I looked at an earlier post, and noticed I had referenced my political blog, which is of late rather dormant. Having changed consciousness, I can no longer indulge myself in the ramblings of my ego, and the expense of others, no matter how easy they make it to do so.
To the Being: I noticed this morning that the being of meditation, as I refer to it, has four distinct aspects. The head, the foot, the body, and the essence. For the first time I realized that the essence is what makes the being alive. And that what separates the foot and head is awareness. What I mean by that is that metaphorically, we can get stuck in doing, which is what the feet represent, or thinking, what the head represents. We can also go overboard on what they are in the verse themselves, the renunciations and/or devotion, which as an expression of ego becomes false humility. Aestheticism has been used as an escape device by many for centuries, if not millenia.
It's the body, awareness, that brings it all together for the foot and head. That daily awareness, that nowness of every moment in all it's mundaneness, it's ordinariness. Nothing seemingly sacred, or WOW! about it. It's just the moment by moment of living with the dish washing, folding laundry, buying groceries, going to work, and doing that work. For example, last night I was in class at Officer Academy. A former district volunteer has re-joined, and he was a former Lieutenant, which is what I am testing for. Technically, he's been in the district much longer, has the officer experience, and so for the most part stands a much better chance of being the next Lieutenant at our station than I do. So I caught myself thinking about the future I cannot predict as if it were a done deal already. The other guy might be trying for captain. He might move. He might a lot of things, and so might I. What I want you to see though, is that this mental predicting and calculating I was doing was brining me down, bumming me out. My emotional state was responding to my mental structures. I felt like this class was a colossal waste of time. All based on speculations of my mind. I wasn't being now, and I knew that it would affect my ability to learn the night's mundane lesson. Being now is my inner purpose, and will reveal my outer purpose, which may not involve the fire district at all. Honestly, it's a bit hard to wrap my head around that thought. My ego doesn't like that notion.
A paradox: this form world we refer to as reality, is quite empty. Not just if we hang our identity on it in what ever shape: a political identification, a religious identification, an identification around an illness, or a hobby, or a vocation. Take me for example. I could say I am a carpenter, a father, a husband, a firefighter/EMT, an event organizer, a writer, a Buddhist, a liberal, and drummer. All of that is nonsense if that is what we think makes us what we are. Another aspect that nature teaches us about reality reinforces this. Look into space tonight. What do you see? Lots and lots of stars. So many we say they outnumber the grains of sand, too many to count, whatever. And then visit the Hubble telescope web site and find out how many more thousands of galaxies have been discovered in the tiniest spots of space by focusing on one little area for 10 days. More stars! More galaxies! But wait a moment. What are those stars existing in, which is so much more vast than the number of stars? That's right: empty space. And what do all the little sub-atomic parts exist in that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the cells that make up the organs that make up the you and me of this world? That's right.
Empty space.
If you removed the empty space from the uncountable atoms that make up our physical reality, we would be incredibly small. Most of this form reality, this physical world we live in, is empty space. And we focus a lot of attention on this physical world, which is the only reality that succumbs to degradation.
So we have a meditation body, complete, and the essence of it all, that life giving force is, well, something I really have yet to figure out. I do know, that it resides in the mind. The consciousness, that luminous reality beyond form. I like the phrase, "...the inseparability of samsara and nirvana."
Say wha? That's right. They are inseparable because they both occur in the same place: our consciousness, or mind. If we remove the obscurations from our mind, we have nirvana. We move from the state of obscuration, samsara, to nirvana. A journey of a thousand lifetimes and we may never take a step out of the home town! Realizing this in itself will be the first step in that journey. And one result of that journey will be significant changes in the physical reality of our lives. Some of this truth is explained in the movies The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know?
To conclude, being all monkish, and aesthetic, or "humble," are not what we are after. Those become religious, or spiritual identifications, and egoic expressions. Without that ordinary dayness, that body of awareness in the mundane, brings the head and foot together, and adding that essence which sees the emptiness, metaphorically and literally, in the form reality, will bring your meditation being into a higher state.
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