NOTHING LOST/NOTHNG TO FEAR

It's been a long time since I posted anything, I guess I've been internally processing a lot of things that I've not been able to express. My offering for today is my vision of nonduality patched together from many different spiritual perspectives.   Incomplete as it may be, it helps me to keep my eyes on the big picture...and fills me with hope. So here goes: 

Everything on earth is transitory – it’s passing away.  It arises, and falls.  All the things we count on, even heaven and earth, shall pass away….  “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.  The grass withered, and the flower thereof falleth away, But the word of the Lord endureth forever” ( 1 Pet 1:24-25).  

Everything earthly is for a season.  Why do we let these things that pass away have dominion over us?  They come, they go.  But we cling to them…

Everything old is new again.  Nothing is ever really lost…it comes around again to manifest in the natural in a different form.  Nothing is ever worthless, it all has meaning and purpose, but that meaning and purpose is for a season…we just sojourn here… (Ecc. 1:9-11, 3:15).  

If we are all “passing away” but nothing is ever really lost of our essence, death really is swallowed up in victory.  We are a form through which the Life Essence (God) shines, albeit imperfectly.  Each one is different so that the glory of Life is manifested in a different way, from a different perspective, and temporarily (for a season). But when that body passes away, nothing of the essence is lost, because “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecc. 12:7). Since nothing is lost, there is no sting and nothing to fear! 

But the carnal mind (or insert your term of preference here: ego, devil, beast, conditioning, amygdala) is a fear-monger!  And it torments us continually…never shuts up!  That’s why many “relax” by watching TV, playing games – the carnal mind is engaged with something else and is not torturing us with worry and fear.  The carnal mind is the enemy who has taken us captive and drags us to hell to torture us.  “For to be carnally minded is death: but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Rom 8:6).  At the last trump (Rev 11:15) when the beast in us has been defeated and the mind of the Christ reigns in us, we will have rest.  For those who still worship the beast, “The smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever (continually!) and they have no rest day or night” (Rev 14:9-11).  This happens in the very presence of the Lamb (v10), who is there all the time offering rest! 

It’s All Good…

There is an ancient story that tells of a student monk who began to laugh during group meditation and prayer.  The other students, horrified and embarrassed for the monk, hoped that he would stop laughing.  But his laughter grew louder and louder, until the other monks could not help but wonder what the teacher would do in the face of such irreverence.  But to the amazement of all the other monks, the teacher pronounced the laughing monk enlightened!  The monk laughed because he saw that everything is wonderful! Everything does work together for GOOD! It’s Divine play, in a way, but not as in a cruel game.  It’s a game in the sense that we shouldn’t take it so seriously, because nothing is ever really lost. There is really GOOD NEWS!  It’s only a game – there’s nothing to lose and nothing will ever be lost!  We take it all so seriously, and so cause all our own sorrow.  So we can begin to see that suffering and sorrow, although very real, are only for a season, and that everything is perfect and as it should be.  This is the peace that passes all understanding, when we see that there was never anything to fear.  

This is not to make light of the suffering in the world, just because we are in a large place and know that suffering is only for a season.  We need to work very hard to alleviate suffering, for suffering is very real.  

Right now, huge weather pattern changes are taking place, changes that could destroy millions and leave much of our planet frozen solid or an arid wasteland.  And I know it will be okay if even that happens…for nothing is ever lost.  It is all so very real and awe-inspiring; it is all also like a dream or a movie in which we are very involved.  Upon awakening, we will find ourselves in the heart of God.  Death happens, yes, but it has no sting.  There is nothing to fear.  We are on a great adventure, and we go back to where we came from.  What joy, freedom, peace, and rest is found in this knowledge:  nothing is ever lost and there is nothing to fear!

ALLEVIATING SUFFERING

Suffering bothers me....it bothers me a lot. Speaking about suffering and enlightment, in this video Ken Wilber said, "It hurts more; but it bothers you less...When we taste the infinite Absolute of consciousness, the world is seen just as it is—radiant, perfect, and whole. The relative, however, does not cease to be. Quite the contrary, the pains and pleasures of our relative lives are intensified to an unimaginable degree. We have to give ourselves PLENTY of room to feel BOTH: The ABSOLUTE PERFECTION in everything that arises.
..And yet see ONE person starving and you will start crying so hard it will kill you." The more we become aware, the more it does hurt; the more acutely the pain and suffering of all those around us is felt.  At the same time, every manifestation we see around us is sacred and part of the Divine and so nothing is ever lost.  Suffering is of the utmost horror, but not to be taken too seriously because in the end nothing can be harmed at all and even death has no real sting.

From that perspective, we CAN watch everything unfold almost like watching a movie, for even though pain and suffering are very real, they are not the ultimate reality...

