HOW NATURE WORKS

There was a snail down on the walkway this morning.  This was its lucky day, it must have been thinking, if it could think, because it happened upon a fellow snail that had just gotten stepped on by a passerby.

The first snail yielded to its carnivore tendencies, as snails will do when herbaceous things are scarce, so the collapsed second snail was now escargot to the first one.

But luck is deceiving.  The first snail was now directly in line to get stepped on by the next passerby.

DOOR OF MYSELF

I am at myself.  I need only step in now.

MEDITATION POINT

Nothing lasts longer than nothing.

FREE FALL

We are in a free fall through time, never arriving anywhere.

IDEAS OF ONESELF

A person is naturally happy.  He is unnaturally unhappy.  He finds that the more ideas he has about himself, the more unhappy he becomes.

His ideas about himself come from his thinking mind.  He identifies with his thinking mind.  He thinks he is his thinking mind.  His thinking mind thinks it is him.

He is so unhappy.

RECALLING A MEDITATION

There is a lot going on in the outside world, in the world of the senses, in the forest, but it is peaceful and calm here in the center, in the clearing that is “whatever-this-is.”

Here is the portal through which “whatever-this-is” awakened in me, this person, seven years ago.  May it grow ever more present in me, this person, continue to unfold, to blossom, to deepen, to widen.

After all this is its life, not my life, not this person’s life.  Its many lifetimes, its many journeys, including the current seventy-one years and counting journey, have been that it may realize its destiny, which is to awaken.

I, this person, am proud to have been its vehicle, and as it happens it final vehicle. I, this person, this biology will die one day, but it will not, nor will it ever be born into this world of form again, not as the subtle body it has been while being me, nor as any of the other incarnations it has been over the centuries.  Its task is complete, its mission accomplished, the deed done.

At the same time, I, this person, am well aware that I, this person, am one of the rare ones to have actually experienced the awakening of “whatever-this-is.”  It is said that it takes thousands, even millions of incarnations, as both insentient and sentient beings, that is as objects and then as living organism, for the awakening to occur.  That it has occurred in my lifetime, in this person’s lifetime, is humbling indeed.

But with this comes a responsibility to maintain the awakened state, because all too easily it can be smothered over by the outside world, the world of the senses, the forest, the thinking mind and egoic self, and the workings of the physical body.

But “whatever-this-is” has come too far for me, this person, to sabotage it by becoming so distracted as to lose the state.  Accordingly, I, this person, will not permit that to happen. Accordingly I, this person, will maintain the awakened state faithfully. 

FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

Forgetting to remember has become a problem for me.  I need to remember to remember more.  But remember what?  That I no longer exist.

No longer existing is a state much coveted by Buddhists, the “blowing out” of self as the Buddha termed it.  I still exist physically, this is to say, but my egoic self, my idea of myself, is gone.  Egoic selves are an identity, anathema to us Buddhists.

But what is not understood  is that it takes years to come about.  There are Buddhists who never do experience it.  The reason is, they think it is achieved intellectually when it is the opposite.

I was not prepared for it, not as such, when it happened to me, even though I have known of it for centuries.  But, alas, my egoic self has collapsed now, has toppled over, has imploded, and quite convincingly so.  There is no more me.

WHEN

When did I run out of time?  When did the scales tip, did the hourglass turn over?

The end is in the beginning, the saying goes, so the day I crawled into the world I was already out of time.

But then the days became weeks, the weeks months, and the months years. It appeared I was immortal.

But then my immortality ran out of time, too.

ACUTELY AWARE

He was acutely aware of it.  He was not the same person because of it.  He would like to say that it was spiritual in character, but it was not.

He was compelled to go there all the same, even as, seemingly, he never was not there.  Like the needle of a compass is drawn to a magnet, he had no choice but to go there.

NOT HIS OWN

There was more of him here now, an expanded consciousness somehow.  He did not know what happened, how it came about, except that he did not do it.  His life was not his own, he was reminded.  His life had a life of its own.

GRAY-FACED MAN

There is a gray-faced man in his 70’s that I see every morning on my way to the market.  He shuffles along in his flip-flops, his arms folded across his chest, and wearing no coat to speak of.  His voice is raspy due to his constant talking to himself. 

Staring straight ahead, he notices me out of the corner of his eye, as he has done for years now.  I say good morning to him without fail, and he reciprocates in his way, whereupon he returns to his muttering. 

Why exactly I was prompted to greet him from the first day I encountered him, I do not know.  I felt compassion toward him at the very least, as he is clearly mentally challenged. 

