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Monday, June 18, 2007

Feeding the soul

I felt that this was a sobering observation, and will take a good deal of pondering. After all, much of my work over the last six years has been aimed at understanding how to create physical inner conditions to overcome negativity. It appears nonetheless that the emotions -- that is, our ordinary emotions, which are part of the standard equipment this body comes with -- may never acquire complete immunity from the difficulties imposed by the observation of reality in experience.

This stands in direct contrast to an energy process that can draw in material and fill the Being in such a way that negativity is unable to arise. That process is definitely possible, but as we are today, even if the process is known, even if the method is understood, it is not permanent and it is not invulnerable.

Perhaps it is possible to reach a point where our ordinary emotional state does not feel negative towards the prospect of death. I do not know the answer to this question. I have seen an awful lot of theoretical statements about it over the years. None of them seem to be much more than that, because for every single human being, the experience of death and all of the ideas that surround it are completely subjective until we come up against it ourselves. That is the proving place, the point where we are tested. Watching the person who trained me and empowered me to undertake my own work come up against this point, and seeing the very sober truths that she is confronting in regard to it, gives me pause.

The only thing that leads me to believe that even this can be overcome is that I used to have a terrible fear of death. Encountering states within my own being that did not admit of the possibility of negative experience or attitude changed me in the sense that I am not so afraid anymore. I started out my life afraid of dying, and afraid of losing my ego.

Those two things do not look as bad as they used to.

As I have mentioned in other places on this blog, I am reasonably certain that the whole aim of the inner work is to surrender the self in exactly the same manner in which it is surrendered at physical death before physical death actually takes place.

The effort to nourish a new kind of inner unity and fill ourselves with what is needed to achieve that is a mystery in progress. We will know where we are going when we get there.

For now, those of us who are interested can be satisfied with the fact that work is not only available, but also possible.

Taken correctly, every moment of this life feeds the growth of those extraordinary flowers inside each of us. To participate in the nourishment of each bud and to await those glorious moments when our flowers open to release their perfume and attract their pollinators is a magnificent thing.

So let's get on with it.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

romance and myth

One of the traps that I think we fall into is to perceive our life as a story, a myth, a romance that we make up as we go along.

It is true that our life is an adventure in which we never know what will happen next. The unfortunate fact is that the ego tempts us to make up the story line. Just about everybody falls into this trap; we all begin to invent reasons and meanings for everything, and to write scripts not only about how things ought to turn out, but also scripts about how things should have taken place.

We all become the authors--and the victims-- of a perpetual rewrite. We are heroes, we are victims--above all, we are always the central character. Everything revolves around us. The rest of the world is just the backdrop, the canvas upon which we paint a master picture. (Okay, I admit I am mixing metaphors. So sue me.)

This kind of thinking is what leads us to feel regret for the past, and invent relatively absurd fantasies about the future, almost none of which will ever come true. If we learn to observe ourselves, we can see ourselves inventing tiny little fantasies like this all day long. The habit penetrates down to the smallest details of life. It swells up to occupy entire lifetimes.

This morning I was musing that the parable of Don Quixote is pathetic for two reasons. One of them is that he is completely wrapped up in his self invented fantasy of the life of chivalry. He absolutely and irrevocably believes that everything he does, he does for good, and for honor, and that all his actions are noble.

We understand that to him these things are real, and that is why he gains our sympathy. At the same time, we see that he is a complete idiot. He invents one fantastic story after another based on his personal interpretation of events. All of his ideas about things are wrong.

This complete and utter misunderstanding of what life is is one source of pathos.

The second source is how wrong everything keeps turning out. His fantasies lead him to take one colorfully wrong step after another, and he does objective damage in successive situations as he labors under the illusion of doing what is "good. "

There you have it in a nutshell. Every single one of us is Don Quixote.

How can we live in this moment of life without inhabiting a storyline of our own making? How do we separate the bathwater from the baby and throw it out?

Perhaps we have to start from scratch. Every single moment has to become a blank slate, a moment that exists only within this moment.

Pretend there is no story. Pretend that nothing ever happened before this. Pretend that we are characters on the first almost blank page of a novel who have been given an identity, but nothing else. Everything that happens from here on in happens unexpectedly-- incredibly-- and the character must react to it with the most intelligent improvisation and sensitivity he can muster. He has nothing to rely on but his own heart beating, his own being -- who he is, as he is.

Now pretend that that it is like this all the time. Every new second is a new sheet of paper and the character is always a new character. An entire unexplored life is before him, in which anything is possible. Let’s play the devil's advocate --nothing has ever happened before, nothing ever can happen before, because there is no before. And nothing can happen ever after, because there is no ever after.

Happily ever after is a fairy tale.

I agree this sounds impractical. Nonetheless, I believe there is a possibility in front of us to throw away much of what we think we are and much of where we think we come from. We can toss the assumptions and the presumptions and get on with the consumption, that is, the consumption of life from a point of view that begins in an original moment -- a moment as original as the unique and true originality of each moment.

The less baggage we carry with us, the fresher everything seems. If we invest ourselves and our experience of this moment, and accept it with as much joy as we can muster from an attitude that begins from optimism and an inherent faith in the truth of this moment, I think things will weigh us down less.

until tomorrow --

Till the soil, tend the garden, toes in the dirt with joy.