“Love has a powerful way of removing the mask we all insist on wearing.” Jessy
Whether life today is more difficult than it was a generation ago or not, something has happened to our expectations. One of the dark sides of our lightning-speed digital world is that people have become accustomed to a strange new belief that we should be able to have whatever we want, when we want it. There is no holding any tension and delaying gratification, but rather increased expectation that life should automatically be fulfilling and pleasurable.
Narcissism is the disease of our times, and we have all become immune to the effect of one of its main features, which is entitlement, confusing it with the deep and abiding intrinsic worth that each person has. 
We now have a case of mass entitlement that comes from falling into the Trance (my term for living from the false self and believing that the things we are grasping for will actually fill the emptiness in our hearts. Here is what Bruce Levine—a psychiatrist and outspoken activist who speaks out on the Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry—has to say in an article on his website entitled Why the Rise of Mental Illness? Pathologizing Normal, Adverse Drug Effects, and a Peculiar Rebellion:
“For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating, and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness.”
A June 2013 Gallup Poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have “checked out” of them. The number of people who qualified for Social Security Disability (SSDI) for mental disorders increased nearly 2.5 times between 1987 and 2007. In her New York Review of Books article, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?”, Marcia Angell states, “There has been a thirty-five-fold increase in the same for children.” In 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400% in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans between the ages of 18 and 44 years. By 2008, 23% of women aged 40–59 were taking antidepressants. On May 3, 2013, the CDC reported that the suicide rate among Americans aged 35–64 increased more than 28% between 1999 and 2010. The United States is less than 5% of the world’s population, yet uses 80% of the global supply of opiod drugs.
In the words of two of my earliest mentors, Stanislav and Christina Grof, people are having “spiritual emergencies” at an untold rate. They were referring to the fact that in 1989, when they wrote the book Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, increasing numbers of people involved in personal transformation were experiencing crises as the process of growth and change became chaotic and overwhelming. In a sense, people were being catapulted onto the Path of Zero, (my term for the path of returning to the truth of who we really are) not consciously, where their sense of identity began to break down, their old values no longer held true, and the very ground of their personal reality was radically shifting.
I was one of those people, and thankfully found the Grofs during that time and chose to feel my way through, rather than remain in the Trance. New realms of mystical and spiritual experience opened up for me, along with confusion, a huge disruption to my marriage, and tremendous anxiety that I struggled to stay ahead of. Thankfully, I had a therapist who was able to distinguish my upheaval from mental illness, and my transformational crisis became the doorway to an entire new reality for me, as well as an entirely new life purpose. This was my preparation to become a transpersonal psychotherapist.
Now, 30 years later, we are in the midst of a collective spiritual emergency, and it is happening to people who have not necessarily chosen a conscious path of growth and transformation. The work of Stan and Christina Grof revealed that within the crisis of individual spiritual emergency lies the promise of spiritual emergence and renewal, and that is still true today.
You might say that a very good reason to take the Path of Zeroto connect you to your loveseedis because if you don’t choose, life will catapult you onto that path anyway. You can go kicking and screaming, or you can make the choice to embark on the path right here, right now. It may indeed be the most important decision you ever make in your life and the life of all beings, because what you choose affects everyone else.
While we are here on Earth, accessing the pure aliveness of our loveseeds is an act of love for the world.
May I have the courage to drop the pretenses and to let the light of my being be revealed.
May I realize that being who I truly am is more than enough.
May I see beneath the surface and attune to what is real in everyone I meet.
