The Attempt to Remember

I’ve been knocked around my whole life by the following question:

To live in the ferocious blaze of Eternal Divinity,
what must I attempt to remember in every moment?

Big toe in decade nine, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

No dogs, no stones, no trees, no hot fudge sundaes, no good guys or bad, not even mosquitos. No gender, race, nationality, nothing like that. Just God.

I don’t understand it. I simply have felt my heart sing, since birth, in harmony with the cosmic music animating creation: “Yesssssssss!”

Steve the worldly-world being is just a costume my soul is inhabiting, a role I’m playing in this incarnation, one of however many it will take to fulfill the destiny of every soul: absolute, complete conscious union with all of existence.

Worldly-world experience of every kind—including thoughts, feelings, beliefs, habits, preferences, addictions, and every single choice, even the most gruesome—has but one purpose: to serve that end.

All paths are paths to God because ultimately there is no other place for the soul to go. — Paramahansa Yogananda

All so-called evil, all so-called harm to ourselves and others, is, in fact, a sacred gift to awaken us to our ignorance, the freeing of which is an essential component—perhaps THE essential component—of our inevitable realization of God Alone.

Not a single soul has ever died. Only our physical shell bites the dust, to be replaced by another, then another, and so on, as the realization of our True Self emerges over incarnations. The extent to which we find that hard to embrace is understandable. It’s no small achievement to experience all of existence aflame with the same one consciousness of God.

Death is only an experience through which we are meant to learn a great lesson: we cannot die. — PY.

How we humans define our world actually creates our world. Our every belief, opinion, judgment and feeling is entirely self-created based solely upon how we define reality for ourselves. Nothing is unacceptable; there are just things we choose not to accept. Nothing is unforgivable; there are just things we choose not to forgive. No one has ever pissed us off. No one has ever made us happy. All sense of difference is in the mind, not in the ultimate nature of things, which is absolute Oneness.

Perhaps the most pernicious form of addiction is our addiction to beliefs, particularly our addiction to the belief that other people and outside circumstances are responsible for how we feel.

This is not to deny any form of suffering, but to realize where it comes from. It comes from the mistaken definition of reality that we are human rather than the soul, and that the worldly-world perceived by our human nature is real rather than an illusory drama the purpose of which is to serve our soul’s conscious awakening in Oneness. And, along the way, to encourage us to ask ourselves: What suffers? Certainly not our True Self, manifestation of God.

What suffers is the reality we have created in our mind. Further, other people and events may trigger our reactions, but they don’t cause them. The cause of our every response to everything is always the same: our definition of reality. There’s never been a bad day or a good one. There are only days we like and days we don’t—and always for the same reason: reality according to us.

To assume responsibility for our feelings, thoughts and actions is among the most liberating choices we ever make—for then we always know where to focus our attention: in the mirror, and the manifestation of God we find there.

As we become ever more self-responsible and choose to see that everything is God, a lot becomes funny. That’s because victimhood and its related blame of others is out the window. The underlying focus of every life event becomes our journey to Oneness, freeing our attachments to everything but God Alone. Being present with a peaceful heart is the priority, not who left the door ajar so the cookie pirates could sneak in and rifle our stash of brownies.

That worldly-world misery and joy are self-created, based on our misperception, is among the reasons I find the spirit of universe to be playful, loving and deep. We lament our perception of failure and celebrate our perception of success until our consciousness evolves to where we see both as an illusion and ourself as a puppet of circumstance. And the underlying despair of that illusion, the heartache it triggers as we realize, among other things, that we are not the victim of anything other than our own definition of reality, eventually gives birth to a passion for not just greater understanding, but also ultimate self-realization.

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, and all embarrassment into laughter. — Beldon Lane

Perhaps more important than anything else said here is the role of mind training in growing our ability to respond in a soul-affirming manner to whatever comes our way. If how we define our world creates our world, getting clear on the definition we want is vital. Just as vital is how we will train our minds to live that definition. What mind-training practices will serve us best? Whatever the answer, at its heart is likely the cultivation of a life-long practice of meditation and reflection.

Whether we follow a religion or not is entirely a matter of individual choice; but if we want to follow one, then we should take it seriously, and practice it wholeheartedly. — His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama

Those who find some or all of this a stretch, or even preposterous, have my empathy. Don’t believe me or anyone else. Trust only your own intuition, the voice of your heart. And as more than one saint has surely counseled over the eons, let’s try not to bullshit ourselves.

For reasons I can’t begin to explain beyond the grace of God, there is nothing in this life for which I am not grateful, perhaps especially my own ignorance, my own bone-headed choices, nothing that is not helping me grow my capacity to love. Most notably today having my ego eviscerated as I attempt to free every scrap of attachment to anything but the Eternal Divinity that is the totality of existence.

Here’s Thomas Merton: No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there… We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

I’m not embarrassed to report that I often find it necessary to remember a piece of wisdom from the late Marshall Rosenberg: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. As I revisit this essay over the course of time, I’ll dance a jig of gratitude whenever I’m able to rectify any of the short-sightedness it undoubtedly contains.

Meanwhile, I find myself a champion of what may be the most fear-provoking point-of-view the world has ever known: Everything is a gift, and the business of life is discovering how come.

No life will be a failure; there is no such thing as failure in the universe. A hundred times man will hurt himself, a thousand times he will tumble, in the end he will realise that he is God. — Vivekananda