The Houdini Drive
The Atman has been empirically discovered to be subject to what Atmanologists have come to call the Houdini Drive. Houdini was a famous performer who was driven to create more and more extreme situations—situations of impossible difficulty—in which he was constrained, for example, by ropes, handcuffs, straitjackets, inside locked trunks, thrown into ice-cold water and in danger of drowning, with only seconds to escape before the onset of fatality. His challenge to imminent death kept his audiences on the edge of their seats. They were thrilled and amazed when he succeeded in appearing, unexpectedly, outside the trunk, free of all constraints, and triumphant against all odds.
This same trick, based on the same drive, describes the performance of the Atman. The Atman creates an ego and places it in a situation of impossible constraints, including the constraint of ignorance, and forces itself to cope with unbearable suffering of every sort. Egos also love to play two-handed versions of this game. Politicians sometimes call it brinksmanship. In fact, they are willing to go over the brink, initiating wars. Teenage drivers call it ‘playing chicken’. At the collective level, the human ego-system even faces itself with imminent death on a planetary scale. It creates conditions of utter hopelessness and despair—only to miraculously find the way out, at the last moment, and emerge victorious over all obstacles. But can we do it this time? We are in suspense. It can only happen if the trunk we are trapped in becomes a magic cocoon, in which our ego dies and our immortal spirit reveals itself in all its power.
This scenario of heroic triumph, in fact, is the basic story line of most adventure tales, mythologies, and Hollywood films. It is the fundamental human compulsion. The final frontier of the hero’s challenge has now been reached. It is incumbent upon us all to achieve the supreme liberation, not just of the ego from its immediate circumstances, but the Atman must free itself from both the ego and the apparent constraints of the phenomenal world, through a return to Brahman, the Absolute; and once having regained its status as co-creator of the universe, to bring about a renaissance of both Nature and the divine human spirit on this planet. And we have just minutes to go (or at any rate, just a few years) before we all die. This do-or-die situation should have us on the edge of our seats—or would, if we were only the audience of this performance, and not participants; but the fact that we are the ones in this life-or-death situation is too much for most of us to cope with, so we go into denial and boredom, or employ other defense mechanisms to “escape” from our reality, instead of truly escaping from our “reality”. But those of us who recognize that we are in Houdini’s position are working full-tilt to escape from our bondages before the chance is lost.
To achieve success in this ultimate escapade, we must simply follow Houdini’s formula. It requires seven steps. First, we must accept our situation with joy. Do not consider yourself a victim. We must assume responsibility: We agreed to be born, we put ourselves in this position, to create the ultimate challenge. Now we must work our way out of it. We must focus all our physical and psychic energies one-pointedly on gaining liberation. This is the part of Sat Yoga that is called Raja Yoga.
Second, we must be able to dream our way out, to imagine ourselves as liberated, divine beings, and to receive and understand the messages in our nightly dreams that offer maps of the labyrinth we are trapped in, and methods of releasing ourselves from our attachments. We must pay attention to our higher intelligence. This is called Swapna Yoga.
Third, we must overcome the initial obstacle: the ropes. We cannot cut them or untie them by force. We must slip out of the ropes. To do that, we have to stop pushing against them or struggling with them. Instead, we must make ourselves a little smaller. We must become humble and not press against the other with aggression, but retreat into ourselves to allow the outer constraints to slide off effortlessly. When we serve our spiritual community egolessly, unconcerned with outcomes or with recognition, mindfully, in witness-consciousness, without resistance when faced with egoism from without, we free ourselves from the ropes of narcissism. This is the way of Karma Yoga.
Fourth, we must get out of the handcuffs. These correspond to chakra two, the urge to use the hands to touch, caress, and possess the body of the other. If this arises from a psychological state of neediness, desperation, lust for penetration or envelopment of the other as an “escape” from isolation as a separate being, this will fail as a way out of the trap. Sexual desire is a mirage, a projection of union or empowerment that leads only to the disappointment of an unfulfilled fantasy. By withdrawing that psychic investment, we shrink the hands of desire so that they can slip out of the cuffs. This can only be done on the basis of the higher knowledge that we are beings of light, rather than material objects, physical animals. This is Gyana Yoga.
