Mind Matters Most - Chapter Seven

MMM Seven

Do ye not know that ye are gods?

When I was in my early thirties I had an experience which I can only describe as an epiphany.   The word epiphany is bandied about quite a lot these days.  People often use it to describe an ‘ah-ha’ moment, a significant insight where something dramatically jells.  I’m not talking about that here.  I am talking about something far more profound than that.   I’m talking about a Self-realization experience, the sort of thing the yogis seek; the moment of Samadhi.   With me, this was a happening so deeply moving that I can only describe it as the most significant moment of my life in both a mental and spiritual sense.  It was and remains the highpoint.   It occurred as a spontaneous and completely unwilled ‘out of body experience.’   Something far greater than the ego-mind of ‘yours truly’ that is usually in charge.

I have described what occurred in other of my writings.   I say here that it was an ‘out of body’ experience for I was:  observing myself observing myself.  In other words I was looking at my physical form which was standing in front of a bathroom shaving mirror.   The ‘me’ which was ‘out there’ doing the observing was more than just an observing part of me.  I can only describe it �" self centered and vain as this might sound �" as the god part of me, a god part which I presume we all have.    In those few seconds I knew that this part of me as an indescribably beautiful combination of infinite love, compassion and joy.   All of this was felt in one tremendous burst.  The moment would not have lasted more than ten or twelve seconds �" its ramifications stay with me to this day.   I am the Observer!  What is observed is my creation, my loved one!

Why am I telling you this?

As I grow older I’m becoming more convinced of the validity of that saying “Love is all there is.” Or “Love is the answer, what is the question?  The absence of love, or the lessening influence of this all-embracing love, makes up what we might refer to as ‘a direction away’ from it.   In other words, love permeates everything but it is the degree of permeation which decrees its intensity and therefore its influence.   We have love in its infinite variations of intensity or presence within us.   All of us have this.

Getting complicated?

Let us visualize an infinitely long string or line.   Move along that string in one direction and you’re moving towards love.  Move in the other direction and you’re moving away from love.  Love is never completely gone.   Love is the experience.  Our analogical string is infinite in length.   Experiencing the full power or full depletion of either direction is impossible to us.   We humans have our limitation.  But who knows what lies outside of our own parameters of Humanity’s experience?   Infinity is something we cannot comprehend.

Labeling some of our negativities

Now let us start putting some labels on things, for this is what we do.   Semantic arguments aside, we know that dislike is not as intense as hatred.  But whatever this emotion is, it is not love.  We have moved away from love to some degree as these emotions arise within us.    Jealousy and envy are different from loathing.   Greed is different to annoyance.  But if you take a look at every so-called negative emotion we humans experience you will find that all of them have within them one under riding base �" fear.    We might have a hundred labels for the various ways we feel about negative emotion within us but all of them have this commonality, some degree of fear.  We might have to dig down a little, analyze our feelings to some degree, but the nth discovery is that our emotion is stemming from fear.

Anger is fear.  Fear we’ll be hurt so we need to fight.  The old flight or fight experience which we’re told comes from our days of long, long ago.   Envy, “He’s got what I haven’t and I fear I won’t ever have it.”   “I despise him,” because there is a deep-seated fear in me that I could be like that.   You might not agree, but I reiterate.  There is only love and varying aspects or facets of fear. 

Even our self-consciousness at having to learn something unfamiliar or to undertake some new venture or undertaking has within it this element of fear.  Yet it could be said that a certain amount of fear �" that is, this lack of fully experiencing love �" is a spur to our advancement.  Trepidation gets us acting.  If the entire world and everyone in it came from total love, what would we learn?  What would be the point to our lives?

Shades of enlightenment

By way of analogy, I would like to attempt to describe what I mean by love and the concept of a lessening or diminution of love and, thereby, a deepening of ignorance.  Ignorance is the cause of our fear.  We do not know who or what we are.  We do not know that the essence, the never-changing, immortal part of us is the Observer and that its primary quality is Infinite Love.

Imagine a line of bottles standing on a sunny windowsill.   The sunlight is shining down on the whole row with equal intensity.  None are in the shade.   Now, let us imagine that the bottle at one end of the line is made of deep, opaque brown glass.  The one next to it is also opaque.  It is of a slightly lighter shade.  We’ll say it is a dark green bottle.  Next to it is another bottle.  This one is made of yellow glass.   Next to it again is a lighter colored glass bottle, and finally, at the end of the line is a bottle made of pure, crystal clear glass.

