Sanity & Humility

A man whose spiritual brilliance and poetic writing never ceases to amaze me. His experience echos my own in finding out What-Really-Matters.........

From Robert Augustus Masters


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We talk of making up our mind, but we mostly just let our mind make us up. An entrancing fiction is the result, so convincingly personified that we take it to be us.

Our innocence doesn’t easily outgrow its naiveté. Blinders come with the operational manual for incarnation. The whispers of other worlds get lost in the hustle and muscle of our overdeveloped concerns. Our romancing of tomorrow ties us to yesterday. Nothing lasts the way we want it to. Whether or not we have what we want, we still experience pain. Worse, we continue dramatizing our pain, thereby turning it into suffering, while addicting ourselves to whatever most pleasurably or potently distracts us from our suffering.

What we refuse to face festers and multiplies within us — and also around us, as if magnetically drawn to us — until it literally takes our place, looking through our eyes and harnessing our energies to its own ends. This isn’t necessarily the
possession of horror films or voodooistic rites, but it is still possession.

What we suppress suppresses us.

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Everyone is selling something. Like an old junkie once said, we all push our habits. And we are all looking for release from the pain of our habits’ grip on us — for we don’t have our habits, but they have us — which just creates more pain.
And addiction to release only deepens our addiction to the very pain or tension that makes such release “necessary”. There’s more pleasure in removing tight shoes than comfortable shoes.

Self-suppression and its compensatory addictions eat away our days. A very different, much deeper dance calls to us, but we’re committed elsewhere, or so it seems.

We may be at different stages, but we’re all in the same boat, as close to the threat of shipwreck as we are to being unthreatened by fear, loss, and radical change. The more fearful we are of making waves, the more the waves make us. To make wise use of our time in the boat is to recognize that it is already full of holes, already sinking, already empty. The bad news is that in trying to plug all the holes we only plug up ourselves. Avoiding death deadens us.

Let us move more upstream now: Only one sperm ordinarily reaches and penetrates the egg, but all the others, at essence, live through that primordial and totally absorbing arrival, literally dying into Life, reaching the egg through their shared sperm-ness, unless they remain stuck in — or identified with — their apparent separateness and dreams of being a sperm who really makes it.

And we are all sperm, at best swimming our heads off, and we’re also the egg, the harbor of pure embrace, opening until there is only welcome, and we’re also the matchmaker and the music and the dancefloor, the interactive space wherein it all occurs, and the power that makes it all possible. And more.

Though almost all sperm die before reaching the egg, at best living through the one or two that attain the goal, all of them matter, all are unique, all are individual and have the potential to be fully individual. And what is full or true individuality? It is not only unabashedly idiosyncratic, but also is in conscious, dynamic surrender to its Source, wholeheartedly participating in
whatever contributes to its ripening, its transition from ego-centeredness to soul-centeredness.

Soul is the last frontier of individuality, existing as, but not only as, the self illuminating interface between duality and nonduality. Soul is fearlessness incarnate. It doesn’t mind death. In fact, many, many deaths constitute its ground. And many, many failures, failures that are gratefully taken as compost for awakening to What-Really-Matters.

The sacrifices required of us are overwhelming to whatever in us is less than soul-centered. “I” may claim to want Ultimate Freedom, God-Realization, etcetera, but no “I” really wants to be dethroned or made obsolete. Almost all of us would be terrified to not be centered by a particularized identity. So we constellate ourselves around the prevailing sensations associated with “I”-ness, rarely noticing that such “location” dislocates us from Being, corralling us in time.

Keeping exits open — confusing hypervigilance with genuine awareness — or keeping secret bank accounts — confusing being overinsured with taking care — keeps our awakening work halfhearted, partial, too low-risk, dulled by unnecessary safety nets.

All the sperm die, all the waves end, but it’s not the waste that it may seem to be, if the sperm or waves live wholeheartedly,
for through such fullness some intimacy with what does not die inevitably occurs.

It’s enough to derail regret, not to mention one’s train of thought. Acorns that don’t become oaks uncomplainingly serve as fertilizer for the rare few that do become oaks. They don’t attempt to destroy or discredit those that outgrow their acorn-ness, and nor do they idolize them. The oak towers above the acorn, but does not look down upon it. So too with humans who have awakened from all dreams. It is the slumbering humans who want to tower above other humans, without undergoing the necessary trials that are essential for authentic awakening.

Making it wrong or disreputable or spiritually incorrect to be an acorn only needlessly complicates matters, given that just about all of us are still busy being acorns, brewing up quixotic mindstorms in a nutshell, dreaming of being other than ourselves. We as seeds struggle within our surrounding darkness, afraid to crack our seedcases beyond repair, mistrusting the green imperatives coiled deep within us.

We tend to keep our darkness in the shadows. We let ourselves be enlisted by our past, arming ourselves against what could truly liberate us. We thus become substrate for our dreams, inoculating ourselves against whatever disturbs our slumber.

No matter how many channels we now have, it’s still the same damned set, edited and packaged for more than our pleasure and less than our need.

Comfortably impaled on false altars, we continue practising the art of distracting ourselves from our pain, the very pain that, if awarely entered, is our ticket to Freedom.