Enlightenment is realizing that we are all ONE, all manifestations of the Divine, all sacred, all holy.,,and to treat all "others" as such.  How much suffering in the world would be alleviated if we all treated everything as a part of ourselves?  This is why Jesus said, "As you did it unto the least of these, you did it unto me." Because we are all part of God.

HOW CAN WE KNOW WHAT'S TRUE?

It's been a long time since I posted.  I've been busy thinking about how we can possibly  know what is true and what is not.  And I'm stumped.  One scholar says this, another seemingly equally valid scholar disagrees.  One scientific study may demonstrate one thing, but if a person does further reading, research can usually be found that contradicts the results of the first study...Which one is true?  And how can I, a mere common person without formal scholarly or scientific training, hope to ascertain what is a reliable source among many which seem valid?

The same holds true in Christianity.  There's been a search for the historical Jesus, and many respected scholars have widely differing viewpoints.  Which is true?  There is even a whole field of study (epistemology) that studies how we know what we know, and they don't even seem to know how we can know what we know...

People who study consciousness and the brain maintain that we don't actually perceive the world around us as it really is.  They say, for example, that there is no actual color green, but that light (which has no color) is filtered by our eyes in a certain way that we perceive (with the limited tools at our disposal) as the color green.

Dr. David Eagleman "is a neuroscientist and a New York Times bestselling author. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw."  I recently listened to a  Brain Science Podcast interview with Dr. Eagleman which focused on his most recent book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. (As much as I can ascertain, both Dr. Eagleman and Brain Science Podcast are reputable sources :-). Dr. Eagleman shared the following information:

"In the book I spend a lot of time just sort of deconstructing reality piece by piece, and showing that, as we want to go on this journey of exploring what the heck we’re made out of, the first thing to do is to recognize that what you’re seeing out there is not actually reality. You’re not sort of opening your eyes, and voila, there’s the world. Instead, your brain constructs the world. Your brain is trapped in darkness inside of your skull,  and all it ever sees are electrical and chemical signals. So all the colors you see, and so on, that doesn’t really exist; that’s an interpretation by your brain.

"Just take as a quick example the fact that your eyes are always moving around in these rapid darting movements; and if you did that with a handheld video camera, it would look like a drunk person holding it, and the world would look very shaky. But our world doesn’t look very shaky, because all we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model.  And for that matter, when you blink your eyes and there are 80 milliseconds of blackness there, you don’t notice that, either. Because it’s not actually about what’s coming in the eyes; it’s about your internal construction….

 "…[There’s also what’s called the ‘illusion of truth’  - where people think something’s true just because they have heard it before].  You give people statements to rate the truth value of, and then you bring them back a while later and you give them more statements to say whether they’re true or false, and so on. But it turns out that if you repeat some of the statements from the first time to the second time, just because the people have heard them before, whether or not it’s true and whether or not they even marked it as false last time, because they’re hearing it again—unconsciously they know they’ve heard it before—they’re more likely to rate it as true now.

Dr. Eagleman confirms some other authors I have read on our perceptions of reality. I have actually noticed this "illusion of truth" in myself - the tendency to think I know about a subject because I've done some reading about it previously.  (I'm glad to know that's normal - I think!)  But I guess the questions I'm really trying to answer are:  What is the nature of Reality? How can I know what's true?  How can I tell what's real?  And the answer, as near as I can tell, is that we really don't know.  Much of the time, things may not be as they appear to us with the limited tools of perception that we are equipped with.  So how can I, an untrained person, know what's true, or even which source is reliable? Anybody out there have any advice?

SEEING THROUGH THE ILLUSION

There is an ancient story that tells of a student monk who began to laugh during group meditation and prayer.  The other students, horrified and embarrassed for the monk, hoped that he would stop laughing.  But his laughter grew louder and louder, until the other monks could not help but wonder what the master would do in the face of such irreverence.  But to the amazement of all the other monks, the master pronounced the laughing monk enlightened!  At first, this story seems difficult to understand.  But the monk laughed because he saw through the veil – he saw that everything is wonderful! Everything does work together for GOOD! It may seem cliché, but everything IS just the way it is for a reason and a purpose and God is working it all together for a higher good, even what seems bad to us from our limited perspective.  We begin to see that suffering and sorrow, although very real, are only for a season, and that everything is perfect and as it should be.  This is the peace that passes all understanding.  This is freedom.

When the veil of illusion that obscures the truth is removed, we will see that there was never anything to fear.  We will see that it was only our limited perspective that gave us sorrow and made us cry.  We will see that even death has no sting, but really is swallowed up in victory!  Once the illusion is seen through, we can emerge from bondage to the fear of death to live in glorious freedom! 

Read the complete article here.