A friend emailed me to say they thought that while spirituality was all very well, it wasn’t as important as making the changes we need do to save the world. Obviously, my message isn’t getting through to everyone. I say we don’t need to save the world, we just need to save ourselves, and that will create the system we need where the world is no longer abused. Again, this is the reformation vs. transformation perspective, where I support the latter. What I am doing here is overview just what I perceive spirituality is from my many years of study. And it is about reconnecting to everything in a different way than we do today (as if we are connected to anything but our own ego needs). In our modern world, we love DRAMA, it guides our lives all the time and it is run by what should be a simple tool – the EGO. The ego is meat to help us navigate life as a physical entity NOT control every aspect of it. Whenever you have emotional problems it is due to ego, and ego loves drama, and the more drama the better. Spirit is that calming inner voice that says, “it’s not that big a deal, it’ just a lesson, not a life sentence.” Instead of bemoaning “Why is this happening to me?” try asking “What is it that I should learn here?” and then move on. If you bang your shin on a chair do you agonize for the rest of your life about that minor occurrence? Amazingly, the trauma’s (big and small) that we hold on to are often lifelong when they are merely lessons in what we ought to accept or reject. Your emotions are there to help you understand how you feel about something, not a life sentence in acquiring more of it. The only thing you want more of is LOVE. It’s not about the physical world, it is about our connection to it at a profound level. When we are more spiritually minded we become less concerned about our ego selves and the beliefs we are attached to and more about the big picture for the common good.
My mother was a wonderful teacher about life although it took me decades to learn the main lesson she could impart to me. She taught me by her example, how NOT to live life. While she had moments where she was happy, she spent the bulk of her long life living in the past and future. She had past hurts and dwelt on them. Then to add the problems, she was a worrywart. She worried about the future and everything that could go wrong. She ended up trying to control her world so she could minimize the hurts – it never seemed to work out that way. When it didn’t go as badly as she had worried it might, she reached back into her past and brought up something that she could use to make sure it did go badly. This justified her negative perspectives and why she thought was cursed. She cursed herself and never realized it. She blamed everyone for everything that made her life not what she wanted. I think she thrived by wallowing in her self-pity. I’m sure that most of this was unconscious but it was her Modas Operandi for life. I’m sure you know someone just like this (even forbid, you recognize it in yourself).
The great modern guru’s, such as Eckhart Tolle, all tell us that the answer to a positive life is to live in the NOW. If you have meditated, tried to meditate, or even just thought about meditating, you have probably looked at these orange robed monks/guru’s meditating for hours at a time (and they are not asleep). I meditate and have done so for many years. But after 30 minutes my mind won’t keep quite, because it wants to get up and explore the world, not just sit in it. I once sat through a Swarmi’s (A wonderful Yogananda devotee) long meditation practice. It was tranquil and soothing. At one point he softly directed us to go to our place of silence. Bad thing to tell me because while my right brain is happy without boundaries, my left brain kicks right in with thoughts of how long is this going to keep going. OK, I can do silent meditation, but I have found that my connection to the silence core of my being comes best from wandering through an isolated natural setting until I get into a hypnagogic state of silence. While this usually happens during the awake to sleep transition, I find I can now achieve it in a waking state and still function safely. Go on YouTube and search for meditative practices and you will find literally thousands of techniques that will get you to your transcendent self. I’m sure they are all good and all work for many people. My advice, find something that works for you. There is no one correct way. They are all correct ways if they work. But do find a way to that peaceful inner place. Back to the NOW!
When we hurt, it is because we dwell on something that has happened to us – an insult, an emotional letdown, something we planned that didn’t work out, our life taking off in some chaotic direction leaving us scared and vulnerable. The list could go on, and I’m sure you all have your bad memories of things that hurt you. But here’s the kicker, it all happened, yet you continue, for years, to continue to be hurt by the very same event(s). Not only that, you bring all that hurt to the table with you every time you get into a situation and then expect it (often unconsciously) to all to happen again and again – and guess what, your subconscious obliges, after all, it is what you are projecting out into the universe that you want! Greed, Hated, Jealousy, Anxiety, are all symptoms of your past hurts coming back out. When you do this you literally live in the past and then project into the future from where you are now. Only rarely, do you enjoy the present moment. A law of the universe, you have FREE-WILL, and everything you do, you choose at some level.
Imagine you suddenly had amnesia, what would you worry about? You might have some mild anxiety about wondering if there was something to worry about, but nothing from your past is there to hurt you. It’s all gone. You don’t have anything in the future to worry about because you don’t have any memories about what might go wrong, or even right for that matter. Everything about NOW is a blank slate, just as it is for a newborn child. When you have no memories, you have NO judgment about anything for it is all new. You also have NO Attachment because you haven’t had time to develop any attachments or any long-term beliefs, you just exist in the now as it happens. You also lose the need to Control anything, for without judgments or attachments, you don’t need to have anything go your way to fit your non-existent beliefs or non-formed habits about things to be done in a certain way. You just trust that things will happen as they happen and observe curiously. You don’t have any preconceived notions about anyone so you accept them on whatever terms they present to you. I’m sure our indigenous ancestors had their drama’s but I doubt they lived them a whole lifetime. They were connected to the natural world and each other in ways we cannot recall anymore.
As Anthropologist Wade Davis notes, “Our way of life, inspired in so many ways, is not the paragon of humanity’s potential.” We are fast becoming a globalized and homogeneous technological world. Some unique culture in the world is being lost almost daily. In this homogenization, we are also becoming increasingly polarized and that simply serves to create extreme ideologies, which I might add are extreme addictions to a set of beliefs which are fundamentalist in nature. That is inflexible, dogmatic and self-proclaimed, “the only one Right way.” Go back to my earlier posts for my views on that idea!! Another post needed about how our ancestors got on together (and where they didn’t occasionally, which is also good to know as we move forward). But first, a little more deeper insight into the workings of our world (and how religion got us to hate ourselves).
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