Enlightenment @ MindSay

My mind hurts and my body aches. The energy I have exerted in thought has left me fatigued and with a dizziness of sight. I pose again with reiterating thoughts if it’s meaningful, is there purpose, and now is it worth it? Have I allowed myself to be trapped in a world of abstractness and candy cane fantasies of what should be? This where I begin to become consumed with thoughts of escapism. Could I leave all this behind and be content with new directions in life or thought? Do I need new context or some basis on which to judge my work and goals? If it comes to light that all this has been or becomes a matter of vanity and egoistic fulfillment I will retire myself and my thoughts as well as destroy any material that I feel to be inauthentic or done in vain. My wrestling with these ideas has come from a teetering and pursuit of finding activist and conscious individuals who understand the world in a deeper context outside of themselves. As I sit in University classes listening to other peers and professors, I realize that the worlds they live in are the same physical areas as everyone, but the realities are far more disparate (in some abstractness) than probably realized. The propositions of having the thought of the non-scholarly person (in this sense I mean someone with out the collegiate certificate) enter into consideration with regards to the issues and topics seems confounded to most. Why do we leave out those that we are working to help or understand? We cannot be caged mice and look through the glass walls of our cage with a safeness and abstinence from the others outside. We rest in comfort without risks. We fear consequences and participate in a menial comatose life of conformity and comfort. What happens if we only do one great thing to change the world? Is that not enough? If we never let the world, not academic world, change us how will we ever change the world. We must experience, not always vicariously through publications, but experience the things we fear the most. We must experience the negative consequences to experience the positive consequences. When we become awakened and conscious then we become enlightened. This need not be with academic facts or knowledge, but the truth of knowing ourselves. Once we know ourselves then we know the world in a very different light as almost if for the first time. When we reach a small moment of consciousness it is at first unsettling, but then it settles in with a calmness and feeling true to the essential being or self. No orgasmic flow will match the intensity of an enlightened moment of consciousness of the world and of the self. This can be sought during a time of relation with another. Enlightenment comes in a sense of calmness in looking at the person as if for the first time. When we are able to become enlightened and sustain such enlightenment then we begin to see and appreciate the things around us and the people we come in contact with. That first moment will be sustained and repeated each time you gaze up your significant other, taste a piece of fruit, or smell the morning air. Perhaps my thoughts are just thoughts. Take what you will if you read them, but take the most valuable piece that influences you or strokes a particular thought. The world is what it seems and is elusive in what it is. Find in your world a purpose and meaning of what you do with some consciousness of how you are

Man has but the simple task of balance.  Balance is not the same as moderation.  That balance entails the unique and tumultuous duty of acting in a way that brings neither extreme or fanaticism nor subjugation.  We act in ways that fulfill consumption.  This may be food, sex, alcohol, reading, etc..  Consumption fuels the inner desire we have for something.  Eckhart Tolle discusses the idea of the ego as being the barrier to enlightenment and stillness.  Hannah Arendt would refer to conditioning, but it becomes a quandary of sorts in understanding the function of conditioning (separate from that of influence).  Man produces conditions, yet he is subject to being a product of conditions.  It seems an inescapable dialectic of life.  To what degree, if any, can we escape conditioning without providing conditions by which to escape previous conditions?  Since we cannot seem to escape conditions and conditioning we must work within them to understand their influence and determinism in imbalance.  Balance is our continuous struggle and reward in life.  We maintain an understanding of our consumption as being appropriated in moderation in order to implement balance that is neither starvation nor gluttony.  This process of balance does not only occur within ourselves but also with ourselves and nature, individually and collectively.  There is not centerfold which holds higher regard than the other because in the cosmic illumination that extends beyond our understanding we are but workers.  What are we working towards?  This remains a question of life and a collective question for humanity.  Man has been given the unfortunate ability of emotion, love and hate, which predicates most of his feelings and willfulness to act.  The balance is to not fall into the extremist disillusionment of fanatical love or hate.  A man who has all the love for the world one day can awake with the bitter taste of hate on his lips the next morning.  Man fails to understand balance and partake in healthy emotional consumption.  When man fails to moderate such consumptions he becomes consumed by it and no longer assumes the role as consumer but product.  He becomes a product with extremism and narrowness of thought.  His balance has shifted from one terminal point to another.  If becomes consumed then he may become confused and unable to discern balance fearing that one movement will shift from one terminal point to another.  Perhaps this manic imbalance is why people struggle with life.  They have been conditioned to allow consumption to consume them and thus are no longer masters of their consumption but products of it.  They are oppressed by the ego as they try to fulfill it but it is an unhappy bitch.  It takes what it wants and destroys, sometimes, violently what it discards.  Man's responsibility is to understand that neither peace nor war can ever sustain man.  It is utopian to believe in sustained peace and abominable to believe in sustained war.  Man will always feud.  His feud will primarily be with himself.  He projects his internal conflict outwardly and thus begins the cycle of providing a condition under which others are conditioned.  It is with moderation, compromise, mediation that we can come to an understanding of balance within ourselves and humanity.  As we look for answers to the world’s problems and degradation of humanity, we must look at the consumption of one and the ill conceived product of being consumed.  When you can balance yourself you can project a balance proposition for conditioning and thus retract the ill fated cycle of extremism and teetering form one terminal point to another.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

