Hi Vineeto,
So this is how I am experiencing this, and in fact this is precisely what happened yesterday. That ‘I’ have set up a base camp somewhere on the periphery of normalcy, periodically ‘I’ will take a daring outing away from the base camp and “up the mountain” let’s say. And what I found yesterday is that there is a tether that connects ‘me’ back to base camp, that deep down ‘I’ know ‘I’ am only going to go so far, scout out the territory from what ‘I’ can see and then return to what appears as the warmth of the known.
I experienced this yesterday as the variations of the fear of extinction, or perhaps of abandoning humanity, something like leaving behind all that is known and familiar and setting off into exile, into an unknown land. But the thing is I have experienced these feelings before, it’s not like any of this was new to me, which means I have travelled this 2 way journey before.
So then since yesterday I thought that it is this “tether back to base camp” which needs to be examined, because it will never allow me to set off on the genuine one way journey to ‘my’ extinction. So this is what pricked my ears when you wrote :
Richard summarised the experience of that “tether back to base camp” in his journal (article 9) :
It requires great fortitude and finesse to fly in the face of the social commandment: to remain a member of society at all costs. There is a pull of loyalties; old allegiances to relatives, friends, colleagues and acquaintances will tug at the heart, pulling one back, urging one to remain where one is. Loyalty, however, is a two-edged sword for it can cut two ways; there is the new allegiance to the purity of the peak experience, pulling one forward relentlessly, for herein lies release … and genuine peace-on-earth. The pull in two directions can be excruciating. On the one side is the sense of belonging, the warmth of relationship and the being acknowledged by the peoples one has always known. There is the loss of all that, with its ensuing grief – and guilt – at leaving them all behind. On the other side there is the knowledge that one will have reached one’s destiny, that one will have that perennial cheerful contentment with life as-it-is subtly buzzing inside one, and that the actuality of peace-on-earth and prosperity for all humankind is now possible. All this one knows, with a crystal-clear certainty, from the perfection of one’s PCE.
Actually this feeling I experienced yesterday it reminded me of experiences in the past where a relationship would break down, and there would be this deeply sorrowful feeling, that this person with whom I have been so close for all those years would now disappear never to be met again - this is the flavour of that ‘tether’.