Easter 2011
Technically, this blog is for May 1 – but I happen to be writing it on Easter Sunday, and it seems fitting.
The immaterial, weightless nature of the soul is all but forgotten now – the truth and immediacy of it – so real discussions about our bondage are sort of redundant. The facts of the states of dreaming, waking, and the river that yawns between them have been reduced to the banal, and casual, by the world-mind.
In some cultures, they say to speak a thing, to give it a name, renders it powerless. Today, the New Age is the consensus of common knowledge about all things spiritual; without our noticing, the banality of mind has “owned” the concepts. In stealth, it has erased the doorways to the inner chambers of power. We are lost.
In The Bardo, I recount a story of a seminar I attended in my youth – where many seeds were planted about the lost mystical world; at the end of the talk, the mysterious speaker looked out into the audience with a piercing, unblinking gaze and said: “In the endgame, expect paradox.” These words burned into my mind, lingering indelibly over 30 years. The paradox, to which we are unknowingly oblivious now, is that our daylight, “wake” reality is, in Kali Yuga, the deepest descent into unconscious slumber possible by the human spirit – and that to actually awaken into Consciousness, we must regain access to the realm of “dreaming”. The paradox is that the whole map of our many lives – the births without number into time, countless thousands of events, inflections of experience and feeling, deaths – are dangerous dreams of binding, hypnotic power.
There are microscopic degrees of sleep (and conversely, of awakening). The mortal insidiousness of abject slumber is that of a coma; there is no memory, no knowledge of the source of one’s existence. There is no receptivity or registering in the soul-body of the profound magnetic pull of the “true North” of the Causal plane. Much less is there motive for the immense striving required for emancipation.
But back to the paradox: we know all about this now, right? Thank God we’re not in ignorance of the light like the poor brethren that were our forebears. We are the New Age, the enlightened tribe, and know that lofty, bright radiance of transcendence is our birthright. We can just sit here and bask in it, enjoying our beatitude.
We are lost. If you doubt me, measure yourself against the axiom enunciated by Gurumayi Chitvilasananda: “Leave the circle of Time, and enter the circle of Love”.
Are you in Time? Are you, in daily life, bound and nailed to the cross of space and Time?
I rest my case.
But the Far Shore exists. It is more real than you are.
And it is waiting for you.
Junipur over and out