Fifth, this enables us to turn our attention toward the divine light within, to contemplate our luminous Being, to be filled with power as we attain unification with the radiance. The light shines through the fabric of any straitjacket and escapes. This is Kundalini Yoga.
Sixth, we must fully face the difficulty of escaping the gravity of chakra one, the equivalent of the trunk, now filled with water and sinking fast beneath the freezing waves of a dying Kali Yuga. When the Atman’s Houdini Drive first enters into the realm of the ego, it splits into two separate forces, referred to as the upper and lower death drives. The upper death drive is the urge to know the Truth, which requires the transcendence of the illusory ego. It is the force that sends people on the spiritual journey, even when their lives are apparently comfortable at the economic level of reality. But the upper death drive is most often eclipsed by the lower death drive.
The lower death drive is the urge toward excess, especially in the activation of one or more of the lower three chakras. It leads to entanglement in ideologies of hatred and righteous anger; and/or of sexual compulsivity, at the levels of thought, speech, and action; and/or enmeshment in one’s family system, and/or in other co-dependent relationships, and/or in alcohol, drugs, or other wasteful activities or toxic stimuli.
We must recognize the downward pull of the lower death drive, the ego’s urge to lose itself, to obliterate its existential transformational imperative by going unconscious, becoming merely ordinary, following the herd of lemmings, forgetting the Atman altogether. We must go consciously into this final fortress of tamasic energy and rouse the fragments of the lethargic beast, the infantile ego, for its last lurch into Bethlehem to be reborn. The buddhi, or higher intellect, must cast a spell upon its own egoic elements and bring them to new life as self-luminous forms of emptiness. We do this through talking to our inner objects, the egoic and superegoic fragments, and retrieving them from the mists of inner time, the phantasy matrices that keep past situations alive in the depths of the soul, creating longings for lost lovers, psychic “nots” that are somatized as “knots” of pain. We use mantras to remember what we are beyond the plane of memory and desire. We speak truth to the figures of consciousness within and to those without. We speak from the Ground of Being. This is Mahavakya Yoga.
Seventh, we must carry the information, the wisdom, which we have gained through all this inner work, back up to the point of cosmic origin. We must attain the zero point of chakra seven, the singularity of pure potentiality. This is the Quantum Self, the Atmic photon prior to observation that reduces it to an ego, no longer a particle, in fact, but now a virtual presence, a probability wave in superposition. In other words, one is no longer in the trunk, but potentially either in or outside of the trunk; in fact, one is in both places, or nowhere, depending on one’s free will. So simply through activating one’s highest intention, liberation is achieved instantly, faster than the speed of light. The Houdini Atman does it again! This is Sat Yoga.
And in fact the trunk itself will return to its original nature as quantum waveform. No one was ever really trapped, the ego was always only an illusion, and Sat Yuga will effortlessly manifest where Kali Yuga seemed to be. It has all been a trick, God’s lila, or cosmic play, the realm of illusion, or Maya. This is the ancient teaching of Yogi sages since the beginning of history, and now the grand finale of the act is happening on the stage of time. The collective Houdini Drive is coming to a climax.
If you are still in the box, falsely identified as an ego, a physical human being, rather than pure divine presence, then, at least you must keep your faith in Houdini, the Atman within you. It will soon enough reveal itself to be You! Learn the laws of enlightenment, the biophysics of Sat Yoga. Then you, too, can enjoy the delights of superposition, of surfing the cosmic quantum wave—and converting this wondrous wave of bliss into the next kingdom of heaven on earth. It is all a matter of simple physics. Physics works out the dynamics of what precipitates out of Primal Being, or Sat. What first emerges is light, separating from awareness. Reuniting the two is Sat Yoga. The First Cause and the Final Cause are one. You are that One. When you know, you’ve won.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
Tags: Atman, Brahman, cosmic quantum wave, dreams, excess, gyana yoga, hero, Karma Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, mahavakya yoga, mythologies, Raja Yoga, Sat Yoga, Swapna Yoga, the Absolute