"All our bodies, no matter which gender, colour, which nation, what kind of worldly-mind-ideology that we have adopted… each body remains a manifestation and a celebration of the All-Pervading Mysterious Life-Force, Spirit."
Firstly, an explanation for the conditional, for the physical environment of Tushita Ashram-Hermitage. I wanted to create a Beautiful Circumstance, not merely for the purpose of people being impressed – by the landscape, by the atmosphere etc., but a Place, a Circumstance, that would Honour – the Beauty, the Courage, the Life-Endurance (that Nature continually shows us) and the Majesty of our Spirit Nature. That is to say, I wanted to create a Circumstance in Honour of the Majesty of Our Inherent Life-Given Nature before It was ever made to submit to one or other worldly identity, before It became colonised by worldly identity.
There is a saying that many are fond of expressing, which goes something like, “We are all one in the Spirit”. May I suggest (well, I am going to anyway) that this is a an expression that is so utterly soaked in worldly identity-ideology (egoic-self) and politics, that any claims that we are actually allowing the body/mind to be Lived, animated by, the One Spiritual Reality, are incredibly suspect. Well, let’s say that although it could be the case, the telling evidence remains elusive.
We all love to marvel at newborn humans, who without any worldly identity, emanate this captivating quality of Open Innocence… but, for how long do we let them stay there? For how long do we allow the Spiritual Reality, the Life-Force that is animating that body, manifesting and animating all of existence – to be their One Great Identity? Before any of us could bathe in the Radiance and Innocence of the Soul’s Breath, our minds were colonised. Those whom we called our elders, were not with us as Guardians of the Soul, rather as guardians of the passed-on worldly identity. They insisted, in small and large ways, that if we didn’t adhere to, remain within the confines of the identity that we were given, we would be lost, bereft – no sense of who we are or where we come from. But, I have heard these very same people proclaim that, “Well, we all come from the Great Spirit Being” – I guess that we want it both ways, a kind of safety net.
I suggest that You and I came into this physical existence in Response to the Mysterious Spirit, in Response to the Creative Will of the Life Force. We came from It, we adhere in It and we will be dissolved back into It – and there is not a damn thing that You or I can do about it. Death has no regard whatsoever for any worldly identity, which we have used to filter our perception of Life – informing us on what feels normal, meaningful and possible. And this fact really messes around with our control-freak tendencies! To merely say, ‘We are One in the Spirit’, that One Spirit Reality remains a concept to us, we remain safe from any Life-transformation and our control-freak tendencies remain intact. But It must become a Lived Reality. Just as Love is not a concept but a Lived Reality.
To Love the Spiritual Reality so much that the worldly identity begins to fall out of our mind, is not to say that we cannot adorn the body in an infinite array of garments, speak all our different languages and sing out our hearts in all of our various chants, songs and prayers of Love. Living the body/mind in the One Spirit Reality Identity requires no annihilation of any outer difference, of any ritual and so forth…. rather, instead of those outer differences and rituals being used to reinforce our worldly identity, they become symbols, enactments and celebrations of our Greater One Spiritual Identity.
Oh, does it not break Your heart to see and feel how we are afraid to Love? – as Love dissolves all borders. Love breaks down all imagined borders between self and other, between inner and outer. It threatens our clinging to the very motive, to the eternal endeavour, of making, shaping and imaging a vain-glorious separate entity – as if each of us is not already utterly unique in Life. All our bodies, no matter which gender, colour, which nation, what kind of worldly-mind-ideology that we have adopted… each body remains a manifestation and a celebration of the All-Pervading Mysterious Life-Force, Spirit. While each physical existence continuously has Its Roots in, and Life in, the Spiritual Real, not so the worldly identity, which we must then continuously superimpose onto our-self and onto every other physical living thing. As long as we humans insist on separating ourselves out into mind-reactive forms of conditional ideas of Self rather than existing as Un-conditional, Heart-felt Responses to Life – we will always be talking past each other and we will never have Peace. As we are never less than Life-It-Self – the Spiritual Reality – it is therefore not an egoic thing to feel to move beyond merely conforming to and validating each separate-to-each-other worldly-identity, it is not then an egoic thing to Realise that You and I came into existence to Honour the Heart, the Soul, the Real.
As long as any individual is clinging to a worldly-created form of self-identity, they will desire others to submit to, accommodate and validate that self, who we think we are. It is then all too common for individuals to expect that their Spiritual Practice or ‘their’ Spiritual Master should accommodate for and validate their conditional-self (the egoic-self). Then, after sometimes years of negotiating for, arguing for, this conditional validation and not gaining it, not yet feeling the conditional fulfillment that they wanted (and all while declaring that they want to, or are doing, Spiritual Identity Practice), they then resort to the common blame-game, to the fault-finding habit – and abandon what they once declared was their Love.
Oh Beloved, I am always Expressing to all, My Relatedness to all. How I See You and all in Truth – as the manifestation of the Spiritual Reality, the Reality that You say that You want to Realise as You. However, please see that this desire can be merely a consoling, comforting, self-indulgent message – much like wallowing in Spiritual poverty, in the suffering of the conditional-self, and then taking solace that ‘Jesus loves me’. Uncomfortable Truths have no place within the idealized representations of Spiritual-based life that many people have. The individual almost desperately wants (even demands) that Spiritual Practice be something that comforts, validates and enhances their conditional self, and finally, oh so finally, that everyone will love them!!! – They can finally ‘be who they really are’… whoever that is.