Since we are crossing paths so often now, twice a day sometimes, the first that has ever happened, I sense that it is more than just synchronicity, meaningful coincidence.  Could it be that he and I have known each other many times, as different people, in our past lives?  We still recognize each other through the fog. 

The possibility occurred to me then that everyone I meet in my day-to-day life, and have ever met in my countless everyday lives over the centuries, I have met before.  Day in and day out the same people, different identities, but the same people.

This morning I stopped the gray-faced man and asked him, in the midst of his mumbling, who he was talking to, and he replied “you.”  Well, that was encouraging I thought to myself, but it was too obvious.  I then saw that I was not the “you” he was referring to.  Now I was even more encouraged.

WHOLE POINT OF LIFE

Kant proclaimed that we cannot penetrate beyond the tremendous dead wall of reason.  That we can go beyond reason, however, is the first teaching of Vedanta philosophy. 

Vedanta seeks, and has successfully found, that which is higher than reason, that which takes us beyond the limitations of reason. 

What proof is there that a higher state than reason exists?  If we accept, for just a moment, that there is no higher state, what possibly could explain the world?  What purpose could the world possibly have otherwise?

If we believe that there is nothing higher than reason, then we have missed the whole point of life.

SAME ATMAN

Vivekananda stressed that in every human being and in every animal, no matter how weak or wicked, great or small, resides the same omnipresent, omniscient Atman.

The difference between the person and the smallest animal is not the Atman but the particulars of the manifestation.

The brotherhood of humankind so-called, is more correctly stated as the brotherhood of all life.  “Thus the sage, knowing that the same Atman inhabits all bodies, respects every body as such,” the scriptures teach.

The Atman goes along from birth to death to rebirth until it has manifested itself to perfection, whereupon it ceases reincarnating.

Perfection is the goal of the Atman, for with it comes its liberation.

APPEAL OF BUDDHISM

The Buddha held that there is no God and no Atman.   But how did he arrive at this?  His thinking mind determined it.  But it was the Buddha’s thinking mind only.

Other thinking minds could just as easily have decided otherwise.  Indeed, many did, not the least of which were Vedantist thinking minds.

But that is not the point.  The aim of Buddhism is the end of suffering, and a surefire way to achieve this is to contend that no God or Atman exists.  It does not matter whether or not this is fact.  The effect is the same.

No longer, for example, are you frustrated by not being able, seemingly, to get close to God, or God to get close to you.  If He does not exist, that solves that.

You may have mystical moments when you think you feel His presence, but such moments are unreliable, unpredictable.  No matter how conscientious and determined you are in your spiritual practice, it does not seem to matter.  God is hard to come by.

Why put yourself through all that, the Buddha argued, when, by disengaging from it, you get relief?  Indeed, you do get relief when you detach from it.  Such is the appeal of Buddhism.

PARTIALITY

There is partiality in the universe, from what we can see.  One person is born happy, and another unhappy; one is rich and another poor.  Then there is cruelty also.  One animal tears another to pieces, and every person tries to get the better of the next guy.

If this world is a creation of a God, then that God is worse than cruel, worse than any devil that human beings have ever imagined.  How can we conclude otherwise?

No, says Vedanta, it is not the fault of a God that this apparent partiality exists, that this competition and cruelty exists.

But how then can this difference of some being born happy and some unhappy be explained?  It did not spring out of nothing, for that cannot be.

Who is happy and who is unhappy has nothing to do with it, Vedanta says.  It is not something in this life but something in a person’s previous life, or lives, that is to blame.

This is to say, each of us arrives here with a past.  We each come here to work out our own past deeds, and in this way each of us is the maker of his own fate.  We have no one to blame, or to thank, but ourselves.

WHEN THE LIGHTS COME ON

We see the world as it actually is all of a sudden, the truth of the world, the falsity of it, how make-believe it is.  The illusion of it. 

The fact is, we exist only relatively, in a world that exists only relatively. 

Some of us are so spellbound by the world that we never do have this revelation.

Many lifetimes may be needed for this ability to appear in us.  Only then will the lights come on.  Only then will we see that there is nothing here, not even ourselves.

FOREVER SOMEBODY ELSE

At what point does the shift occur?  When do we become somebody else?  There is not just one shift, but endless shifts, the truth is.  We change constantly.  From the moment we are born until the moment we die, our every breath is a shift. We are always somebody else, have never been anybody but somebody else.