PERPETUAL PREPARATION

We prepare to prepare to prepare to prepare.  Birth is preparation for Pre-K is preparation for kindergarten is preparation for grade school is preparation for junior high school is preparation for high school is preparation for college is preparation for a job is preparation for promotions is preparation for a family, car, and house, is preparation for retirement is preparation for death is preparation for rebirth is preparation for Pre-K, etc.

We never actually finish anything, only apparently.  The events of our lives are like steppingstones across a pond.  Each stone is a completion in a sense, in as much as it is a landing spot, but once reached, that landing spot anticipates the next landing spot; when we reach a stone we don’t just stand there, this is to say.   Indeed, we are ready for, are prepared for, the next stone.

Our assumption is that there is something worthwhile at the end of this line of steppingstones, some grand reward, some payoff, some pot of gold.  Particularly when we are old and facing death the matter occurs to us.  Surely we say, as we look back over our lives, back over our own particular line of stones, it has not all been for naught. 
 
The good news is that, no, it has not all been for nothing.  This much we sense.  The bad news is that we do not know when, or if even, we will know what the payoff is.  We will be prepared, though.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE: A SHORT STORY

What he remembered most about painting houses, as he did in his younger years, was that painting was a direct experience.  There was nothing philosophical about it; painting was not a theory.  It let him feel connected to the world in a way that strictly mental activity did not.

Alas, though, purely mental activity was what he wound up doing after college.  He spent all his time in his head, as a writer, to the extent that he no longer related to the outside world.  Reality for him was his inner world, not the world “out there.”

He came to see himself, in time, not as himself but as the idea of himself.  Anything other was not enough for him; the outside world was not enough.  What mattered was what the idea of himself created, which was poems, one-act plays, short stories, and novels, lots of poems, plays, stories, and novels. 
 
What he was blind to, what the invented self he had become refused to see, was that his thinking and writing was about the real world and not the real world itself.

It helped that his thoughts and words remained unpublished.  But then how could it be otherwise?  Publishers said that his work did not ring true, that it felt contrived, forced, just as he himself had become by then. 
 
Was there a solution?  He knew for his sanity he needed to get back to direct experience.  No, he did not take up house painting again.  Painting houses was a young man’s game, and he was not a young man anymore.

The answer for him was Zen.  Zen was not about thinking and words.  Zen was not about Zen even.  In Zen meditation, for instance, he was not to meditate on something but just meditate.  There was nothing he was to do or feel about Zen.   It was direct experience.

Operating on this level, however, on the intuitive level, he discovered that there was something else going on.  Somebody else was in the room with him, which, to his utter surprise, led to yet another direct experience called God.

TOLLE ON FEAR

"Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life."
― Eckhart Tolle

VIOLENCE BREEDS VIOLENCE

Violence is contagious.  The “Arab Spring” is a prime example, where, to name a few, it has been Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and now Syria/Iraq with ISIS.
   
But violence has been in the air for years in that region, with the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then the flare-ups ongoing between the Palestinians and Israelis.   

Ukraine is now at war with Russian separatists on its eastern border, and while Ukraine is not an Arab country, all the violence to the south of them surely has had an influence.
   
The last time violence was out of control this way was WWI, which led to WWII, which led to the Korean War, which led to the Vietnam War. 
 
Violence, Eckhart Tolle teaches, is perpetuated by those who are “unconscious,” i.e. by those who are identified solely with the egoic self, political and social issues aside.  It is the egoic self that is territorial, prideful, suspicious, and unyielding.

High levels of consciousness, awakening, compassion, are smothered over by the distraction of violence.  People cannot think of higher things when everywhere there is mayhem and killing.

God is seeking to awaken through us, Tolle goes on to say, but our violence gets in the way.  Our violence is not God’s doing or intention.

TAKING THE EDGE OFF

What is the “edge?"  Stress.  Our lives are stressful.  Being engaged in the world, even casually, is stressful.  Even being a hermit, as some of us are, is a strain.  There is no escaping the edge.

There are, however, ways to cope with it.  Drinking martinis, going shopping, taking up boxing, returning to knitting, but surely, we say, there are better ways to deal with it than this.

