The Desert Phase – Burnout

 

 

If and when the True Self fades, thereby becoming false because it can no longer make true (i.e. real), the desert phase – i.e. burnout - begins. If burnout happens quickly it is experienced as a very hot hell. If it happens slowly it is experienced as though proceeding or being stuck - or weighed down - in a hot, arid and windy desert (or wasteland). Desert phases (usually experienced as depressions) are the unpleasant side effects of reorientation, indeed of self-adjustment.

Since a pilgrimage to a True Self, that is to say, to a particular self-as-goal, is a dynamic process, and since the Self when made true/real also becomes dynamic, desert phases are inevitable. Hence the experienced pilgrim will anticipate such phases and install Health and Safety devices that guide and protect her through those phases.

 

The heat of the desert derives from the energy freed when identity bits (and which bind energy) are involuntarily cut off, in the process (of fissioning) releasing the energy stored in those identity bits. If the identity bits are cut off voluntarily, that is to say, when leaving home voluntarily, then the released energy is experienced either as enlightenment (or reduced weight/drag) or as the various intensities of joy. If the released energy is reinvested in the goal of a new True Self it is experienced as a blissful coolness (and/or as a spring in the step).

 

During the desert phase, the pilgrim’s self is involuntarily downsized, thus returning her to her core (i.e. truth) ‘business’. If she downsizes involuntarily (like Moses, or deliberately like the Buddha, Jesus and all the others who decided that a period (i.e. 40 days) in the desert was an expedient means) to almost nil (hence ‘giving up’ her identity, the latter often being interpreted as the ego), and which is the initial goal of the true mystic (or absolute Truth function seeker, or the seeker of the Absolute prior to identity), then she recovers the basic drive to unit of identity status (i.e. the Yahweh experience). 

 

The desert phase is part of the Inner Pilgrimage. If and when the pilgrim accepts or invents (i.e. sees on the horizon) the image/goal of a new self then the desert phase begins to end. If a new self-to-be-made-true does not appear then the pilgrim remains in the desert, and which gradually turns icy cold, and dies or, more commonly, is eaten.

 

Seeing the new True Self is fundamentally the beginning of the Outer Pilgrimage - for the image derives, must derive, from the everyday world (i.e. from a relative world - as with the religious, from the general world - as with the common folk) and where it must eventually be reality tested and made real/true. Because focusing on (a received or created) new self is an Outer Pilgrimage (sometimes displaced inside) step, therefore resulting from real contact in the real world, it provides (i.e. empowers) the pilgrim with a fusion energy surge. That energy surge can be either experienced either as happiness or as a cool bliss/contentment when invested in making her new self a reality.

 

Ending the inner pilgrimage, that is to say, by achieving True Self potential, or going on an Outer Pilgrimage (to wit, any activity in the real, everyday world), thereby making real contact stops the given self as a whole unit that acts as true, ends the desert phase.