Finding the Supreme

Chapter 3 — Do Gurus Wear Seat belts?

Everyone metaphysically asleep does something to dull the pain of this disastrous slumber.

They throw themselves into their their work, they throw themselves into their family, they do many things to stem the misery of not knowing who they are. One thing or another is chosen to dull the sharp edges of ignorance. They eventually throw themselves accidentally away.

We select something to act as a drug. Something is picked to numb and distract us from facing the meaninglessness of everything, and we invest that chosen distraction with the meaning we seek. It is a most human thing to do. People may throw themselves ‘body and soul’ into loving someone else and sacrifice their life to them. Or they may choose extreme sports, money, alcohol, heroin. These are substitutes for who we actually are. Humans cannot for long bear not knowing. And the most tragic, deadly situation is when we do not know what we do not know. We don’t know we have a true self to know and we are in a blind double bind.

There has to be something we do to mask the mask of hiding from everyone because we fundamentally hide from our self. If we go literally crazy within these masks, then that is what it is. Something has to happen. We make it so.

The call of our true self is postponable, but eventually undeniable.

Whatever we use as novocaine for our unintended and tragic ignorance, it is a text message from the inexhaustible light in us that will not allow us to forget our true selves. Once we are forced to recognize the symptoms of our own cover story, we are closer to recognizing the light of who we truly are but at the same time unfortunately for some this may be an appalling shock and too late in this life to solve.

I am old, my children have left me, and the purpose of my life is gone. I can’t do professional sports now and I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what is wrong, without work to do I’m not myself, I have to find something to do.

Empty activity can be burial by busy. Eventually the umpire of our life screams, “You’re Out!”, and he says, “You have to be In! That’s why we call these Innings!”

Where is in?

You could imagine there is an inner cave in our awareness. There is a tunnel to it. There is no door, the access is open. Occasionally as we tiptoe by it on the way to some outer experience we see a pinprick of bright light deep inside it. Over time, it gets brighter and more enigmatic. It might wave like a flashlight. Somebody is in there, way, way deep, who in the heck is it?

Eventually we have to go and see in the dark.

This is our cosmic game of hide and seek.

I keep my self just out of reach of me. But pretty soon I have to find out who is in there.

We bury our eternal self from view during this time of outer running away before we awaken to the possibility, the inevitability, the grace, the mania, to return to our inner home. This is what is truly meant by “looking for love in all the wrong places”. We all do it until it becomes intolerable. Then if we don’t acknowledge this call to self and begin doing something to welcome it into our attention, our life falls apart. It has to because the simple imperative is to clear everything away but the kernel of me, the true me. You have to. And if you cannot, you may kill yourself because it is simply that bad if you can’t figure out and accept who is you.

It’s important to state that none of this means you cannot be a wonderful parent, immersing yourself in your family in service, or do other loving and wonderful things for the world. But if these activities are pure cover for inner self abandonment, then I believe  pathologies manifest in some ways as well. By abusing loved ones we once served, and similar acts that are incomprehensible. Incomprehensible until we understand their cause. Their cause is inner emptiness. You cannot forever plug infinite lack with good works. If those external good works are not balanced by inner discovery, they will twist and manifest into grotesque parodies of themselves. The events potentiated are dramatic puzzling headlines of persons warped into terrifying violence. They are screaming at everyone else to tell them what is wrong and if it doesn’t occur the frustration leads to punishment of everyone and also self.

These behaviors we class as inhuman. Somehow we recognize that disconnection from our core self severs our definition as human. That who each one of us really is, is basking internally and eternally in the unity of being and that our language reminds us thus calling ourselves human beings. We needn’t call cows cow beings, because cows know it.

We somehow know that our true self is our actual source, our very continuity as awareness and that since all source is unified to recognize who we are recognizes every other as ourselves. By not maintaining a live connection to our internal source, we sever a connection to our human family and to the rest of creation. A yogi meditating decades alone in a cave is profoundly more connected to the rest of humanity than a financier surrounded by other people but ignorant of who he really is.

A disconnected human suffers unendurable pain, and eventually will cause unendurable pain.

On Lightworkers

For lightworkers, Ascension can be our drug. Service can be our drug. These things can be our fabricated distractions from our truth. And the higher we get in frequency, the more subtly we may choose our distractions.

Our path is our distraction.

There is no path. Although the assumed ‘path’ is a much healthier distraction than alcohol or whatever else, it has a similar though non as dramatic effect in our lives  for we use these things to signal us we may not be home yet. All the sages say this. It is one of the things they say that we all find most mysterious. When the Guru says, “You are already there”, we say to ourselves, not me. This is actually one of the final hurdles to coming home. The Guru knows we don’t know, but he must tell us so and we must go through the paradox of being away at home.

It’s like inner voice mail. “Hi, this is Bill, I’m not home right now, but you can leave a message.” The problem is that it’s Bill calling.

