Wednesday, December 2, 2009

I Like My Distractions

Q: I like my distractions - my wife, my kids, my work, my hobbies. Actually I am rather happy unless I think about the stuff you talk about and think I ought to seek something else. Eternal happiness eludes me, quite frankly.

MM: Then you are already wise.

Why Distraction?

Q: You say the we seek re-union through distraction. I don't understand that.

MM: We become separated from infinite peace and serenity, and all-knowing oneness through our senses, in other words through being in our bodies, and consequently through our mind. We are not our bodies , or mind - there is much more - or maybe I should say - much, much less to us than meets the eye. We cannot imagine who or what we truly are beyond our physical experience of ourselves. Therefore we seek happiness through what we think will make us happy, but this is all based on what we think will satisfy us.

By that we usually mean what satisfies us in some form through our senses. Health, wealth, pleasure, power - you name it - but none of it will work for long because it can never take us to our original, and eternal, state. That state only needs to be rediscovered by taking away everything that is of body or mind. That is who we are beyond doubt, time, space, or experience.

It sounds mysterious and it is. Yet it is the most natural of all. You could say that our true nature is God. That is re-union.

Distraction

Q: I feel distracted by so many things and it does not leave me much time for relaxing and meditation. Somehow, even though I know I should, I don't seem to be able to change it.


MM: Regarding distraction - we seek re-union and mistake many things as ways to get there - even if it is just people we don't want to say "No" to out of fear of losing them - until our eyes open...


I found this on Wikipedia of all places. Sometimes you just have to wait until you can handle the truth. Then change is automatic and not something "you do", but something that naturally happens in your life.


A striking example of Vipashyana was provided by a student of mine in her early twenties who had been meditating for some time. Since her late teens, she had been a devotee of "raves," dance parties held at enormous warehouses in our area, attended by literally thousands of young people. Well-known bands are engaged, the music is loud, alcohol and drugs are sometimes consumed, and the dancing goes on until dawn. The atmosphere is said to be usually "mellow" and fun, and the young folks are drawn back to the parties again and again. My student was attending a rave one Saturday night and, for no apparent reason, wanted to feel the cool, the space, and the silence of the night. She left the huge warehouse where the party was happening and walked across an adjacent field onto a a hillock beyond. Turning around, she looked at the building, throbbing with music and blazing with light, packed as it was by several thousand ravers. Suddenly, without warning, it was as if her eyes were opened for the first time and she "saw" the party--so she reported--in all its naked reality. She saw the tremendous desperation of the people inside, their loneliness and hunger, how they had all come there seeking to escape from their suffering. She saw how they had all become predators, preying upon one another, in a fruitless search for happiness. It was an endless game in which, she too, was involved. Overcome by the sorrow and hopelessness of the situation, she broke down and wept. She came to talk to me because, as she said, this experience had shown her something not only about raves, but about life in general, about the many things people do out of their own pain and misery. She told me that she felt, for the first time, the meaning of suffering. She saw her experience as a direct product of her meditation practice and her commitment to her spiritual path. Her experience made her realize, again for the first time, that her meditation was the one anchor in her life and that the spiritual journey she had undertaken was about having her eyes opened, in perhaps shocking and painful ways, to the underpinnings of the seemingly normal, everyday world.








Tuesday, December 1, 2009

I Love My Body

Q: I love my body - except for a few parts I'd improve if I could. But mostly I am rather vain and pleased and it gives me a lot of power to be beautiful. Otherwise I consider myself a spiritual person, but I worry about being so happy about how I look and the time I even spend to make myself look even better with make-up and clothes. Should I fight this and try to overcome this to be a better person?

MM: If you try to fight it, it becomes stronger. You will become vain about being un-vain. You will become vain about your "inner beauty". Just notice the tension in yourself when you are showing off your beauty or standing in front of the mirror trying to make yourself even more beautiful and just relax this particular tension. There is beauty there today, which will disappear in old age - you need to find the knack how to not identify with the beauty today, and the ugliness of tomorrow in old age. Otherwise you have no freedom.

Q: But how do you do that?

MM: Look at your first statement; "I love my body". In a way you are lucky, as most people will say "I hate my body". Both are equally silly tough. Who loves who? Who is it who can say I love or hate - "my" body, or somebody, for that matter?

Is it the body itself that you think is "you". This "I" that the ocean, for example, does not have. The ocean would never say "I hate, or love, my waves". This "I" is foolishness. Without "I", there is beauty or ugliness, but you are free. Free from "I", and all that comes with it - the expectations of beauty and the disappointments of ugliness.

Q: But then, if you tell me that way I am then free, who is free versus un-free?

MM: Precisely!!!

Q: There is no one there!?

MM: ... and there is no "there" there either :-)