“We’ve been on this journey a long time together. We’ve gone through a lot of stages. And just as in any journey, some people have dropped along the way, have had enough for this round. Others have been waiting for us to catch up. The journey passes through the seven valleys, the seven kingdoms, the chakras, the planes of consciousness, the degrees of faith. Often we only know we’ve been in a certain place when we pass beyond it, because when we’re in it, we don’t have the perspective to know, because we’re only being. But as the journey progresses, less and less do you need to know. When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey toward simplicity, toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey out of time, leaving behind every model we have had of who we think we are. It involves a transformation of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It’s a journey that takes us from primary identification with our body, through identification with our psyche, on to an identification with our soul, then to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
Because many of us have traversed this path without maps, thinking that it was unique to us because of the peculiar way in which we were traveling, often there has been a lot of confusion. We have imagined that the end was reached when it was merely the first mountain peak—which yet hid all of the higher mountains in the distance. Many of us got enamored because these experiences along the way were so intense that we couldn’t imagine anything beyond them. Isn’t it a wonderful journey that at every stage we can’t imagine anything beyond it? Every point we reach is so much beyond anything up until then that our perception is full and we can’t see anything else but the experience itself…
Eventually we begin to recognize that the journey may be stretching out for a longer span than we thought it was going to. We come out of a philosophical materialistic framework in which we are totally identified with our bodies and the material plane of existence—when you’re dead, you’re dead—so get it while it’s hot. And more is better and now is best, because we don’t know when the curtain will come down and it will all be over. And better not to think about that curtain because it’s too frightening. Where along the journey do we begin to suspect that that model of how it is, is just another model? And that this lifetime is but another part of a long, long journey?
In the Buddhist teachings, there is an analogy of how long we’ve been doing this. The image is that of a solid granite mountain six miles long, six miles wide, six miles high. Every hundred years a bird flies by the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak and runs the scarf over the mountain. In the length of time it takes for the silk scarf to wear away the mountain, that’s how long we’ve been doing it. Round after round after round. It puts a different time perspective on this one life, doesn’t it? Not all of those rounds are on this plane; not all of those rounds are in human form. But all of those rounds are a part of a journey that has direction.
Sooner or later the realization comes that nothing we can think of is going to do it. Nothing we experience is it—because our minds think of things, and we and the things are separate, and there is a little veil, like a trillionth of a second that exists between us and the thing we’re thinking of. And when we sense something or collect an experience, there’s the distinction between the experience and the experiencer, and that’s a very thin veil. It doesn’t matter how thin it is—it’s like steel. It always separates us from where it’s happening.
When at last the despair is deep enough, we cry out. We cry inwardly or outwardly, “Get me out of this! I want to get out! I give up. I don’t know. I surrender.” At that moment, when the despair is genuine enough, the veil separates a bit. I’m not talking about wanting to want to give up. I’m not even talking about wanting to give up. I’m talking about actually giving up…
When, as the Third Chinese Patriarch of zen suggests, we set aside opinion and judgment because we see they’re just digging us deeper into our hole, we surrender our own knowing. Now, that’s really hard, because the whole culture is based on the worship of the golden calf of the rational mind while other levels of knowing, like what we call intuition, have practically become dirty words in our culture…
Some of us, I am sure, recognize that game. When Einstein said, “I did not arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind,” many of his colleagues thought him quite eccentric - because the rational mind has been the high priest of the society. Realize that it’s merely a tiny system and that there are meta-systems and meta-meta-systems, in which only when we transcend our logical analytic mind can we even enter the gate.”
~ Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill: Awakening to Oneness (1976)
No comments:
Post a Comment