The Spiritual term of being ‘asleep’, means this: we are so deeply unconscious to how we are relating conditionally to Our-Self and others. Oh, we humans talk about it, we endlessly talk about it, but we are so unconscious of our own activity in it; it has become who we think we are, ‘me’. To Awaken – out of this conditional-self, out of this worldly-indoctrinated identity, this deeply unconscious activity – each one of us is then required to Understand, to See, how that conditional-self is obstructing us, is denying us, from our Un-conditional Spirit Love-Full Self-Being. What we call ‘Enlightenment’ is therefore not a reward for so-called Spiritual efforts, rather it is a natural unfolding, a dismantling of everything false – it is a reckoning with the Spirit It-Self. Beyond the usual quest for comfort and consolation, the quest for Enlightenment dissolves all false identities crafted in our reaction to conditional existence, that for protection, we have ever-since, shaped and squeezed our Inherently Free Noble Being into.
Now, I will attempt to briefly outline in words the Profound Love Discipline (the Practice of Present Spiritual Realisation of the Self. And I am sure that You have heard this before. It can be explained in this way: Sit quietly, close your eyes, let thoughts be, in order to let Your Self relate with and in a whole-bodily feeling, to and with the Spiritual Reality (not the conditional reality). Relax the conditional-self, let it drop for a while… let yourself whole-bodily Feel this Feeling, let it pervade you… Now, open your eyes and look at another person – the other – and remain with this Feeling. In and through this feeling-disposition, relate to the other, relate to that person. If one does not do this, then one is relating to the conditional of themselves and of the other person, turning us even further in on our-self. It has nothing to do with how the other is relating to you, they will in all likelihood be in conditional feeling-relatedness (of themselves and you).
It is a Profound Discipline, which means It is a Love Discipline, which means that It is a Happy Discipline, which means It is a Happy Discipline of/by the Soul. It is not a Happy Discipline of the egoic-self. For the egoic-self, the worldly-identity that one has so invested in, has crafted and shaped over many years, always wants to protect itself, defend itself, fight for itself. And that is why most do not want to Enter into The Souls Fire, this Love that slowly, with patience, will dissolve the mind’s worldly-identity, which is obstructing the Inner Enlightenment of our Free-Spirit-Self, our Ultimate Native Self.
For most, the Profound Discipline required for every Present-moment Spiritual-Feeling-Realisation of the Spiritual Identity of the Body, is less important than the power of Spiritual beliefs and rituals that comfort and give purpose to one’s conditional reactive self and its survival. The individual will do almost anything for their own vain-glorious seeking, submit themselves to almost any hopeful promise of one or other popular festival of egoic-spiritual-phantasmagoria – from every kind of creationist theory, ‘god’s own people’ theory, ‘the only culture that has The Truth’ theory, to theories with alien-abduction zealots.
Meanwhile, the Spiritual Master, that is, the One All-pervading Spirit, has no bias whatsoever relative to any humans’ worldly-adopted identity, rather it is merely, constantly showing us Evidence of our Enlightened Self, the One before any worldly identity. However, being so involved, so fixated, so mindful of our culturally / religiously / socially-adopted forms of identifying our self, we keep ourselves unavailable to this constant Revelation.
Yes, if You and I submit our Lives to a greater expanded Consciousness, an Awareness beyond the worldly identity, then we might very well feel ‘alone’ in this world because of this ever-Widening State of Consciousness. However, I am so very grateful to have been guided beyond the petty, parochial, medieval world of the conventionally religious – of the theologians, the priests and the mullahs… of the social climbers, the status-mongering seekers and of all the fashionable seeking of the adaptive identity that one takes on in reaction to their physical-self and all conditions.
Beloved, there is no position on which people are so immovable as their cultural and religious and altogether self-reactive (egoic-self) beliefs, their worldly identity. There is no more powerful ally that one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, God, Buddha, Allah, their Guru, or their conditional beliefs (which, having been crafted over a long period of time, are now proclaimed as great Spiritual Truths, while in reverse, they utterly support the separate worldly-identity). I guess the best that one could say about all of our seeking for Spirit-Self-Feeling-Realisation, is that he/she lovingly stakes out their own banana skin and then steps on it.
When we are trapped in the mind (where the worldly identity exists), we are out of the body, the body of Love, the body of no fixed worldly identity, the body that is always in Great Conversation in and with Life. The body remains always indifferent to any culturally, religiously or socially-created methods of identity, it does not ever beg for approval, value or validation – only the mind does. Trapped in our minds, the quest for ‘Self-Realisation’ becomes completely hijacked by the egoic-self, commandeered by one’s own already self-obsession which, no matter what is Given, what is Transmitted, the egoic-self keeps misleading everything back to its self. Enlightenment, the Whole-Bodily Realisation of our Native Self, Nature (the Spirit) – is forever obscured by just the mind.
To discover the Essence of Your bodily-creative Life, will require You to transcend, to go beyond all names of art and of worldly-imposed identity as Your Self. Surrender or Transcendence of the mind’s worldly identity (how we identify our-selves) is not an action, rather an inner recognition; devotion to one’s mere existence as The Gift of Life, the Legacy of Spirit, the Inheritance of billions of eons in Light’s evolution. Mystics of all ages, down through time and place, have not been known for their miraculous powers or for a doctrine they have taught, nor for their adherence to any particular worldly cultural identity, rather it is for the devotion that they have shown to and in the Spiritual Reality throughout their lives.