42 is not the answer
The ultimate answer to the Universe, the question of life and everything else
Whether you’ve been consciously seeking to spiritually progress for a few days or a few decades, if you live in the age of the internet and have used google to help you along your journey, then you’ve come across the term: “raising your vibration”.
Raising your vibration has become such a monumental “thing” in today’s spiritual language that we now have “true empaths” who claim to have the power to “get plugged into source energy”, “get wired into us”, and “measure” our spiritual vibration. I am not here to debate the truth of such claims. I will though come clean and confess I do not possess a spiritual seismograph, so please don’t pay me $100 to pin you at a 190 and give you a spiritual business plan with a 10 year warranty.
I know there is a part of you that wants that. And if I am really, really truthful with myself, that part in you exists within me too. Why? Well come on! We live in the 21st century where we’ve imbibed the values of speed, certainty, and efficiency.
This deep rooted desire has been beaten into us. For the past 40 years or more, we’ve been told by experts in every field that there is “a singular” “simple” “formula” that can shred our body, fatten our bank account, flock sexy men (or women — whatever floats your boat) to our doorstep, and take us from misery to mastery in 3 months and with 3 easy payments of $333 or your money back.
We live in a world that is obsessed with quantifying every aspect of our life. The success of our marriages is determined by the number of anniversaries we’ve celebrated. Success in our careers is measured by the dollar figure we get paid, and our expertise measured by the number of years we’ve stayed in one place, the total years we’ve worked or our ATS score. We equate sexiness with how much we weigh, the percentage of our body fat, the length of our hair and the size of our boobs. To be sexy we weigh ourselves, and count our calories. We’ve enslaved ourselves to the dictatorship of fitness, monitoring the miles we run and the weights we lift instead of leaning into the visceral enjoyment of movement and aliveness in our bodies.
And in the same vain, we have an urge to make sense of the spiritual, control our consciousness to materialize the mystical, and what better way to simplify our spiritual journey than reduce it to a single unifying number that can be calculated and measured, get the game plan that takes us to sensational spiritual bliss with bling and babes.
In that vein, we pay for program after program, read countless articles about hacking our way into vibrational enlightenment by practicing our daily pranayamas, singing in the shower, soaking in epsom salts, eating organic raw broccoli, selling our clutter on ebay, and saying adieu to our low vibe friends and family.
And while each of those techniques works in elevating our mood, we are missing the bigger picture. Thinking that we can quantify, codify, simplify and “hack our way into spiritual bliss” is the very kind of thinking that is keeping us frustrated, stuck and in chronic spiritual pain.
Returning to the centered connection we have with ourselves, with our fellow humans and with the earth we live in is simple, but it is far from simplistic. It is not a number. It is a lifelong quest. It is an experience. It is an art.
