Gazing in the Mirror

April 7 - A Willingness to Live

Life isn't worth living unless
you're willing to take some big
chances and go for broke.
~ Eliot Wiggington

I am keeping my whole mind
and thought and expectation
open to new experiences, to
happier events, to a more
complete self-expression.
~ Ernest Holmes

So many people live a fearful life. For so many people the fear of death is very strong. The will to live is very strong. Most people will suffer almost anything and endure all manner of torture in an attempt to postpone, delay or prevent the outcome of all life – dying. Ancient peoples had a deeper understanding of and reverence for life. I am beginning to see that the role of spirituality is to prepare the mind to come into harmony with the questions of immortality that naturally arise within it and to reconcile our minds with our body's destiny of death. This is why ceasing to identify with the body and ego becomes the primary purpose of understanding how spirituality is recognizing the invisible plane as somehow "supportive" of the visible plane. It matters not how one describes this – as a world, as an energy – such descriptions have varied with time and place.

Destruction pure and simple is the essence of anger which annihilates inhibition and that is why righteous perspectives often support troops in war. Woman is the vehicle of life. The male does not have that natural realization but is the support of that social purpose. The media plays the role of turning the enemy into "its" so that they are not thous in order to enlist people to go against that natural inclination to survive or to have a reverence for life. Our society has lost much of its reverence for life and we see that influence in the more violent entertainments of our time.

In ancient hunter societies there was an understanding that there existed a covenant between the animal world and the human world with the realization that the animal gave of its life willingly. These early hunters saw the animal as a willing victim with the understanding that the animal's life transcended the physical and would be returned to the soil or to the mother through some participatory ritual of restoration. The buffalo or the salmon were the "master" animals, the principal animals that provided the food that sustained the tribes of North America. There was a bonding between the human and the animal that required one animal to be consumed by another animal. This was the natural order of things. Even so there was a discomfort in the taking of life, even with rituals of acknowledgment for this mystic participation in the killing of and consuming of Life.

Rituals related to living a life are beautiful. Respecting the animal that is killed to sustain life is appropriate. Turning a Thou into an It does not wipe out guilt but understanding the natural cycle of life as the work of nature puts situations into proper context. There is a deep connection between the people and the animal they consume. Worshipping "God" may have come from worshipping the animal that feeds the people and sustainability was served by requesting that the animal come back time and time again. William James expressed the thought that earnestness was a willingness to live with energy even though doing that inevitably brings pain.

Viewing death teaches us many things. Most obviously, we see life animating the living form. That is clearly evident to us. And then after a loved one passes from life, we see that Life Force isn't there anymore. We wonder where that energy "went". There seems to be more to it than the simple cessation of biological processes. The problem is not in dying but in the middle of our life we may become aware at some point that the body has reached its climax of power. We begin to see the body lose that strength and become weaker. The need at that point is to identify one's self – not with the body which is clearly in decline – but with the consciousness of which the body is but a vehicle of expression.

When you can learn to identify with consciousness, then you can watch your body decline like an old car. Joseph Campbell says he has learned this from his study of myths – "What am I ? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light, of which the bulb is a vehicle ?" He describes an analogy that uses an old car – "There goes the fender, there goes this . . . It's expectable." "The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want." We move from dependency into self-responsible authority and experience the peak of our power and full capacity. A willingness to live requires that we fully realize when the natural course of the body has turned away from achievement and find there an ability to relax into an enjoyment and appreciation of the wonder of it all, while we yet remain embodied on the physical plane. We seek to know that it is the consciousness that is the I-dentity of the self and not the vehicle of the body that it has been embedded into.

~ perspective

I seek an integration of my mind
with my body and my way of life
in harmony with the ways that
nature dictates.
I accept the natural decline
of my body as the peak vitality
of my Life passes naturally.
I accept Nature's way and the
cycles of seasons and lives so
I don't try to hold onto any
one single point in time.
As I become more spiritually
clear my consciousness joins
Consciousness in a realization of
what that Is.
I teach my mind to relax
regarding its ideas of immortality
by teaching it to I-dentify with
the larger sense of Beingness
expressing Itself uniquely through
a variety of forms.

#anger #consciousness #death #enemy #fear #killing #mythology #nature #ritual #sustainability