The Ordinary and the Extraordinary
The Wall That Keeps Us Tied To The Corner Of Our Room
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Intro - Corner of My Room
There is a wall within us between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
There was a moment back in ’97 when a lot of things happened to be changing in my life. It was also the year that the great kirtan musician Jai Uttal came out with a hauntingly powerful song called Corner. In the song, he calls out to a Baul, one of the wandering mystics of Bengal, so it’s a song that is a call from the bottom of one’s soul to a teacher or guide.
Listen for a moment...
The mirror of the sky reflects my soul.
Oh Baul of the road, Oh Baul my heart,
what keeps me tied to the corner of the room, what keeps me tied?
A storm rages in my crumbling hut.
The water's rising to my bed.
My quilt is floating on the rolling flood,
bringing my shelter down.
I heard this song and something in me immediately knew what he was saying. It made me look at myself and ask that same question: what keeps me tied to the corner of my room?
What keeps me small? What binds me to the ordinary. And the second stanza - the storm raging through my house, bringing my shelter down - as I listened I could see how my life’s current structure could not hold the magnitude that was truly surrounding me. The ordinary just wasn’t vast enough to hold the extraordinary. I was drowning — not because life was too deep, but because my structure was too small.
Mark - Mind and Soul Split
Years later I heard my teacher Mark Griffin talk about this same phenomena, as he saw it from his clarified perspective.
He often related his experience - how, upon his awakening into Nirvikalpa Samadhi, he could clearly see among the people around him, the conflict between the mind and the soul. In fact, he said that the discrepancy between these two sources of impulse he could see in almost everyone was one of the hardest things for him to handle, because now that he could see these forces so clearly played out, the struggle going on in each person was revealed as an incredible inner war. One that they were seldom even aware of themselves.
What was my teacher Mark was seeing? He was literally seeing a person divided down the middle, as if an inner wall separated the voice of mind from the voice of soul. This is the wall between ordinary and extraordinary.
And indeed, we live our lives pulled between mind and soul. Why does the mind want the ordinary?
There are many factors that shape the mind like this. The first is the influence of our society. We are all raised in what is essentially a tribe. Our family, our society, our class structure - all of these have a strong interest in keeping the normal in place. You have expectations put upon you from the moment you are born. Gender roles, expectations to marry, have children, propagate the species, earn a livelihood. The tribe needs predictability, so it rewards conformity and trains us to stay inside the ordinary.
And over time, that conformity becomes internal: the mind learns to equate ‘ordinary’ with ‘who I am,’ and it protects that identity by staying inside what feels safe. Ordinary does not require change, does not require expanding our sense of identity, nor does it require stepping outside the social order.
Yet the soul seeks the extraordinary. Why? Because to touch the Divine is completely extraordinary. It's 1000% extraordinary. There is not one ounce of ordinary in the contact with that which is innately sacred.
And there is that spark within each one of us that yearns for that Divine connection. Contact - even briefly - with that infinite ocean that feeds the soul. Whether that yearning within you is conscious or not - it is present.
How did we get here — and what keeps the wall standing?
In this episode of my podcast, Seeds of Awakening, I’ll explore 5 aspects to what keeps this wall in place, and then offer some ideas how to demolish it.
Blind To The Ocean In Which We Swim
Part of what binds us to the corner of our rooms is somehow thinking that the experience of the extraordinary is rare or limited or not really available to us.
The further you progress in the spiritual journey the more painfully ludicrous this idea of scarcity becomes. The experience of the extraordinary is so infinite that it is as though we are in a little bubble of ordinary floating in a vast sea of extraordinary.
There is a remarkable story told by the great poet sage Rumi where he describes the vision of the enlightened dervish Dah-koo-kee. At one point in the vision, Dah-koo-kee is describing seeing seven immense trees, so dense that no leaves or boughs were even visible…
More wondrous than all else was this, that hundreds of thousands of people were passing through the desert and plain beside them,
Hazarding their lives … in desire for shade …
And not seeing the shade of those trees at all. …
The caravans are without food, and yet these fruits are dropping ripe beside them: Dah-koo-kee says: O God, what magic is this?
