It is when one begins to move between the planes that one begins to grasp the character and the interconnection and interaction between each individual plane. Say, when one moves from the spiritual plane into the ideal and then into the material, if one is interested into putting into action the deepest stirrings in one's being, so to speak. A cliche perhaps, but one that exists for good reason, which is descriptive enough to be useful in reflection.
Let's do that. Reconciling the interactions of those planes in the midst of one's own trajectory, one sees how they fit together and work together - or don't. This age of disintegration, however long and protracted its wavelengths, reveals enough as one navigates the planes in an attempt to traverse it as a living and local thing.
For the modern individual that can afford it, the choice region to linger in is a sort of purgatory in the plane of the ideal, rearranging various symbols and ideas into different pleasing configurations which might temporarily allow for various forms of material relief organized and frozen against ever growing chaos and dysfunction, relief that may in turn offer a temporary spiritual huff of feeling good. The ideal itself may be able to afford several revolutions of material breakdown before degrading itself, staving off more profound change.
But the very reason for all that agitated fidgeting is a deeper spiritual sense that something is terribly wrong and must change. After all, the spiritual realm, owing to its global profundity and reach, is more difficult to keep free from contaminating unpleasantries. Deepening alienation and despondency reach out to growing material chaos, seeking articulation through the ideal, almost as if to establish a current.
I'd like to note on the side that it isn't that I've somehow discovered the secret mechanism with which the planes interact; this is only a provisional metaphor useful for teasing out various interactions and thinking about them. It may come time for a revision in short order.
Anyway, one may discover truth, but then where to go from there? Within a given plane itself, contrast serves to direct movement as well. If one exists in a state of spiritual discomfort or even agony and then experiences a state of ecstasy, well then, where did that come from, and how to sustain it? One is cold, and vaguely feels something warm in the distance and moves to it, and so on. Now one has a direction!
But not so fast. Material labors take increasingly intensive ideologically and spiritually backed energies to sustain their paths of development. The archetypal movement from city to farm to live a simpler life may contain a lovely image, and it may come complete with several successful embodiments to shore it up, but such an image is also replete with a stream of rotting lumber piles, sharpened and unused tools, weed-infested plots, and generally failed and bankrupted operations tell another story.
Building one's own habitation, growing and hunting one's own food, staying warm, dry, and clean, these things take much time, energy, and dedication, even more so if coming from another way of living. One has to really believe and feel it in the bones to stay motivated to put in the time and energy to move the needle and transform one's locality, and then like a fire that gets going, gives off a warming spiritual nourishment of its own which sustains the effort.
There are ways to live between worlds, but increasingly we move toward nothing less than a revolution and harmonization of one's connected living processes. The monastery for example, organized around the sustained experience of enlightenment and spiritual peace, has to it a careful restructuring of every facet of living, buttressed against the distracting and fragmenting influences of materialistic luxury, with overhauls of food, dress, grooming, social interaction, mental and physical activity, habitation, and etc. to facilitate meditation and introspection.
But till then? To maintain a violent abomination of our collective living regime, it takes the application of violence itself to provide the continuing motivation to continue development or even maintain the present state of society. It is the multitude of whips and sticks, whether sharp and harsh or soft and gentle, which through soft annual tax collection, regional zoning and law, and harder threats of prison, starvation, homelessness, and death that are all too motivating, at least until the complex of industrial living processes undergirding those instruments of maintenance threatens to fall down around one's ears itself.
Threats of death and dispossession are reason enough to stay relatively miserable for many, at least until those threats are made empty by the universalization and inevitability of those very threats that one is ostensibly moving away from.
