Yesterday was strange. I sat in front of my computer and had nothing to say. My cursor did that thing they do in movies when they want to show how the writer has writer’s block or is stumped by a question she can’t answer so she just sits and stares at the blinking cursor which, very soon, becomes a kind of laughing monster who ridicules you and rubs your face in your imminent failures.
So I was wondering about that, about where writing comes from. It’s not like if I can’t write or have nothing to say that it’s my fault! The writing doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to someone else, to some ineffable mystery being who lives in my soul and has a lot to say. More often than not, it’s actually many ineffable mystery people, each with a different perspective on a certain subject. Some of them are brilliant, clever, and wise, others just want to criticize, dissect, bemoan, and belittle. That’s not all either, by the way. Some of the ineffable mystery commentators inhabiting my soul are true poets and mystics and they perceive beauty and speak its name in words, or in glyphs, as my friend, Chanti, calls them.
In my dream last night, someone was saying we know that Beauty and Love are real because we recognize their images personified in the deep psyche. For us, they have faces and bodies and personalities and that’s how we know them, how we know they are real. There are those who have no understanding of this fact, or else they have no interest in maintaining its validity. Just smoke and mirrors, they say, just the brain working out its electric issues. Really? That’s some brain, then, and some electricity. Brainwashed scientific materialism folks end up invalidating the reality and the value of dreams because they think only material reality and verifiable empirical facts are worthy of the moniker “real.” But this is why we have to stop trying to please everyone.
There are many pathways to true knowledge. Not every person who is born into a human life will make it to the pinnacle of truth and knowledge and wisdom. Many people are here just to let their brains work out their electric issues, just to slog their way through oceans of karma, and not everyone will find themselves deeply, passionately, irrevocably in love with wisdom. As we know by now (or should know if we have eyes to see), many people are drawn toward the consciousness and the works and the behaviors of evil. I think it can be a waste of precious energy and resources to go around trying to convince every last person on the planet to change their ways and become a lover of wisdom. Because time is very short, and we keep thinking we have tons of time.
A Tibetan Buddhist writer whose work I really enjoy once wrote about the kind of haunting experiences people tend to have when they have reached the deathbed phase of their lives. This Tibetan Buddhist monk worked with end-of-life people so he had first-hand knowledge. He said that it can be a super intense and even heartbreaking and devastating moment when we’re on our deathbed and we look back on all the days and hours and years we had to get it right and realize how much time we dawdled away on meaningless shallow pursuits. And the sad fact is that many people simply don’t get the message about what life is about until it’s too late.
What is the message? How can we get it right so we can be at peace when the deathbed moment comes? There’s only one message: we have to get right with god. For many people, the word god conjures up a lot of mental bullshit. I call it mental bullshit because that’s what it is when you start flapping your gums about ideas you inherited from others and have never really considered deeply. Only a person who sets out to explore the question of god personally is qualified to speak on the subject and even then, it’s tricky. You can’t just swallow whatever religion your father gave you and then think you know about god and religion. And you can’t just look out at the world with its grotesque cultural expressions of religion and think that’s what god is. God is a very personal matter, god is not out there in the synagogue or the mosque or the church. God isn’t in the holy books or at the holy sites. Chasing after god in those places is just a frightened ego desperate to find some peace in a crazy and unstable world. Or else it’s a bona fide sinner hoping for salvation by giving a life of lies and cheating a good face. I think these are exactly the people who get that haunted look in their eyes on the deathbed! You can run, but you can’t hide from the reality of your own death. And when the time comes for you to cross that river, you better be ready.
Getting right with god means finding god inside your own heart. What is god? I think god is a word for a transpersonal power to which we are yoked through our souls. We are responsible to this power, we must answer to it. It wants things from us, it needs us to grow and become mature. How we do this is through our thoughts, words, and deeds. We stop our shitty selfish greedy behaviors and we start our good deeds. What are these?
When I have a dark thought about someone, and I stop myself from it, and when I change the dark thought into a nice one and also take responsibility for my own inner world, that is a good deed. Not only did I stop the energy of the dark thought from taking root in my own being, but I also worked with it and helped to transform it into a compassionate and loving thought. I didn’t judge myself, either, I just chose to be compassionate instead of mean, letting go of my need to be right and dominant, open and allowing others to be who they are in their own way. That is a good deed. All day long, we have a choice about which thought to pursue, which words to speak, and which actions to take. Getting right with god means always choosing the compassionate option. It also means being grown up and mature enough to understand what really matters. Money, power, success, fame — whether for yourself or for your children — none of that really matters. Getting right with god means walking, with your camel, unimpeded, through the eye of a needle. And you can never do that if you are burdened by the weight of desire for personal gain.
Getting right with god means relinquishing attachments to the childish things of the world, and figuring out what your priorities are. As I said earlier, not everyone will make it to this level of comprehension, but those who do get there recognize that living a simple life that is not focused on material possessions, but is rather focused on giving others love and compassion and the shirt of your back if they need it, giving all your love and not needing anything in return, being that free is the only way through the needle. Being that free means having a heart that’s light as a feather. And that kind of freedom only comes when you are right with god. God is not an external reality. God is you, your personal life, your thoughts, your words, your deeds. How we treat our life, how we treat our limited days, hours, and minutes, how we behave, the choices we make — all of this adds up to make one whole life and when we examine it we can say the person lived a holy life in service to the sacred or the person lived a shallow and profane life in service to greed. No one out there in the skies judges you on your accomplishments or failures.
You do that yourself with every step you take.
