After the rapture comes sobriety (hopefully). Sobriety is the greater challenge and it offers the greater promise. Is sobriety comfortable? It is most definitely not. After a lifetime of inebriation, one intoxicant after another, from belief in the world to belief in oneself to belief in the work to belief in God, sobriety is terrifying. With no illusion to support and distract you, with no future goal to attract you, with nowhere to go other than the present, how could such a state not be terrifying?
You will pine for the rapture. You will beg for the euphoria of emotion. You will want some spiritual aim, some theory, to sustain you. When you are finally stone cold sober, you will know these follies are dead on arrival…they no longer move the needle.
It is said among the ancient masters that one travels towards God, then in God, then beyond God. Why beyond God? Because everything we can think, believe, know of Him is our constructed limitation of His Endlessness, as real as it may seem to us. This is the path of sobriety.
What is the ‘promise’ of sobriety? No more pretenses, the possibility of sincerity and reliability, less wasted time and energy, more genuine humility. You will want to fill the void of your departed intoxications, you will feel that you are drowning, suffocating, you will beg for relief. Do not bend to your addictions and something else may come, beyond belief, beyond thought and emotion. Make no sudden moves. You will know the next step when you find yourself taking it.
