Silent Musings

There are thousands if not millions of books, businesses, internet sites, television ads, blogs, magazines, and people on the street who will inform you, sometimes for free but usually for a price, about ways that will allow you to acquire whatever you desire. Sometimes the lure toward acquisition is straightforward, such as “how to get rich by buying and selling real estate,” or “you can lose 5 pounds a week on the Atkins diet,” but often the pitch is more subtle. If you don’t believe so, then consider the millions if not billions of man-hours that have been invested in the development of effective marketing techniques. Do you really think that investment has gone into figuring out how to give you exactly what you want or need, including more freedom of choice? Are you foolish enough to think that those techniques don’t work?

A similar phenomenon occurs when the desire is not to acquire, but rather to let go and lighten our load, getting rid of much or all of what we have that burdens us. Although it may seem to serve a “higher purpose” to simplify our lives and leave more room for “spiritual” activities, the process of letting go is as influenced by the forces of manipulation as the compulsion to acquire things. In fact, it’s really no different. Now we are “acquiring freedom from our possessions” …

Manipulation of the human mind takes place on many levels. It is as present in everyday cultural values as it is in the latest offerings from Madison Avenue. Television news used to be more subtle in its manipulative ways, but today it is just outright blatant. The first mistake we make in dealing effectively with all the manipulation that surrounds us is to believe that we are above it. Sorry, but it just ain’t so. You and I, we’re tools, to quote the vernacular.

Even though it might seem simple, losing everything is more elusive than it sounds. Sure you can declare your intentions to renounce all of your possessions and desires, even going so far as donating all your money to charity and dropping off all of your personal belongings at the Salvation Army. But letting go of the compulsion to reacquire all that has been lost is not nearly as easy as the romantic mind would like to believe.

Maybe losing everything is no better an idea than trying to acquire what we perceive as lacking. It’s exactly the same thing when you get right down to it.

Where do we turn then? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you.

What I can offer, though, is a radical notion for most. Get to know and love the strategist within you. Yes, that one, the one who causes all your pain and suffering. The one to whom you may deny acknowledgment or acceptance. The one who compels you to do (or at least consider doing) all kinds of crazy shit, even though you can’t seem to find any good reason. Most of us work hard every day trying to get rid of this devil, or barring that possibility, trying to hide its existence from ourselves and others.

Sorry, but it will never work. There is no strategy that can defeat the strategist. Learn to live with it, to love it, and most especially, to love the strategist in others as well. When such harmonious coexistence is finally achieved, then … well … there you Are. As Lovely as a human devil can be.

The personality is but a product of imagination. The self is the victim of this imagination. It is the taking yourself to be what you are not that binds you. The person cannot be said to exist on its own rights; it is the self that believes there is a person and is conscious of being it. Beyond the self lies the unmanifested, the causeless cause of everything. Even to talk of re-uniting the person with the self is not right, because there is no person, only a mental picture given a false reality by conviction. Nothing was divided and there is nothing to unite. - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That

It’s been a fair while since I last wrote. I can’t say why, exactly, because from time to time I have had a strong urge to communicate regarding this or that topic. For example, I spent this year’s Thanksgiving week in Taiwan, and had much to say about my experience there. I have also been ruminating a lot about what gets written and said about spirituality, in particular, how much one’s own personal viewpoint colors the conclusions. But mostly, I’ve been wanting to find some way to express the vastness of beauty that I find in almost every detail of life lately. One of the “problems” with beauty is that it is so inexpressible, and yet here we are as humans desperately trying to hold on to it in the form of words, pictures, music, art, poetry, and so forth. Remarkably, these feeble attempts somehow do at times capture an aspect, which is its own little miracle that can be shared amongst us. But in the meantime, between the verbal expressions written here, I find myself sitting in Silent appreciation of all that Is. Nothing in particular to say, nothing in particular to do.

It’s so difficult to describe exactly what I felt and experienced in Taiwan, for example. It was my first time visiting there, and in many ways it was exactly what I expected - noisy, busy, crowded, full of air pollution and commercialism, lots of decrepit-looking buildings … you know, the typical Asian big-city experience. And yet, there was something remarkable lurking beneath the surface for me. As I walked the streets of Taipei at night watching all the scooters whizzing by, I felt such a profound affinity for all the people I saw, and for the culture as a whole. Even the ridiculously commercialized yoga studio I visited there had a mysterious attraction to it, despite the fact that I could find no rational explanation for my experience. My girlfriend and I also spent a whole day in Kenting National Park, where the experience of peace, beauty, and love was far more expected. But even there I was completely overwhelmed by the depth of my love and appreciation for a few moments of just Being there.

I had a big realization recently. You know, the kind of realization where you already got it in a conceptual way a long time ago, but somehow didn’t realize that you hadn’t completely gotten it until right now. It goes like this. There have been countless descriptions said and written about spirituality, many of them quite beautiful and even helpful in our struggle toward awakening. And yet, what I saw is that all those descriptions of the spiritual experience simply aren’t true. Every experience is unique, and defies any and all attempts at classification. To conclude and be completely clear, if you read it in a book (or blog), you can be sure of only one thing … that it isn’t true. What is true, then? Well, I’ll leave that to you to discover for yourself. The only thing I can say is that inexpressible beauty will somehow find it’s way into the picture, eventually if not right away.

A few days ago, one of my friends posted the video below to YouTube. The subject matter is suicide, which recently claimed the life of a close friend of the two young women (one of which is my friend) in the video. While watching it, I found myself so deeply moved by its intent, its simplicity, its expression of the human condition. I don’t really know what else to say, other than that the Heart is so vast, so fragile, and yet so accepting and resilient. I find every concept of myself completely shattered.