Unless rooted and grounded in love, (not just a spiritually deficient, lust-confused physical notion of love, but love that is the selfless, exponential sharing of ones humanity; love which extends vertically and expresses laterally; love which has no tense, neither past, present nor future but is unconditional in every aspect of its existence), unless anchored in this understanding of love, even the height of sincerity rarely prepares us to cope with and eventually resolve the things that lie waiting to be unearthed just beneath the surface of our conscious existence.   Those things which, consequently, are the irrevocable reasons for and the ultimate causes of our need to don our “mask”, yet are barely perceptible and can only  be exposed by embarking on a journey of self discovery, those longed to be realized things which have submerged our true selves.

 

 Such was the mindset that provided the impetus for my personal journey.  Here are some recent results from my ongoing explorations:  Memories of past experiences that undoubtedly shaped my psyche’ are becoming clearer with each day’s subterranean probing, revealing with overwhelming implication how all of my decisions and every choice settled upon, were the direct result of impressions made by everything that ever happened to me. All the potent words I ever read or ever heard, all the touches I ever felt or didn’t feel (because they were denied me), all the unkindness my young spirit endured, all the devaluing, undeserved retorts, jeers, jibes, taunts and criticisms ,every omission of much deserved, empowering kindness, applause and affirmations that were my birthright simply by virtue of my humanness and my entitlement as a citizen of the planet, all of this, for better or for worse, impacted my emotional and psychological development and consequently, my self image and my behavior.

 

I have a vivid memory from a time years ago of being on a hike in a wonderful old woods just outside Cuyahoga Fall, Ohio.  These woods were near the beautiful lush green rolling hills I use to roam on horseback every summer in my teen years while vacationing on a family farm.  This one day in particular, a group of friends and I were seeking out old trails in the woods we had never explored when suddenly the trail we were on ended in a steep overhanging rock face with a 10 to 12 ft drop to the resumption of the trail.  The guys in the lead decided to do the 'macho' thing and make the jump rather than go all the way back to a juncture.  They landed safely with no broken bones and none the worse for wear...not so with the girl that followed behind them...in addition to some minor head injuries, she broke her leg in three places...owwww...that was enough to turn the rest of our group around for the long hike back for help.  I've never forgotten standing at the top of that cliff, impervious to the goading, trying to decide whether to jump or not...she, on the other hand, having grown impatient with the time I was taking to make a decision, pushed ahead of me and leapt into the air garnering cheers from the boys on the ground below.  I've never been exactly comfortable with my indecisiveness not being sure whether it was wisdom or fear that accounted for it and ever since I’ve sorely hated the notion of being perceived as afraid (this was a twofold self-indictment because I didn’t want to appear to be a coward to my friends and I couldn’t reconcile within myself being unwilling to take a leap of faith).  I've often thought that maybe she made the most worthwhile decision...perhaps her willingness to risk life and limb was worth what she gained in self respect...after all, broken bones do heal...the wounded psyche', well, I’m not so sure. 

