Those of us who explore what seems like the fringes of experience, know that the real adventure is confronting one’s immortality – the many lives, planes and planets that become the furniture of infinity as we move to the music of multidimensionality.
One of my teachers, influencers as the saying now goes, wrote about a century ago that waking up and not knowing who you were or are, even for a few seconds, is but a taste of higher self consciousness.
Finishing up the third volume of Michael Posner’s oral biography of Leonard Cohen, as full an account of a celebrity’s life as one is likely to get, complete with as many contradictions, paradoxes and self-indulgent scandalous behaviours as you can handle, I was struck by Cohen’s seemingly endless dependence on gurus and teachers to give meaning and significance to his path through life.
I can clearly see the turbulence of the astral body as an attribute of youth itself and little to do with personality types or psychological categorizing. Achieving balance and serenity through practice in one’s twenties is nearly impossible
I was reading a book, interesting and enjoyable, when the author wrote about choosing a course of action that was “in our best interests”. A common enough sentiment, and one I have used myself in many a conversation. But as we pursue our course along the inner journey where all conventional assumptions are challenged and sometimes overturned, such thoughts often turn into questions. I found myself wondering what are “our best interests” exactly?
Just as birth is but the appearance of a start and death the simulation of an ending, so too your “first” exit from the body is but a conscious replication of a long standing practice, albeit an unconscious one.
From time to time I am asked about the possible actuality of “dire predictions”, …of war, environmental collapse, of political upheaval. Whether in public or private forums, I usually poo-poo them and not because I am a skeptical curmudgeon dedicated to some kind of know-it-all denialism.
I have long been intrigued with the struggles of intellectuals and artists to come to terms with what seems to be the chaotic destructive madness of the world as they experience it. Poets, novelists, philosophers, administrators, legislators, and the like, all look to be permanently on the edge of hopeless gloominess about humanity’s performance and potential.
The self that we think we are, were or will be, is merely an expression of attachment, something we like to love when discontent is at a low ebb. The self is a bauble, a plaything, a vehicle that takes us places and plonks us down to play the game at the local level…
One of the early stages on the inner journey is seeing that we are lost in the fogs of society’s directives and the ego’s fear based vanities. We start to feel as if everything we once knew for sure is wrong and that a new set of truths and values have to be discovered and developed. As we explore these many possibilities for action we usually have to let go of our need for approval from family and friends, those supports we used to take for granted when we played by the rules no-one talked about.