Now, if the sunlight entering into that line of bottles were pure love, how much more would find its way through the glass and into the interior of the clear bottle compared with those which are darker?   At one end of the line it would be very dark inside.  At the other, so light as to be deemed as ‘no separation.’   The full intensity, or almost the full intensity, of the sunlight’s rays would enter.  There’d be nothing holding it back.

Now let us hark back to our earlier chapters where it was described how our aura or mind-bodies are studded with sankaras.    These sankaras are, as we’ve said almost ad nauseam, are made up of thought-forms or congealed emotional buildups within us.   These thought-forms vary considerably from one person to the next.      Some have many. Some have less.  Like those bottles, the greater density causing the darkness, the greater the difficulty the light of our own consciousness has in shining into our bodies.  

The sankaras are not noticeable by our conscious minds.  But when we become established in Vipassana Meditation and can focus our awareness onto any surface of our bodies, and penetrate into our bodies, we experience repulsion.  We experience resistance.  Just as the sunlight cannot penetrate the dark bottle, the awareness which is our focused attention cannot easily penetrate into the levels where those sankaras are located.

The difference between our bottle-analogy and our auras is this.   A dark-colored  bottle does not change.   It retains its opaqueness as the sun shines onto it, only some of its light, now considerably weakened, finding its way within.   But the light of our own awareness, focused on those sankaras does change the sankaras.   Gradually our focused attention dissipates, melts away, and dissolves, these impurities.     The impurities represent fears, hang ups, traumas, all sorts of experiences which have been pushed below or found their way below.  Our reactive-thinking put them there.  But the intense focus of our Vipassana Meditation gets rid of them.   Our pure attention acts like a laser beam, breaking up and neutralizing them.   You could say they return to The All.

Reincarnation �" Plausible or hogwash?

Why do some people have more sankaras in them than others?   Well, it could be simply a matter of their life experiences.   The degree of suffering we go through varies enormously from one person to another.  So, too, the way we interpret and handle such suffering.  That’s an obvious part of it.  But many of the religions of the East say it is more than that.  It is the result of previous lives lived.   Some of those sankaras were laid down in earlier lifetimes.   As each soul lives and dies it then �" after a period in heaven -  reincarnates and carries forward any sankaras which were still there at time of death.  In many ways the resulting influence of these sankaras form our Karma or deserved destiny.   We have to work them out of ours system.

There is a very interesting book by Brian L. Weiss, M.D., called Many Lives, Many Masters, which upholds the hypothesis that we not only reincarnate but that we do carry forward with us into our present life some of the more significant and traumatic events of lives previously led.   I cannot state categorically and from firsthand knowledge that this is the case.  However, whilst undertaking some of my own indepth meditations in the Blue Mountains I can recall some very strange events.  For example, a medieval battle scene with opposing armies on opposite slopes, phalanxes of spears �" all flashing across my mind in a split second.   I recall an ugly, hateful face (of someone never seen in this life) who I sensed was a victim of.  My intuitive and dreadful feeling is that he was a torcherer.   And still another  incident when a trapdoor opened below me and I dropped to my ‘death by hanging.’    All of these were simply quick flashes into consciousness, lasting only a second or two.  But there impact was very dramatic.

Reincarnation and the Laws of Karma

The philosophy here is that everything must eventually balance out.  It isn’t so much a matter of being punished or being rewarded.  We lay in certain things and we must deal with them.  The sankaras might be conceived by us as being undeserved, but it is we who put them there.   Just like the Law of Gravity, the Laws of the Mind are every bit as immutable. It we step off a cliff we will fall.  If we load up our minds with emotions they will turn into sankaras and have an influence on us.

I don’t know whether all this is true.   However, it does seem very a plausible explanation.  Obviously someone who has lived many lives as a human being, the so called “old soul,” will have had far more chances to incur a buildup of sankaras than one that has lived only a few.   Indeed, it might be the buildup which brings that old soul to the point where he or she feels impelled to find meaning in their lives.  A young soul hasn’t evolved to this point.  The internal promptings might become more intense as that build up of sankaras occurs.

It is my view that those who turn to serious meditation are the more mature among us.   Could it be that we �" I include myself among this mature group here �" are old souls.  In my automatic writing sessions (I’ve written several books on this)  I was told by my Higher Self, or my Spiritual Guidance that I am now in my 420^th incarnation as a human.   Author of Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsh, was told in one of his books that he’s lived 476 lives.   Could it be we’ve lived many lives and are now figuring out how to get rid of self-created illusions within us, the sankaras so that we might ‘return home?’  Home being total and full realization of what we are?   This is not a concept original to me.  However, I do not find it difficult to subscribe to. To me, it makes a lot of sense.