We’re like those travelers — walking beside vast forests of shade and fruit, and somehow not seeing any of it. The wall makes the extraordinary invisible, and leaves us fighting over scraps of the ordinary.
Tenacity in Holding our Personal Past
What else keeps us tied to that small corner and blinds us to our own full potential?
One of the most powerful forces we self-impose is a buy-in to the collective agreement everyone seems to hold that what we have been and what we have experienced must irrefutably shape who we are and how we operate in the here and now. It’s as though everyone picked up a massive heavy lead ball sometime in their past and agreed to carry it with them for the rest of their lives.
Sure, some people do therapy or seek other healing modalities or support groups to try to reduce the weight of the ball they carry, but how many people truly question why they are carrying it at all?! How many people look down and say ‘what the heck?!’ and just take that iron ball off?
This ball of who we have been is one of the strongest anchors we have to keep us bound into the corner of our room, bound to the ordinary.
Listen to this idea through the lens of this great old and often told story:
A seeker is clinging to a tree, arms wrapped tight around the trunk.
A sage walks by and says, ‘Why don’t you come study with me?’
The man cries out, ‘I will - as soon as the tree lets go of me!’
The sage says, ‘Oh foolish child. The tree is not holding you. You are holding the tree.’
It’s just like this - we think that our past is holding us. Over and over again we shape our expectations of what we can do and what we can perceive so strongly by referencing our own past. The past has nothing to do with it. The past is not holding us in place any more than the tree was holding that young seeker. It is we who continue to hold our past and it is we who continue to reinforce the belief that the past shapes us now.
What if it really was that easy - simply Let go of the tree. Simply Step out of the corner. Simply cut the shackle of the iron ball and walk away.
This very instruction to simply let go of the tree was given to me directly by one of my spiritual mentors, the great meditation master Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, with whom I had the great and rare privilege to study.
On one occasion, she was giving a talk to a packed auditorium. She was relating a story about a conversation she had had with someone in which they were describing a difficult situation that had occurred. Gurumayi shared with us all how she had told that person to “just drop it”. The person responded that “Oh I’m not like that. I can’t just drop things”. And Gurumayi had looked at her and said “of course you can. Just drop it. Just drop it. You are Shiva. You are Shiva. You are Shiva.”
As she said these words, You Are Shiva, the entire auditorium fell silent. Each one of us got it. She wasn’t talking about the mythology or religious character of Shiva, or any Hindu god figure or anything like that. She was using the word Shiva to connote the direct experience of pure awareness, infinite consciousness, the essence of the divine. Gurumayi was reminding us that in every moment we have the option to leave behind the ordinary concepts we have of ourselves, the ‘I’m not that kind of person’ mentality, and jump directly into knowing the unlimited nature of the Extraordinary.
In 6 short words: Just drop it - you are Shiva, she delivered the essence of letting go of the tree we think is holding us.
BELIEFS
What else holds us in the corner?
I've taught many students over the years who come to me with the question "do I have to believe in anything for meditation to work? Because I'm not really interested in changing my beliefs and I'm not really interested in anything esoteric or woo-woo.”
Yet as I spend time and work with them, what has become apparent to me is that these are the very people who are gripping belief the tightest, because their worldview has only one permitted conclusion: “what I see right now is all that’s real.” Nothing esoteric holds truth, validity or substance. Nothing exists beyond what they have seen so far in their life, what they can see right now in this moment. When your beliefs declare the visible world to be the whole of reality, the wall becomes your worldview.
It is the spiritual equivalent of those who believed the world was flat and that ocean-faring ships would drop off a great cliff, because that was the story delivered to theirs eyes. They matched their interpretation to what they themselves saw. All the reports from returning sailors saying “no, there is no cliff” fell on deaf ears.
Even though stories abound from the mystics and saints, siddhas and shamans, yogis and sages of all world traditions about experiencing extraordinary expanses of awareness, these too fall on deaf ears to those who have not entertained the possibility that there is more going on than meets the eye, more going on than meets their own immediate perception.
