WITH VENUS and Mercury Retrograde in the rear view mirror and three months of nothing but forward-moving planets stretching out before us, it’s time to take a deep breath and focus on some soulful alternatives to Schwab n’ Gates cyborgian wet dream.
Now is the great reset!
There is a thanatonic rapture to “beginner’s mind,” a whole world ending and being reborn as something else.
Suddenly, VR goggles and the entire phenomenon of immersive tech toys look like sappy stabs at the sublimity of naked seeing. The Metaverse: a crude simulation of storyless presence surveying the passage of time with “astounding, lucid, confusion.”
What makes Big Tech versions of otherworldliness so alluring? Simple: they leave ego intact.
Savoring the fullness of being (a.k.a. “meditation”) on the other hand, humbles (and sometimes destroys) egoic ambition and the identities we hoped to prop up by virtue of accomplishing them. From personhood’s perspective, meditation is just a stone’s throw from the apocalypse.
Why stick around to kick through the me-story rubble? To inhale what’s drifting up from the ashes: mysterious, emergent, Interbeing.
The Price of Seeing
Look around. Ask: Is the Merciful Witness incandescing the separate sense of self, sprinkling its speech with delicious divine pauses?
Or is Deathless Being getting trampled and eclipsed by identity-hardened role play?
“Being spiritual” means noticing the fractured, traumatized nature of ego-on-a-countdown and allowing other’s habits of Self-forgetting to break our heart open.
Heartbreak, in turn, equips us with a real-life superpower: benevolent induction. In its most mature expression, this looks like a spiritual teacher.
Minus a courageous inhabiting of timeless Presence, our gestures of love are impotent. Instead of communing, ego attempts to “bridge the gap,” which makes the canyon between flesh all the more real.
The Club Of No Return
There is nothing more dangerous than meditation: watching Deathless Being dream itself into archetypal cookie-cutter shapes (commonly called “people”) that routinely pixilate and dissolve back into boundless Being.
Why “dangerous?” Because, as we serenely survey the divine drama playing out– free of distorting comment or prejudice– we unwittingly enter “The club of no return.”
Suddenly, casual conversation is riddled with self-inquiry: As what am I speaking? Is this the Merciful Witness talking– or orphaned ego trudging through another day of secular winter? Is this me feeling safe at home in the heart of God– or me putting a sexy face on my trauma fog?
Asking and responding honestly to these questions is meditation-in-action; the grace of God vaccinating mind-on-a-countdown: ethereal ivermectin.
On the surface, the pill costs nothing. Looking deeper, it costs everything. Never again can we giddily grab at this dream turned solid.
The Unfading One
Soon, “the story of me” will become a vaporized blip, as unremembered as our once urgent thoughts and feelings (creatures with the shortest lifespan in the universe!)
The sacred mission of these “creatures?” To entice us to witness them and, thereby, move the come-and-goesy-woezy world outside of us, inside; to stain identity with impermanence.
This internal lack of ground, in turn, inspires souls to move attention away from the identity-hardening antics of wanting and not-wanting, and towards the intoxicating world of space-with-a-face presence.
As our relationship with ‘the seamless field of sentience” stabilizes, tense survival relaxes into meditative levity; grasping-at-goodies calms into causeless happiness.
Gradually, as the Merciful Witness wakes up inside more and more me-stories, the parade of personality is replaced by “the noble march of souls.”
The smelliest aspects of grave-bound ego become evidence of the Divine in the throes of self-remembering.
Dark life cycles of thought and emotion are bowed down to as wombs for the birth of the Unfading One.
Meditative Relating
Next step: allowing meditation to migrate off the pillow into our relationships.
The following self-inquiry questions are designed to soften the grip of ego– laying the groundwork for authentic soulful communion.
Catalysts for Communion
1) Do I feel comfortable inviting them to be a fish in the ocean of my consciousness?
2) Has grace turned my inner and outer posture into something worth emulating?
3) Do I have a nervous system relaxed and nurtured enough to welcome them to plug into it?
4) Is the Merciful Witness shining through my trauma fog?
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