Spiritual Clock: What Time Are You?

I am reading Shakti Gawain’s Living in the Light. I was looking for a mass market paperback I could carry around in my bag and it fit the bill. Anyway, I am glad I picked it up. It introduced me to Ram Dass’s analogy for the process of spiritual growth and enlightenment. It is a round clock, and Gawain outlines Dass's hours as follows:

12:00 to 3:00 – submersed in the illusion of form
3:00 to 6:00 – increasing disillusionment with worldly concerns
6:00 – feels like you are hitting rock bottom, and probably looks that way to the world as well, but it is actually the beginning of awakening
6:00 to 12:00 – increasing enlightenment

The process occurs over lifetimes and within a lifetime. There is a grand cycle as well as subcycles. According to Gawain, you are past 6:00 if you have the awareness to be thinking seriously about it.

I think I came into this life well past three o’clock. I have never been comfortable in the world of form. From the time the light of consciousness first flickered in my little head, I have felt a jarring disconnect with consensus reality. I’ve always been reaching for something beyond the veil. Always looking for transcendence instead of busying myself with conventional milestones and making my way in society.

I feel like I’ve hit 6:00 at least once in my life, but in the bigger picture, those may have been subcycle sixes. It may be that I came into this life at 6:15 or something like that (I was literally born at 6:15, FWIW). At any rate, I think I am now somewhere past 6:00 but well before 9:00. I am too angsty to be past 9:00, that’s for sure!

I imagine that 9:00 to 3:00, the upper half of the clock, are relatively angst-free because you are more clearly and comfortably aligned -- with matter or with spirit, but either way, you aren’t walking around feeling a huge contradiction between where you are and where your spirit longs to be. No, 3:00 to 9:00 are the hours of angst, with 3:00 to 6:00 being the downward spiral and 6:00 to 9:00 being the upward climb – just like descending and ascending Kali Yuga. That’s how I see it, anyway – I am taking Ram Dass’s analogy and running with it.

So I am in a personal ascending Kali Yuga. My angst – the contradiction I feel with the context of my life in the third density – drives me ever forward in my climb. I feel that I have made progress in recent years, but I won’t feel that I’ve turned the corner until my external life is somehow aligned with the incessant calling I feel inside.

I think that 9:00 to 12:00 means being able to manifest your inner light in the world. You are a clear and flowing channel. I am not there yet.