There is a short and remarkable stanza, verse 12 chapter 1, in the thousand year old text called the Shiva Sutras, that speaks to this. Two simple Sanskrit words.
vismayo (wonder/amazement) + yoga bhūmikāḥa (stages/grounds of yoga). The experiences of yoga are amazing.
So even a thousand years ago the sages felt the need to remind those who were pursuing spiritual study to lift the veil of their beliefs from their eyes and be open to a much, much broader realm of possibility. To remember: that what awaited them as they pursued their meditation was truly miraculous and certainly extraordinary.
Our Vision Is Too Shortsighted
Is there more that keeps us tied to the ordinary?
To a surprising degree we only grasp new experience to the degree we actively reach out for it.
Remember those pictures of that great dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus Rex - it was a huge magnificent being - but with little bitty short stubby arms. In a way, we’re like that - our reach is that confined, relative to the magnitude of the rest of our being.
We become complacent with what our life seems to be, with the ordinary. We find what joys are within the reach of our little arms and call that good enough.
And because that reach is so small, because our vision becomes so shortsighted, we start to misidentify ourselves. We don’t cast our gaze far enough or profound enough.
Muktananda captured this with the story of the lion cub who lost its mother and grew up among the donkeys. It grew up never knowing any other lions and only seeing how donkeys behaved. It grew up braying like a donkey, never roaring like a lion. It thought of itself as one of the herd, a donkey like every other donkey. One day a mature lion came by and saw what was going on. He went over to the young lion and said come with me. He took him to the edge of pond and said look at your reflection. Look! you are just like me. You are a lion - you are not a donkey. Stop behaving like this and come with me. You are the king of the forest - come! Know your rightful place.
Muktananda tried over and over again to get it through our thick skulls - we are just like that. We are lions walking around thinking we are donkeys. We have complete access to the extraordinary, yet we settle for the ordinary, moment by moment, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime.
The Invisibility Of The Inner Stance
For most people, the anchor to the corner of the room has its roots in the fact that they have never noticing the wall between what their mind wants and what their soul wants - never looking at the wall itself. But it’s only when you look at the existence of the wall that you can begin to assess what your inner stance is.
Everyone has an internal stance. Think of it as your compass. Are you pulling your compass to navigate your life from your mind or from your soul? Which is the source that sets the direction of your path?
Let me ask it another way. If you could stand on the top of the wall between the ordinary and the extraordinary, which way would you face? Which horizon would you orient yourself towards?
It’s easy to answer this offhand and say ‘of course, I’m someone who listens to my soul and faces towards the extraordinary!’
But here’s a way you can test how true that is for yourself.
Have you ever a remarkable moment in your life? Even briefly. Maybe it felt like a moment of total departure from what the rest of your life is like, a moment of awe, of wonder, of transcendence. Most people have had glimpses of something like this, even if only briefly.
“These are moments when the extraordinary breaks through — like a crack appearing in the wall. If your stance faces the ordinary, you’ll plaster it over and move on. If your stance faces the extraordinary, you’ll widen the crack and step through.
What have you done with those outlier moments in your own life? Patched and moved on? Or pulled out picks and dug?
Ask yourself this without judgement - just to gain the information you need to truly see yourself as you are now.
Is Meditation Enough?
It could be that you hear this and think that you are not capable now of directly experiencing the extraordinary. And frankly, for many people this is true, because of the height and thickness of the wall they have built - or you may be someone who in their core feels they are capable of bringing down the the wall, but just doesn’t know how to go about it.
This whole topic is the inherent task of spiritual training - to develop feelers - like tentacles - for what is on the other side of the wall. That's what meditation is for, to develop that sensitivity. To gradually shift from looking towards the ordinary as the field of truth, to looking towards the extraordinary.
But ordinary meditation alone rarely reveals extraordinary experiences. It takes skillful means to bring the deeper doorways reliably into view. That’s why I teach the path in stages and put forth my curriculum of advanced meditations with such conviction, building up ability in the inner pursuit stage by stage.