We all need a life philosophy we can live with

Which brings me to something important regarding our happiness:  If we are to live happy lives we need to establish within our psyche a philosophy of life we can happily live with.   So what do I mean by this?

If we believe, as so many do, that we come into existence at our birth, or perhaps nine months before our birth when our father’s sperm meets our mother’s ovum, and that we end when the last breath goes out of our body and our hearts stops its beat, then we’re probably in for a life which is not going to bring us much joy.   This is especially so as we enter the last quarter of our time on Planet Earth.  If we believe this, we are likely to live by the philosophy:  “We only live once.”  -something I inwardly cringe on hearing because it is often said without the slightest aforethought.  If we do really believe we are only ‘as a spark which arises and is then gone into nothingness’ then we’re apt to become very cynical and pessimistic.  We’re likely to see no point in living.

Many people proclaim:  ‘We’re born, shop, suffer and die.’  There is no God.   The god they might have considered being one somewhat akin to a large and bearded figure who lives somewhere ‘up in the sky’ but now they’re grown up they know is a ridiculous concept.  They might also be �" as I am �" very cynical about things such as ‘Jesus, the only perfect man,’ Virgin birth,’ and ‘All Mighty God sending us his only son.’    They might also take umbrage at those people who belong to organized religions who endeavor to teach them what to believe and how to live their lives.   References to ‘miserable sinners,’ just makes them angry.

Fair enough.  But, and I say again, until they have established a working philosophy which they can feel happy about, they will probable become quite disillusioned with life as the years go by.  Such nihilism takes a lot of the joy out of living.

Many people are agnostics.  That is they admit that they don’t know whether there is a God or not, so they’ve decided to keep an open mind on it.   This statement, albeit actually voiced, or kept quiet about, is a sort of ‘a bob each way’ bet at Life’s racetrack.  The feeling being that they at least have some chance of winning.   If they die and there’s nothing, fine.  If there is another dimension, an afterlife, a heaven, fine.  Concepts of heaven or hell are simply things which don’t worry them much…yet there is often a nagging feeling that they’re avoiding something important in their lives.   They spend a lot of time in escapism.

The difference between believing and knowing

Then there are those who, to their own minds, have found The Path.  They’ve been converted to a religion and have embraced it as their own.  They have faith.  Some have great faith.  In some the faith is so strong as to be claimed as a knowing, a certainty.  But if you push them as to why they think and feel this way, it generally gets back to being a mental construct, a belief not a knowing. For the difference between belief and knowing is quite clear.   A belief is an idea about something: a knowing is an experience and the memory of that experience.   As an eleven-year-old I believed I would one day be able to swim.  When I eventually did I knew I could.  Same with riding a bicycle.   The impulse was to ‘give it a go’ because, well, other people could do it �"why not me?    I believed I could.  But there was always that little modicum of doubt until it was actually achieved.

I suspect that a good many people who state categorically and with a lot of passion that they are ‘believers’ have within them this little modicum of doubt that they could be wrong.   This is especially the case, I think, when they get angry if you don’t agree with them.   Their tiny doubt brings them back to being agnostics with a strong leaning towards faith.  To say you believe and you have no doubt means you can ‘rest on your laurels.’   You don’t need to find out further.   No need for further exploration.  All you need do now is abide by the tenets of the teachings of your faith and you’ll get a ‘green card’ into the Promised Land when you die.   And this is fine.  You have found a philosophy of life you can life with �" and die with.  We all know people like that.

The seekers

Then there are those who are not atheists, not agnostics in the commonly accepted sense, not people of faith, but people who are seekers.   They seek to know the Truth.  They seek to find out the truth for themselves.  They are likely to have read a great deal about the seeking done by others.  The holy books of the great religions might have been studied.   They will likely to have attended courses where others have presented their philosophies.   They might have tried various ways to find happiness in their lives before finally realizing, as they’ve been told by so many others of their ilk.   “Find out for yourself.”  And so they’ve decided to do just that.

During their seeking these seekers have probably considered and rejected lots of spiritual concepts and ideologies.   Then along comes something which no matter what angle they study it from, and how long they stay with it, it appeals to both their intellect and their heart.  It makes sense to both their rational mind as well as their spirit.   Like the believers, these people have also found a philosophy of life that they can live with.   But this does not involve going on trust in the words of others �" though those words and teachings might be very helpful �" it comes from the self, the inner self.  And therein lies all the difference.  For such people continue to grow right throughout their lives. 

But I’ll say no more on this in this chapter.