. You just won't find them in any sort of competition with others. They appear to be these people with weakened ambitions and desires. Why is that? Do they hate people? Who drops out of the race? Who does that? Spiritual teachers do that. And that is the picture of detachment, the detachment that the spiritual community is talking about.

Why is that? Like I said, spiritual teachers create maps. But you have to understand that once the student who wants to be a spiritual teacher finds the door, everytime he finds that door, he drops out from something, he detaches from something - he graduates from something. And graduating means he can't not know what he already knows. That's the thing with knowledge, you find, you keep. Now, just think of that student finding that door over and over, all that accumulation of knowledge. The student grows into the observer. He sees the happenings in the horror house like he's in this room watching. But before that, you could be certain that he was in the horror house and his teacher is in that room watching. The spiritual teacher can't be in the race anymore. It's just like being there and having done that. Whereas he used to do things a certain way, you can't get him to do it that way again. You don't find the way and lose your way. You find the door and go beyond, you already know where the door is. But you can be certain that the teacher was in the race a long time, he lost his way a number of times. But this is kind of your elder and you go to him for guidance, but that is when you are actually interested in developing your spirituality, in transcendence. Otherwise, you would cross paths with a spiritual teacher and you would just ask: Why? Don't you want this, don't you want that? Just why? And the reason for that would be because you don't need a spiritual teacher yet. You don't even know about the door. You've never heard of the door. You've probably heard of enlightenment, but it doesn't interest you at all.

So, um detachment is actually kind of this state where the spiritual teacher's view expands and he becomes the observer, it's what they're calling 'a higher state of consciousness', and he is to be found sitting in that room where he appears separate but is not, really, from things. Students of spirituality, you know, those who want to become spiritual teachers struggle with this in that some fear that this expansion would result in this isolation, but eventually, they will find that the expansion is really just getting the alignment they actually want, it's getting that quality of life, that peace and harmony that transcendence brings. It's just a journey to wellness. And spiritual teaching is just showing people how to get well, how to get there. Transcendence feels like sitting in a room having a cup of tea and you have this zen garden or you could just feel the radiance of the sun and it's just freedom and zen. Transcendence gives you the zen life. And spiritual teachers, they're sought for guidance to the zen life.

Developing spirituality is for people who want zen. But people who see spiritual people and ask: Why? they don't like zen but that's because they don't know zen yet. But you see a monk with that smile that radiates peace, that's zen. That's transcendence.