But the rub of it is this: even extraordinary meditation has a hard time revealing your soul to you if you are deeply locked on the ordinary side of the wall. If you’ve built up a wall too thick or too tall.
I can hold your hand and lead you to the vantage point from which the other side of the wall becomes visible, but if your inner stance has locked onto the ordinary, it will be like your hands are covering your eyes and preventing you from seeing it.
Solving The Problem Of The Closed Loop
Let’s look this problem squarely and realize the challenge.
You have to experience something miraculous to know it’s possible.
Yet if your stance excludes it, you won’t recognize it when it appears.
This isn’t a contradiction — it’s a genuine self-sealing loop.
Inside the ordinary stance, evidence comes first.
Inside the extraordinary stance, orientation must come first.
Most people secretly believe something like:
“If the extraordinary is real, it should present itself to me in a way that does not require me to change first.”
But that demand is precisely what keeps the wall intact and keeps the extraordinary invisible to us.
Because the extraordinary is not an object you look at — it’s a mode of participation.
It’s more like falling love, nothing new is added, but everything reorganizes. No amount of explanation or external proof substitutes for reorientation.
This is why saints sound insane to skeptics and obvious to initiates. They’re not disagreeing about facts — they’re operating from different criteria of what counts as real.
How does one break into this closed loop and move beyond this lock out?
Does it require a leap of faith? Almost, but not quite. It’s not faith in a claim — it’s openness to discovery.
A sense of permission, even cultivating the gentle feeling “I do not yet know what is possible.”
That’s the wedge that can begin to break the closed-loop circle.
And now we see why cynicism is so corrosive. Cynicism isn’t neutral skepticism; it’s preemptive closure. It says, “Nothing outside my current frame will be allowed to count.”
And that very stance guarantees that the extraordinary remains invisible.
The Partnership
So - if it is to be successful - true spiritual training becomes a partnership, because even the greatest of teachers cannot do this for you.
From my side, I offer powerful methods designed to reveal deeper levels of reality.
While you from your side you start genuinely contemplating these ideas and begin working on dismantling the wall as well. Look honestly to understand what your inner stance is and where it’s leading you.
Actively relax your demand that reality prove itself before being allowed in.
If you’ve spent your life dampening down the callings of your soul with words of skepticism or adherence to the way things appear, then you need to honestly look at that tendency and begin to address it directly.
If you are to have the success with the inner pursuit, you need to grab that mental stance and start to shake it up. It will take internally re-orienting yourself to the possibility that reality is deeper than you have so far experienced.
What's important to realize is that throughout our lives we are either adding bricks to this wall - or we are taking them down.
Every day we’re building the wall or dismantling it. Skepticism as a reflex lays bricks. Aspiration as a choice pulls those bricks out.
Each moment we settle for the ordinary, we are slathering on mortar for the next brick to be laid.
Each moment you hear of something extraordinary and greet it with skepticism or disdain, you are actively laying down another brick.
Each moment you reach out for that which is golden in nature, the true food for the soul, you are grabbing a brick and tearing it down.
Bottom line of all this is: To make progress in the spiritual journey requires that you take ownership of your active participation in the state you find yourself to be in now.
Awakening requires a shift:
openness before certainty
orientation before evidence
receptivity before proof
What If?
And finally, let us consider: What would happen if you were able to completely remove every brick of that wall between the mind and the soul, between the ordinary and the extraordinary?
This is the state the traditions point to as the fruition of the path.
When the wall is finally shattered, the extraordinary comes flooding in to our every moment. The mind and the soul are brought into complete harmony and unity.
And that flood of the extraordinary into ordinary life is what the traditions call Awakening.
Excerpt of the song Corners used by permission of Jai Uttal - thanks Jai! You’ll find this song on Jai’s album Shiva Station. Connect with Jai
Excerpt from The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson (1925). Translation believed to be in the public domain. Quoted here for educational and interpretive purposes.
