Become a Follower of the Big Dude!

Meet the divine Dude in this blog. This Dude has had and seen his share of sacred shit. He's not afraid of it or of its language. I can't relate to a god that's been crucified, but I can relate to one whom my government has imprisoned and humiliated. I can relate to one who's been raped by his own holy men. I can relate to one who grew up playing baseball or soccer and who dated the Prom Queen. I can relate to the god who knows the working of corporate conglomerates, pimps, and teen-age girls who are pregnant. I can relate to the god who loves alcoholics and drug addicts just a tad more than wall street hotshots or so-called holy men who abuse little boys. This Dude thinks all of us are mortal particles in an ocean of sacred shit. This Dude recycles.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Meet in the Middle

There's a line from a country song that goes something like this:  "You come from your way; I'll come from mine.  We'll meet in the middle at that old Georgia pine."  Meeting in the middle is sometimes a spiritual challenge.  Some days we taste the bliss and serenity of oneness with all of creation.  Some days we spiral away into isolation and loneliness.  While there is spirituality in all of these experiences, finding some balance between extremes is a useful spiritual goal.

Let's look at those extremes.  Bliss.  For me, that happens in a heartbeat when everything slows down and I am present in the moment as if time has stopped.  It happened once when I was saying good-bye to a friend while standing in the doorway of my home.  It was late evening and raining.  I became conscious of the mist, of the cool air, of the sky behind my friend's head, of the street lights shimmering, of the vast darkness beyond.  It also happens sometimes when I'm sitting in my yard after a long day.  In my case, I'm noticing, these moments of bliss occur most frequently in the evening. Maybe there's a "certain slant of light" (Dickinson) coming horizontally through the darkening trees.  Maybe the complete silence suddenly filled with evening birdsong brings it.  Anyhow, that's one end of the spectrum.

At the other extreme is isolation and desolation.  Many of us experience these more than we experience bliss; certainly, that's true for me.  First, let's distinguish between loneliness and isolation (C. Moustakas).  Loneliness is a healthy, creative time of fermentation.  It's being alone with our selves and being content with that.  Isolation is the feeling that we are separated from the human community and the creation, cast aside perhaps, and it comes with fear, shame, and sometimes despair.  So the other extreme of bliss is isolation, not loneliness.

While both extremes bring opportunities for spirituality and while we are still connected with the God, Big Dude, or Universal Good; in the isolation phase, we aren't aware of our connection.  It's there but we don't experience it.

If the divine is present in ALL experience, then why seek the middle as part of our spiritual practice?  There's  an ego-hit that comes with the extremes.  We are self-conscious in an extreme way that can be as addictive as a drug.  The "high" of bliss and the "low" of desolation can become ends in themselves.  We begin searching for bliss, craving it, are disappointed and feel like failures if we can't score it.  Likewise, we become comfortable with isolation and desolation.  They expect nothing of us.  We don't have to DO anything about them.  Poor us.  We're so alone,  ahhhhhhh.  There's a sedation in that state that we find ourselves attached to, preferring it over the slings and arrows of everyday life.

So, we seek the middle.  We seek to live the everyday life.  At first, this may seem incredibly hard or incredibly boring.  Do it anyway.  We ARE in the middle between our spiritual and physical natures.  We live in the sacred and the shitty all the time.  It's the nature of our human condition.  To cling to one side of our experience more than the other may seem safe or wonderful, but it's not whole.  It's not you experiencing the nature of your current life.  It's rejecting the gift of being spiritual beings in a PHYSICAL world.

Wise friends have told me, bring a little of one side with you when you're in the other as a way to start moving into the middle.  When feeling bliss, consciously remember the desolation of another day and bless it.  When feeling desolation, visualize the serenity of those blissful moments.

Meet me in the middle, baby!  Roxie

2 comments:

  1. (No rush for responses; yoga & spirituality just excite me and that's all. I know you are reading.)

    Very few authors/ bloggers have got this essence of yoga. So, it is great to read about "balance."

    Samadhi may be the end-state in yoga, but the journey doesn't stop there. A skill called 'sanyama' needs to take Samadhi further and refine it from being an 'achievement' to a 'way of life'.

    Sanyama, means a 'delicate balance'. Even siddhis as commonly translated as 'miraculous power' are regarded as effects of a perfect balance. It starts with asanas. The pinnacle of any asana is not being able to display great athletic prowess; but being in such an equilibrium that it will erase physical identity for a moment and open s window for the spiritual to show up.

    Me and the world is the first reflex division our perception makes. Then we are drawn into so many currents and cross-currents of the pairs of opposites that we get pulled more into one aspect of experiencing than the other. Thus are born our predispositions - love and hate, likes and dislikes, happiness or otherwise - the coloring. Balance neutralizes the pull of the opposites.

    However, some times, balance carries a hint of a 'compromise', better to be in the middle and stay non-committal. Once some time is spent on meditation, includes external meditation on objects or in a process, the value of maintaining balance is realized. Losing the balance can be easily traced to distraction.

    The balance becomes acutely delicate as we advance on the spiritual path. Even the slightest deviation is magnified in that purified state. But, as I mentioned in my other comment, when the enlightened persons maintain that supreme balance, they become the most desirable person around. Their balance is not a 'put on behavior' which makes people exaggerate their doing this or not doing that. The balance is ingrained, natural and reflects in everything. It is a steady-state of bliss, not a 'feeling' that comes and goes.

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  2. PS: Middle is significant in another way. As a newborn, we ARE naturally in the middle, mother is not in the world, mother is the world. As we explore the world, conditioned by already conditioned parents and many, we learn about the objects and how to connect with them through the senses. Our self-imposed prison term thus begins. Then we discover emotions that teach us to measure, judge, differentiate, classify and so on making the objects distinct and distant. Then we realize that 'we think'. Many of us only think ever after and never think about this thinking. Thoughts clothe the objects and the emotive connections with 'words' with own existence. But, since they wear different clothes at different times our thinking process invents 'reason' to rationalize each different appearance. This creates a whole array of 'pairs of opposites' that seals our imprisonment. Essentially, we loose our middle ground. The world is not just 'the world' any more; it is defined as objects, their changing appearances and each appearance sits on a pair of opposites with a reason.

    Oh yes, it is important to be in the middle to meet there.

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