Don't Turn Apples Into Oranges
I sometimes get frustrated with myself that I don't seem to really GET the fact that everything is connected. It is a spiritual truth that I accept and which has reputedly sent its practitioners into enlightenment, but my mundane, physical life is just as real for me as ever, despite my hard work and unwavering intentions.What I realized is that I'm frustrated with my conscious mind, my ego, for not understanding this Truth. But that's like expecting an apple to become an orange. Instead of trying to turn an apple into an orange, I need to love and appreciate the apple for what it is, and recognize
that it is a small part of an entire banquet.
You see, the ego is a device for functioning in this physical world. The ability to make distinctions is what keeps us from walking into walls, and enables us to sustain relationships with other people and to cooperate and do all the things that occur on a physical plane. But that's all the ego is for. This thought-based consciousness we call the ego is not our whole being, in fact it's only a small part of it.
Now, I believe it is possible, and fundamental, to train my ego-mind to think in ways that are conducive to identifying with the One; indeed, I am playing around now with Wayne Dyer's proposition that a person who learns to control their thoughts can choose to have nothing but loving and peaceful thoughts all the time. But in the end, the conscious mind is simply a tool that makes distinctions in order to make physical life possible, and I cannot expect my thinking mind to become the seat of the Self, and delude myself into thinking that until it does, the Truth
has eluded me.
Indeed the Truth is quite evident in my life -- by my beating heart, by the movement of the cells in my body, by whatever force it is that precedes the thoughts that occur in my mind --- my very breath and life is this Truth being expressed through me. I think I've missed it because I'm looking in the wrong place, or expecting to understand it with thought, when the Self is what precedes thought.
Look at Siddha Yoga gurus Baba and Gurumayi. Their egos still function, otherwise they'd try to merge into walls and walk through people. They don't do that. They're not confused about the physical boundaries between themselves and other things. And yet they're enlightened. They do "get it."
I think what they've done is to identify with the Witness, the Observer, the Self behind the form. They have spent enough time in meditation, in that space BEFORE thought happens, that they have come to know that part of their being so well -- they have plumbed its depths so deeply -- that their experience of life through It dwarfs their experience of life through a thinking, reasoning, distinction-making mind. They recognize the ego-mind as a simple tool with a specific purpose, and they only use it for that. Their achievement shows us why knowing the Witness is so important, and why meditation is so important. Without these, one remains imprisoned in the narrow, mundane cell of the five senses and ego-thought.
I keep coming back to Wayne Dyer's metaphor of a person's "life mile", and the "critical inch" within that mile where one's best self is usually lived from. That critical inch of meditation, of identifying with the Witness behind the form --- the force that precedes all thought and form --- needs to extend and become the life mile, so that the "critical inch" is the place that the ego occupies. When I do that, then I'll get it.
Until then, my heart will keep beating, my cells will keep moving and changing and functioning, my breath will keep flowing, my Self will keep giving rise to thought and form, and I will be expressing the Truth in every moment, all while I am looking at the apple of my mind and fretting that it has not yet become an orange.
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