 

The moral of this story is:  Until issues are resolved, we’re usually left mired in a maze of worthless, illogical, unproductive regret, developmentally hampered spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.

 

lovespirit

At a visit to my friend John's tiny hovel in Ames in the fall of 1974 I read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin from cover to cover in a single sitting, unable to put it down until I had finished.

“Telling the truth is not easy,” Gaskin wrote. “It’s easier than the alternative, but it’s not easy.”

For many people the commitment to truth and their practice of it, Gaskin explained in his book, started or stopped depending on what he called the social difficulty of the truth. You had to become unattached to the whole universe, Gaskin said, so that you really did not care, and at that point you would be unattached even to yourself, so that one mind at a time you could change the universe.

“But it means you have got to let go of everything,” he explained. “You have got to let go of caring who you are.”

This, Gaskin more than implied, he himself had accomplished.

“I am not going to hide anything,” Gaskin promised. “You can look into my head and see everything there is to see.”

Gaskin would look into you that way, too, he explained, and when both you and he were open and unattached then the two would become as one. When you did that, really did it, then—bang—you experienced mystic fusion, the mind’s connection to all minds, to big mind, and, yes, if you preferred, to god, and this awakening to awareness and consciousness was enlightenment and realization.

Illumination—

Ho!

“It comes down absolutely convincing to you, in your terms, answering the questions that you have asked all your life, and giving you every wish that you have ever had, you see, and that is how you know when you see it,” Gaskin explained, “you know it because it is your childhood dreams.”

But he had nothing to boast about, he said.

“What came on to me came from God,” he wrote, “and I’m just really happy that it came on to me. It answered all my wishes, all my childhood dreams, it gave me everything I wanted. I lack for nothing. I lack for nothing at all.”

This experience, it seemed, Gaskin credited mainly to telling the truth. Though there were many doors to enlightenment and to god, he explained, he himself had one day simply decided to try to tell the truth always and to aspire always to be honest, and it had been that aspiration, vow, and practice that had opened for him the door to god. Others, too, could pass through, he insisted, and all that was necessary was for them to decide that in fact they did indeed want to do it and to decide to start working at it.

“You can change your mind and decide right now to tell the truth,” he wrote.

“Anybody can.”

Satori: a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment. The word literally means "to understand".

 

With satori is there is no bell, no light, no warning whistle. There is no ‘lead in’. It just happens. You cannot chase it down, learn it or possess it by any humanly means. It will, however, kick you in the butt while you’re standing in the express line at the grocery store if it so decides. And, on these occasions of clarity, it will without hesitation throw you for a loop. It’s one thing when you make the move for more knowledge, another when the shift is simply made.  

 

In life, when you choose not to get comfortable, you often have to wade into places, things, situations that are foreign. It feels awkward- like getting used to a new pair of shoes. The other shoes were comfortable… but worn… and it was time for them to go. Sometimes you decide to go with a different type of shoe altogether- and then things really get awkward.

 

Wait- how did I end up on shoes?

 

I don’t know but, anyway, sometimes, you just get ‘put there’. No that’s incorrect. You ask for one thing and get something else altogether that’s even better. Last night- all I can say is… satori. A great big moment of satori and I am on the other side of the looking glass. Awkward? Oh man, you have no idea.

 

But the nice thing about awkward is it’s temporary. When you decide to accept new knowledge, new situations, new anything- it won’t be long before you get into the groove of it. Then, after time, it becomes last year’s ‘shoes’ and you move on again. But you have to remember to approach the apprehension you feel about it all with enthusiasm because new situations/outlooks are always about being prepared for something better. Remember that: BETTER. Not worse. That’s why it should never bother a person to move forward in their life. It won’t be negative unless you want it to be. If you don't know the universal rule it's: if you dislike shit sandwiches, then don’t bring them to the potluck.

 

Nonetheless, that period of lucidity can be a doozy because you’re readjusting what you knew with what you know. Or, maybe actually what you've always known- kind of like going back to your original default factory settings after a lifetime of tweaking and modification maybe. However you want to look at it, satori is one of those experiences that packs one hell of a bitchslap. If you're smart, you'll say thank you.