Sunday, August 17, 2008

When we look at life we will see different sceneries depending on were we have our view point. The north side of a mountain can look completely different than the south side.

Suppose you’re well-off, with a nice husband, great kids and a nice job, but you feel very miserable and unhappy with your life anyway; maybe you say to yourself: `I have everything I want but I’m so unhappy that I almost want to kill myself´. Suppose you wake up from that depression, maybe with help from a psychologist, from a spiritual counselor or maybe it happens spontaneously, by grace. You will now probably see that you were fooling yourself before and how your mind tricked you. (It was just dark thoughts but you believed they where the truth.) And maybe you will now have the feeling that you have woken up from a bad dream.

If you are very poor, on the other hand, and work 12 hours a day, six days a week, picking grapefruits or bananas, but still have serious difficulties to feed your kids, so that some rich shareholders in a big fruit company can get richer, then all talk of waking up from illusions and the necessity of not taking thought's seriously doesn’t mean much. Other things than self deception and thoughts will be much more important. To wake up from that nightmare you probably have to win money on a lottery ticket.

To wake up doesn't mean the same thing to all people. We have philosophies for the rich and philosophies for the poor, religions for the rich and religions for the poor. Rich people will read the Bible with rich people’s glasses. “To those who have, more shall be given” will be taken literally. And poor people will find that “many of the last shall be the first". In India they have also teachings and gurus for different tastes, slow-witted gurus for slow-witted people, smarter gurus for smarter people and crazy gurus for crazy people. But none of them have the whole truth. Those who claims to know it all, belongs to the slow-witted kind.

2 comments:

:Doreen said...

It's not really the poor person that needs to wake up. It is (the wealthy ones and) You. The shift has to start somewhere. It is the awakened "owner" who will stop being an "owner" and spread out his wealth with the pickers. He becomes a picker, as well. He gives up his "business" because it turns into "service" for others. You may not be able to see these guys but we have a few examples, already: Byron Katie, "gave up" her real estate business and devotes all her time to people in prisons, hospitals, etc. Eckhart Tolle "gave up" a successful track to an academic career to be a public speaker that, I feel, has reached a million or more people.

The conditioned "owner" "has to" wake up to their own conditioning. The picker is "advanced", in terms, of her own suffering. It is not possible to say, exactly, why that is. But I know that the greater service is served by those who suffer the most. (At least in the "old world of conditioning") In the New Earth one cannot speak of "greater than/lesser than". In the New Earth even the language changes.

You need to look at the underlying collective conditioning that keeps this current system in place. (But is it not Falling?) A lottery ticket is part of that conditioned existence. Further analysis of these conditions that create the extremes between people is a futile endeavor. It is like trying to resuscitate a dead body. Useless. But you have the opportunity to wake up to consciousness, and in being that Awakened Presence/Space it effects change.

I have always "had" things because in some way I felt I needed them or had to own certain objects because of their beauty to me, kinda like it was a reflection of who I was. So I bought things with "credit" and no cash or possibility of funds (through an outside job) to pay for them. If I had had a high paying job I probably would have bought more expensive things and have been in the same boat. But now I have $1000
dollars left in my bank account (which they require me to have or they charge me $10, I don't know, each month or each transaction, something like that...I just try to forget about it so that I do not lose it to these fees). And a substantial debt that exceeds the $1000. But, now, I have stopped getting more things. Interesting. The desire for any thing more is gone. I am a keeper of things; and now, to go into my room is like opening a treasure chest. I am wondering how to share that with others?

By some people's standards I am poor. By some people's standards I do not work enough. By some people's standards I am rich because I have a car and a roof over my head. Some people can see that I walk with a cane, some cannot. Some think that I am lazy, others see that I am creative. Should life be lived dependent on the views of other. If I feel grateful for Being why should I "try" for more or less? For appearance to the conditioned mass? Will it "look better" to my kids if I'm not available when they need me but I'm out working to pay for the things you need in order to go work. Free Will has nothing to do with society. It has nothing to do with the conditioned world. Free Will is uncovered in the Waking Up process. It is always there, for many it is deeply buried, for others it is just below the surface waiting to burst forth. You can't DO ANYTHING to call it forth. But when you "WAKE UP TO REALITY" you will see it. You will Know IT.

I don't think that when you wake up you will see you're "old" thoughts as being dark. My experience has been quite the opposite. I certainly do not feel fooled or tricked. I absolutely feel grateful for those experiences, thoughts, feelings in the past. I love it, ALL. If it were not for my life lived I would not Be Here Now. It is really hard to explain, it is a paradox, really. We are living a paradox.

:Doreen said...

"To wake up from that nightmare you probably have to win money on a lottery ticket."

The same nightmare.

You make assumptions about the content of people's minds. Including your own. This is not something to be known, the mind. It only knows how to process the tapes and play them back over and over again. As Byron Katie says: "there are no new stressful ideas." See Jill Bolte Taylor, she talks about the loops that thoughts and feelings cycle through our brains. There really is no "content" to the mind. Or, if you like, it is extremely small.