Happy Life - A Wellness Podcast

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What is the purpose of life? The great masters throughout the ages have had varied answers:

• Buddha: To end suffering ... and realize your true nature of non-self
• Mohammed: To serve Allah's purpose via submission to the Divine Will
• Jesus: To love god with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul
• Krishna: Leave behind the material self and unlock bliss through devotional service to the Supreme
• Judaism: Live the faith, fulfill God's commandments and be rewarded with a long, happy life

The underlying truth of these teachings about the purpose or meaning of a human life is unpacked using contemporary terminology accompanied by the stories of Gozan and Candide.

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The ancient masters, one after another, have spoken of a state of peace and happiness that is available to each and every one of us. But how do we reach such a state? It turns out this process is typically not a sudden flash of Satori or sudden enlightenment. In most cases it is a process and this process can be marked by a series of stations along the way. In this episode we examine the transition from the second stage to the third stage. The tricks to moving past the dysfunction of Stage 2 are elucidated as well as the features of what Stage 3 or Recovery looks like. In Summary, the 8 stages are as follows:

LOWER SELF -- DYSFUNCTIONAL

Stage 1: Physical (aka Gross)

Stage 2: Dysfunction (aka Emotional or Astral)

Stage 3: Recovery (aka Rational or Mental)

PIVOT/BRIDGE

Stage 4: Healthy (aka Transpersonal)

HIGHER SELF -- MASTERY

Stage 5: Cosmic (aka Holy Spirit)

Stage 6: Universal (aka Buddha/Illumination/Subtle)

Stage 7: Divine (aka Transcendental/Enlightened/Causal)

Stage 8: Fully Liberated (non-describable/non-doing/Wu Wu Wei)

I am forever indebted to my late teacher George Falcon for much of the ideation behind this model and my thinking on the nature of the self and levels of consciousness more generally. Much of what you will hear in this series was shared with me by him years ago. In the years since those conversations, I have discovered that he didn't invent this model. Rather he synthesized it from very similar ones used by Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Ancient Polynesians, Ancient Egyptians, Indigenous Americans, and many more. It is a universal experience of spiritual advancement to pass stages of some number and these stages, regardless of the tradition, tend to strongly resemble one another. The differences are more with how many stages the tradition breaks them up into. Sometimes there are four, sometimes 10 or 16 or more. Regardless of the number, the ideas and features of the process are more or less the same. Having now studied models from approximately 10 traditions, and investigated my own journey along this path of self-mastery, I am sharing my perspective on these so-called stages of Self-Mastery. In this episode the focus is on what is called the "Recovery" stage.

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