I Know, Right? and Yet...

In spite of everything I’ve learned through study and hard experience, I am discontent. This discontent calls into question my attainment of, you know, wisdom. I know: in Heaven everything happens in an instant — all of time at once, as it were; here in the spacetime realm of gross matter, of material bodies with three-days’ dead Christ inside, yet to be fully resurrected, the Dark Night of the Soul can take years to pass. Things take time to work through space as, since the Big Bang, every thing appears to be constantly changing, each at its respective pace — everything except the Law of Change. Like Jesus says, “Til heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” (Matthew 5:18)

Ah, just “Be still and know that I AM,” (Psalm 46:10) and all is omnipresently well…All is, and yet, is not. It’s just a dream, all that we see and seem (Poe in 1849, wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dream_Within_a_Dream) of bodies that are born, depend on plant and animal life — lives — to survive; bodies that get sick, and well, and sick; get injured, recovered, re-injured; grow old, wear out and die…to no end, no purpose. “It is (and isn’t) what it is.” The Hindus said it first. They said it 3000 years ago, before they were called Hindus, a mispronunciation of “sindhu” which, in Sanskrit, means river. By the 16c AD, the term began to refer to residents of the Indian subcontinent who were not Turkic or Muslim.

The four Sanskrit Vedas, revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation, have been orally transmitted since the second millennium BC. Their oldest parts are the mantras, considered to be “primordial rhythms of creation,” preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated “by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creations at their base.”

“Verily, thoughts lead to words, which lead to actions. Actions repeated over time lead to habits which, repeated over years, become character, and character is destiny! Therefore, guard the thoughts.” Better yet, practice something, be it mantra, or whatever helps induce “no-mind” (no thought, or no capture by train of thought). Any of many physical activities can be one’s yoga, including hatha yoga. I recommend postures which force one to concentrate on balance…to the exclusion of thought. Mantra…to the exclusion of thought. As Nisargadatta omnipresently says, constant thought is a morbid condition.

My problem? “Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.” It’s a spurious quote attributed to the fictional Dr. Judd’s The Anatomy of Atavism, one may argue, but “the low places”? Touché, Dr. Judd! “The more civilized a society seems to be, the more susceptible it is to its buried atavism.”

I’ve had my share of comeuppance, I reckon, and could do with some redemption…Another dark night passes, as my years have been for over a decade, time running out — rather, the illusion of time running out…The meta-view of this universe as dream helps me stay calm and carry on, and not become quietly desperate, like Thoreau’s mass of men. Within this dream, though, this tragic farce, is not choosing not to act itself an act? waiting, waiting, always waiting for a clear sign, an unsought word, to motivate me to ask, to seek, to knock. (Matthew 7:7)