The personal path to illumination and full awakening

By Louis Bourgeois

Perhaps one of the things I enjoy most about turning 74 is that the preoccupations of my youth and middle age have fallen away. Our mission in this life is to give our highest creative gifts to the world.I have found that this endeavor comes much easier as I age.  As distractions fall away, life becomes simpler, and there is also much more time available to pursue my creative talents.

I have been writing since I began my first journal at the tender age of 21. I saved all of these journals until I turned 39.  At this milestone, I reread this prodigious stack of journals, laughing at my meandering, the dramas, but also feeling a certain sorrow for my unconsciousness and my suffering. I was very happy to burn every page of this almost 20-year saga.

I felt ready to write my first opus, taking a hiatus at a beach cottage in Florida. After 3 months I had produced a 400-page manuscript, bearing the ostentatious title: “Longing, Lust, and Love in America: One Man’s Journey; the First 40 Years.”  Fortunately, this manuscript also found its demise in a bonfire after returning to my home in Minnesota.

After this debacle, I felt ready to mark my “midlife” with a spiritual pilgrimage to India. As my birthday is in early September, the trip was planned for August, that I might celebrate turning 40 in Katmandu, Nepal. This adventure was a total disaster, becoming deathly ill with a horrible fever, never reaching Katmandu.  I returned home to Minnesota with my sorry tail between my legs. I was ready for a complete surrender, admitting that my life thus far was a total failure.

Little did I know, at the time, that this complete collapse was an essential step on my personal path of mastery.  One of my favorite quotes, from Robert Johnson’s masterpiece, “Transformation,” “It is a compliment of the highest order when a man finds that he cannot go farther and that his life has become an irredeemable tragedy.”  One more from the venerable Tao Te Ching: “Reversal is the movement of the Way; Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends; Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks.”

At 41 I gave up, planted a garden, a began a long, slow process of healing.  I would be nearly 60 before I felt ready to begin again my search, my life’s quest to fulfill some sense of destiny.  This search resulted in my decision to find a land more kind, and a way for me to make a new start.  6 years of exploration landed me in Cuenca, Ecuador.  It would be another 6 years of searching before I would arrive at what today I call my perfect paradise.

The whole point of this peripatetic struggle was to bring me to the place where my personal past and most of my “interference patterns” would end. One more quote, from my very favorite spiritual master, Karlfried Graf Durckheim, and his masterpiece, “The Way of Transformation:” “Only to the extent that a man exposes himself, over and over again, to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him.  In this lies the dignity of daring.”

It is my guess that many of you reading this essay, especially those who have transplanted themselves from other lands and found a semblance of paradise here in Ecuador, can relate to my sense of relief. And what exactly does Durckheim refer to as “that which is indestructible within him?” This is what my title is referring to: the path of mastery.

Each of us carries this inner master, and it is simply our life circumstances which will dictate if this inner master becomes activated. Otherwise, there are programs like I offer which can stimulate our full awakening. Mastery is a form of genius, and genius has four clear stages: preparation, incubation, illumination and expression. Life circumstances often are enough to complete our process of preparation. We come to a point where we have the clear thought, “there must be a better way.”

The process of incubation is often the most challenging. This is why our suffering and willingness to surrender has produced our foundation.  As we age there is a natural way in which we become more patient. It is the combination of our preparation, via surrender, and our ability to be patient, that becomes the fertile ground for the process of illumination. I call this process of illumination the OASIS Experience.  In full, my program, then, is called The OASIS Experience and the Path of Mastery.

Our teaching center is located just outside Cuenca, in the village of Jadan. Interestingly, the name Jadan means “close to heaven.”  We welcome those interested in classes, offered both on site and also online.  ou can find out more via our website: www.oasispathofmastery.com. We also offer a library of free videos at the Youtube channel: Your Path of Mastery & The OASIS Experience.