Houdini created increasingly extreme situations of impossible difficulty, to escape from, with death only seconds away. In the same way the Atman (soul) creates an ego and places it in a situation of impossible constraints - including the constraint of ignorance - and forces it to cope with unbearable suffering of every sort. Egos love brinksmanship, and are even willing to go over the brink, initiating wars. At the collective level, the human ego-system faces itself with imminent death on a planetary scale. It creates conditions of utter hopelessness and despair—only to miraculously find the way out, at the last moment, and emerge victorious over all obstacles. But can we do it this time? We are in suspense. It can only happen if the trunk we are trapped in becomes a magic cocoon, in which our ego dies and our immortal spirit reveals itself in all its power.
Heroic triumph is the basic story line of most adventure tales, mythologies, and Hollywood films - it is a fundamental human compulsion, but we have now reached the final frontier of the hero’s challenge. Now we must achieve supreme liberation from both the ego and the apparent constraints of the phenomenal world, through a return to Brahman, the Absolute. We must regain our status as co-creators of the universe, and bring about a renaissance of both Nature and the divine human spirit on this planet. We have just minutes to go (or at any rate, just a few years) before we all die.
This do-or-die situation should have us on the edge of our seats. It would, if we were only the audience of this performance, and not participants. But being in this life-or-death situation is too much for most of us to cope with, so we go into denial and boredom, or employ other defense mechanisms to avoid facing our reality. Those of us who do recognize that we are in Houdini’s position are working full-tilt to truly escape from our bondage before the chance is lost.
To succeed in this ultimate escape, we must simply follow Houdini’s seven step formula:
- accept our situation with joy. Do not consider yourself a victim, but assume responsibility. We agreed to be born and so we put ourselves in this position of challenge, so now we must work our way out of it. We must focus all our physical and psychic energies one-pointedly on gaining liberation. This is called Raja Yoga.
- dream our way out. Imagine ourselves as liberated, divine beings. Receive and understand the messages in our nightly dreams, that offer maps of the labyrinth we are trapped in, and methods of releasing ourselves from our attachments. Pay attention to our higher intelligence. This is called Swapna Yoga.
- overcome the initial obstacle: the ropes. We cannot cut them or untie them by force: we must slip out of them, and to do that, we have to stop pushing against them or struggling with them. Instead, we must make ourselves a little smaller: we must become humble and not press against the other with aggression, but retreat into ourselves, allowing the outer constraints to slide off effortlessly. When we serve our spiritual community selflessly, unconcerned with outcomes or with recognition, without resisting the egoism of others, we free ourselves from the ropes of narcissism. This is the way of Karma Yoga.
- get out of the handcuffs. These correspond to the second chakra: the urge to use the hands to touch, caress, and possess the body of the other. If this arises from neediness, desperation, or lust for penetration or envelopment of the other as an “escape” from isolation as a separate being, this will fail to take us out of the trap. Sexual desire is a mirage, a projection of union or empowerment that leads only to the disappointment of an unfulfilled fantasy. By withdrawing that psychic investment, we shrink the hands of desire so that they can slip out of the cuffs. This can only be done on the basis of the higher knowledge that we are beings of light, rather than material objects, physical animals. This is Gyana Yoga.
- turn our attention toward the divine light within. Contemplate our luminous Being, and fill ourselves with power, as we merge with the radiance. The light shines through the fabric of any straitjacket and escapes. This is Kundalini Yoga.
- escape from the gravity of the first chakra. This is the equivalent of Houdini's trunk, now filled with water and sinking fast beneath the waves. We have both an upper and a lower death drive. The upper death drive is the urge to know the Truth, to transcend the illusory ego. This drive sends us on the spiritual journey, even when we are economically comfortable, but it is usually eclipsed by the lower death drive, which is the urge toward excess, through the activation of one or more of the lower three chakras. This lower drive entangles us in ideologies of hatred and anger, in sexual compulsion, in co-dependent relationships, and/or in alcohol or other drugs dependency. We must recognize the downward pull of this drive - the urge of the ego to lose itself in unconsciousness, to become merely ordinary, to follow the herd of lemmings, to forget the Atman altogether. We must go consciously into this fortress of base energy, and rouse the fragments of this lethargic beast, the infantile ego, into rebirth. The buddhi, or higher intellect, must cast a spell upon the egoic elements, using mantras to remember what we are beyond the plane of memory and desire, and speaking truth to the figures of consciousness within and without. We speak from the Ground of Being. This is Mahavakya Yoga.
- carry the wisdom we have gained, through all this inner work, back up to the point of cosmic origin, the zero point of the seventh chakra. At this level we are pure potentiality: we are no longer in the trunk, nor outside of the trunk. In fact, we are in both places, or nowhere, depending on our free will. So simply through activating one’s highest intention, liberation is achieved instantly, faster than the speed of light. The Houdini Atman does it again! This is Sat Yoga.
The trunk will return to its original nature as quantum waveform. No one was ever really trapped: the ego was always only an illusion. Heaven (Sat Yuga) will effortlessly manifest where hell (Kali Yuga) seemed to be. It has all been a trick: God’s cosmic play, the realm of illusion, or Maya. This is the ancient teaching of Yogi sages since the beginning of history, and we are now at the grand finale of the act: the collective Houdini Drive is coming to a climax.
If you are still in the box, falsely identified as an ego, a physical human being, rather than pure divine presence, then, at least you must keep your faith in Houdini, the Atman within you. It will soon enough reveal itself to be You! Learn the laws of enlightenment, the biophysics of Sat Yoga. Then you, too, can enjoy the delights of surfing the cosmic quantum wave of bliss, and converting it into the next kingdom of heaven on earth. It is all a matter of simple physics. Light first emerges from Primal Being, or Sat, separating from awareness. Sat Yoga reunites the two. The First Cause and the Final Cause are one. You are that One. When you know, you’ve won.
In his essay, "The Houdini Drive", summarized and simplified here, Shunyamurti compares the human ego to Houdini: