Clearing Away This Cosmic Frustration

When you heard the Titan mini sub imploded, did you imagine being inside it at that moment? When you watch the videos of people jumping off cliffs, do you feel it? Do you like horror movies for the gasping “jump scare?” Do you dance and shout when your team scores? Do you like kissing? Have you heard that Mount Everest is littered with bodies of climbers that will never be brought down?

The Eastern mystics say that everything we love, every pleasure and danger we chase - including our traumas - is for one purpose: to open a gate for the finite mind to plunge into Source momentarily. To jump out of our self-imposed, limited identity and into the infinite, into Source. You know this Source. You feel it.

We are all taught, early, to place a veil over Source – by our family, our culture, our religion, our economics. And by traumas – not the trauma itself, but our reaction to it, the way we carry it, hold it, nurture it. The people you’ve been mad at for so long? Probably your veil-placers. 

We want more than anything to lift that veil, and let Source shine through us. And at the same time, we totally fear lifting that veil, because of how that might shatter our reality. It’s this dance that creates those suffering habits we return to again and again. We invent habits to distract us from thinking about what's beyond the veil, habits to  distract us from being mad about the veil, and habits to keep us from lifting the veil. Dance, dance, dance, dear human.

Okay, I understand - because the mystics and the blogs have told me repeatedly - that “I am Spirit.” Spirit is manifesting in the world as me. I am Spirit experiencing the experience of experiencing this experince. Yeh, I get it.

But why does this Great Spirit - Boundless Love, Pure Awareness, Limitless Wisdom – choose to manifest in this place of unending limits, with uncountable forms of ignorance and frustration? Why does it give me that vague memory of Boundlessness to haunt my thoughts, to hint in my dreams, to hunt me from the dark?

I say, quickly without thinking about it much, “We come here to learn!” “Earth School!” “University of Embodied Experience!” But learn what? What it feels like to be frustrated? To be filled with yearning and unmet desires? To have my heart crushed and to feel my body slowly degenerate?

Western theologians have tied themselves in knots for millennia over the question of why God created a world in which He knew we would “fall from grace” and He would then punish us with pain of childbirth, sweat of the brow, and then death, but He went ahead with the project anyway. Why? What kind of God is that? There are a billion words written about this, half of them in German, of course, but I haven’t found any that answer the question with anything beyond “we know not the will of Mighty God.”

The mystics tell us (and the shamans agree) that it is only a small part of us that is mad and frustrated at all of this. It’s a small, not very bright, totally self-addicted part of the larger “me,” but it’s loud and persistent; an internal Lauren Boebert. It is unclear about what exactly it is afraid of and mad about, but because it is so loud, I can easily come to believe that I am afraid and mad to my very core.

The small self has a powerful imagination, but its imagination is very small in scope. So, it can imagine unending forms of enemies, disasters and threats but it can’t see over the fence surrounding its tiny backyard, the yard of wrongdoing and right doing. In fact, the small self is terrified of even peering over that fence to behold the boundless field of knowing and unknowing, in which the mystics and shamans cavort. It spends its time planting angry flowers and judgy-weeds in its small space.

Although the small self doesn’t really know what it’s mad about, I believe I have discovered the key:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
             -Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day“

I worship Mary Oliver as semantic goddess and I would gleefully wash her feet if she asked, but she articulates here the core error of the western mind, and the source of several millennia of vague anger. Western religion says we only have one life. Materialst science says the same thing. We are raised with a double-whammy of one-lifeism.

Nowhere in nature does anything live only one life, then vanish. Everywhere in nature, everything lives again and again and again, in different shapes. The small self believes the current shape must remain in the same shape (that tiny imagination again). Its small imagination cannot fathom actual transformation, so it makes it an enemy. This is why we imagine our soul looking just like us, but kinda glowy. - but probably younger and thinner.

The most poisonous lie that the false self tells us is the “one (and only) precious life.” All of western religion is based on this. That’s why the most devout people in the western world are the angriest. But they often don’t really know what they are mad at. Spoiler alert: it’s God they are mad at, for bringing us here, tricking us to disobey Him so he can punish us, so we must suffer, and must obey his capricious and hypocritical law, and must endlessly - with forced sincerity - praise Him for His goodness, and then, after all that - we croak. They can’t admit the anger at God, so they focus on being mad at people they are afraid of - the “rule-breakers.” And of course, anyone who looks over the fence is a real problem.