Meditation is helpful, but who meditates 16 hours a day?  No, it seems like a complete change of mindset is needed. 
 
This is where religion comes in, having faith in something beyond oneself, in something greater than oneself.  This places all responsibility for the way our lives are going onto God usually, or onto the gods, so that we say, “It is God’s will that my life is as it is.”

Karma is another way out.   When our lives take a turn for the worse, or, for that matter, for the better, we say it is our karma at work.  Our past lives are responsible for how things are going for us.
 
A total change of mindset, though, is better, and better still, a full shift in consciousness.  In Vedanta this shift is called awakening. 
 
Awakening is not faith.  Awakening is a spiritual event brought about by conscientious spiritual practice.  Awakening is finding God, and finding God, as Ramakrishna said, is the purpose of life, and what could be more stress-relieving than fulfilling the purpose of life?

THE RIGHT PLACE

We can’t find it if we don’t look for it.  But we’re afraid to look for it.  We’re afraid of what we might find.  We’re afraid that we might find nothing.

But then finally we do look for it.  And, alas, we do find nothing.  And that is because we have looked for it in the wrong place.

But then we question why we want to look for it at all.  What will we gain?

We then ask ourselves is the looking something we want to do, or something we need to do, or something we are required to do.

We can’t find it if we don’t look for it, we remind ourselves again.  Finding it is the objective.  But why do we want to find it?  Who said we have to find it?  And so we stop looking for it once more.

All the while, the right place sits waiting.

PAST ENCOUNTERS

"Haven’t we met before?”  This is the question a guru asked Richard Alpert, a Harvard professor, when Alpert was seeking a spiritual teacher in India.   

Alpert, who went on to become the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, recounted the occasion in his 1971 book, Be Here Now.  The line suggested that the guru had encountered Alpert in a past life.

But now didn’t we all encounter Alpert in a past life and everyone else in the world, only we don’t remember it particularly?

Our not remembering it especially is because of the “sheaths,” or koshas, as they are called in Vedanta, which are located one within the other, and which envelope the Atman in us. 
 
These sheaths, which are the physical body, the life force, the mind, the intellect, and the conditioned consciousness, create the relative self we know ourselves as.

It is our relative self that believes that this current life is the only one we live.   Our relative self cannot see past itself.

Alpert did not say in his book how he responded to the guru's question.  It does not appear that he did.  Then again the guru did not expect him to respond.  Not yet at least.

A DIFFERENT DIMENSION

When we speak of the Atman, we are talking primarily about consciousness.  As all living things, including plants, insects, animals, and humans, contain the Atman, they all have consciousness. 
 
Simple organisms such as vegetation, insects, and smaller animals, have a more contracted consciousness, whereas humans and larger animals have an expanded consciousness.
 
The size of the brain has something to do with it, but it is not the whole story.  The human brain, for instance, is not all that large compared to larger animals such as sperm whales and elephants, but it is considerably more complex.
 
Due to this complexity, the human brain is able to reach the deeper levels of consciousness, the Atman.

There may be other brains which are equally complex, possibly even more so, than the human brain.  Our knowledge is limited to our planet.
 
This is to say, who knows what exists elsewhere in the universe.   Who knows, for that matter, what exists in other dimensions. 
 
The Atman, after all, as Brahman, God, is a different dimension.

GOD IS MOTIONLESS

God is motionless.  We are not.  We are time bound, which means that everything for us ebbs and flows.  Now you see it, now you don’t.  Now God is with us, now God is not.
 
This explains the “dark night of the soul” phenomenon.  The “dark night of the soul” is when, following an intense spiritual period with God, a person suddenly seemingly loses Him. 
 
Accordingly, the person feels abandoned by God, and no matter what he does to regain Him, he cannot seem to do so.  This, in the worst cases, can last for years, until the tide turns again and just as suddenly God is back. 
 
Were we not time bound, we would experience God continuously.  All the coming and going, ebbing and flowing, is happening on our end, not on God’s.

It was Swami Prabhavananda who said, “There is never an instant when God is not with us,” and Meister Eckhart who said, “Nobody at any time is cut off from God,” except to the extent that our time bound condition cuts Him off.