So, why does Spirit desire to manifest as this delusion-riddled, limited world? Why would Boundless Wonder jump into me - this tiny cooking pot poised over the butt-searing flame of life? The answer to that question is actually So. Damned. Easy. And if you sign up for my webinar, “The answer is so damned easy” for only $39 by midnight tonight, you will learn what people throughout history have been begging to learn.

Screw it, I’ll, just tell you.

We come here to learn, incrementally, how to take the next bigger leap into Source. With each jump you make, you can stay in the water of the infinite longer, you can smell more of the fragrance of Source. The poet Rilke said, “This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

Sometimes that pervasive fear you feel comes from the small self holding you down in the Boebert judgy-weed yard. But sometimes your fear comes from the fact that you are leaping into the next larger or deeper gap between your small self and the infinite. This is why we need human teachers, by the way – fellow humans who have made the bigger leaps that you are about to make. They can help you prepare, and they can keep you from making a naïve leap that will end up in an imploded submersible or on some frozen Everest crag.

Here are some ideas and practices to help you:

• The first key is to admit that the “you have one life” story is false. That may actually be very difficult for your western mind. It may take many lifetimes. Our life isn't precious because it's so rare - fleeting, ephemeral, and then totally gone. That's is an absolute recipe for short term, totally ego-based living - in other words, the world that the western mind has created for us, and in which we all live now.  for Our life is precious because each experience, tiny to shattering, ecstatic to debilitating,  is a doorway to the infinite, if we have the courage to see it that way.
• The second key is to allow the Universe to be as big as it actually is, which is far bigger and weirder than any of us have ever imagined – or can.
• The third key is to admit that you feel the whole universe as a presence, in you and around you, in and around everyone and everything. Regardless of what your inner Boebert is currently complaining about, you are, in essence, never separated from the quantum-entangled flux of creation. Tibetan Buddhists say, "look around you - every being you lay eyes on has been your mother in some other life."
• The next key is to enter into the idea that the universe was never created – it has always been. There was never “nothing,” and there never will be. When you allow yourself to enter this, you can skip past all of Western theology, and just enjoy your life. 

Let’s say there are 100 quadrillion ways Spirit can manifest in the endless, eternal universe (that’s far too small a number, but it’s helpful to place some kind of “big” number on it.) In your endless lives and shapes - billions of lives in every shape imaginable, from nematode and virus to salamander to wandering Sapien - this world of the veil, this planet of limits, this cooking pot of “I want,” is only one tiny part of your great, limitless experience that you can never even imagine.

Here is the most simple and potent exercise you can do, right now, and any time, to clear away this frustration of life.

Close your eyes. It helps if you sit in some kind of meditation posture - cross your legs or cup your right hand in the left hand. Really get to meditating. Meditate the hell out of this. Say to yourself, “I am meditating.” Feel good about that. Do it for a while. I am meditating. I am meditating. Then after a while ask a simple question: “Who is meditating?” Ask that a bunch of times. And then ask yourself, “Who is watching that person meditate?”

This is a practice that mystics, yogis, monks, and shamans use frequently, sometimes called “cultivating the witness.” The big, sloppy, delicious question then to ask is, “Who is the witness?” The answer we want to get to is along the lines of, “The one watching is Awareness itself.” In other words, Creation, Spirit, Boundless Wonder – it’s the witness of everything, including little you trying to meditate.

To take this exercise down the shamanic path a few steps, after witnessing the "one who is meditating" for a while, turn your attention now to the “one who is afraid." Watch that person for awhile, asking, “Who is it in me that is afraid?” Watch how they act, what they do. Stalk them for a while, see where they like to go, and what they like to do. There are next, deeper steps in all of this, and you can explore some of them in our August Three Moon Ceremony if you want to.

I leave you with this:

How I become hyacinth

How I become daffodil

How I become hosta

How I become sedum

     easily divided easily rooted

How I become the two-tone

     whistle chirp in that far off oak

How I become something you never planted

How I green from brown

How I heave up your mulch

     and crawl to you in your winter slumber

How I spring from pruned branches

How I become again the weeds you poisoned

How I emerge out of dead vines

How the longer you know me the bigger I grow

How you think you can cultivate me

How long it takes you to see

How I become you.

     (© 2005 Jaime Meyer)