God and how everything happens

It is said that there are three steps god takes in creation. (This is paraphrased from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)

God says:

I

Know

Myself

The last word is what creates the universes. It automatically triggers an infinite progression of objective knowing that successively creates more to know as it knows. This is doubtless what cosmologists call the Big Bang. And it all happens instantly. Technically, it is the logic of creating as it is done by god. It happens in a logical microsecond and it is really no big deal. It’s just  built into the basic mandates of intelligence to elaborate, ramify, expand, and express, just as we do. When we get confused by all the dazzling lush complex variation, it can help us relax to be patient with the creator.  Do we really need 40,000 varieties of spiders?  He does.

Creation also doesn’t happen at all, but let’s not go there right now.  However, for the intrigued, in the appendix there is a further analysis of this in a mystical poem that came to me in 2001.

Maharishi says that in causing creation god identifies in order the knower, the process of knowing, and what is known. The Infinite subject begins to know finite object as all one singular infinite Being.

This explosion of the seemingly material has created a map for us of where everything and we came from.

We have made this apparent journey. We have moved from pure being to formless self awareness to material creation.

Somehow along the way we get distracted. Creation is so fascinating that we forget who we are. We forget everything. The trip for most of us becomes a shocking detour of illusion and pain.

So can we see that getting back is simply backing up?

It’s not exactly like this but it doesn’t hurt to see it this way. We have gone from step 1 to step 3. Then we go from 3 back to 1. We return to 1. We return to the One. The hot news is that even though we don’t remember we walked that walk, somewhere in us knows with certainty there is a way back. And the hotter news is that we don’t have to walk it back ourselves.

The immense cosmic spiritual wink is we don’t have to do anything to get back.

“…when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy realization; I need do nothing.” A Course in Miracles chapter 18

That statement scratched my head for many years until I realized it as below.

When we go through the creation steps 1,2,3, it is like we stretch out a being-band, a rubber band of being. As it stretches out it exerts on us a pull back to our source.

We want to experience creation and god wants to experience it through us. We want to go to 3. It’s built into us. It’s fine. It’s god’s grace that we stretch out from formless unity to formal materiality and we find the amazing creation. So we do go out and he is in glory with us because we are allowing ourselves to appreciate him more and more and he is thereby able to appreciate himself more and more through us his creations. As mentioned this is from the Urantia book.

But our own personal rubber band of becoming is stretched and stretched.

So this is why there is no journey back. We don’t need a path. The rubber band is connected to our oragin.  We have helped stretch Being all the way to Doing. We have chosen it as a glory of creation. How to get back? How to go back to being number 1?

All we do, all we can do, is let go.

When we let go, Being itself brings us back like a rubber band snapping us back from where we experienced we went but didn’t. One of the trickiest parts of this is you can’t be convinced you didn’t really go anywhere until you return. Sorry! opposes common sense! Confusing.

Gurus say there is nothing further to ‘do’ when we realize this truth of return. You just let go. That’s it. And you let god bring you back to his infinite “I Am”.

Maharishi Yogi said, “Running fast contains within it the ability to run slow; the ability to run slow…contains within it the ability to walk, and the ability to walk contains within it the ability to stand still”.

He said, “It is all about learning to stop”.

I have not read any saint who told us about the rubber band. Maybe they did, and I missed it. Maybe they used different metaphor. Obviously when we let go, the rubber band brings us back to where we “came” from.

Our culture says “Let go and let god”. We say “Let it be”. The rubber band is love. Love is the gravity of being. Love brings us home. All we have to do is stop what we think we are “doing”. We have “flown up” in the air from the ground of being as we were supposed to. When we stop flapping around, love lets us “get back”,  “get back to where we once belonged.” And we thought the Beatles were a rock band.

We have actually not flown anywhere. We have remained in pure being and the perception of flying is described by all seers as a movie.  Yoganda is particularly compelling in this image of images.  He says life seems like him as a movie over and over in Autobiography of a Yogi.

We go into the movie but we do not go into the movie. We are there, yes, in the movie, struggling to get out where we aren’t. But the illusion has no hold on us. We have the hold on ourselves.

We seem to perform the holding on, within the illusion. It is our last activity before we realize there is no activity.

The last doing we think we are doing, is holding on to who we aren’t. Holding on feels like stopping, but it is not stopping. Holding on is a doing, it is an activity we do not know we are performing. It takes a certain actual effort to keep our fingers closed around our illusions. Letting go is simply ungrasping, which is much easier than grasping. When we ungrasp, finally we are at zero point of energy and since we are really not doing anything, we can then know the non acting reality of eternal being.

In actual deeper fact, we are not holding on, but this is good enough for now to say we are doing it, because thinking we are holding on is what lets us tell ourselves to let go. An illusory act within the illusory realm, that lets us be removed from illusion. This is an amazing loving paradox of the pathless path. God will not let us be lost eternally. We are eventually summoned home.

Guru Mooji is wonderfully good at validating and netting out these complex seeming understandings with marvelous simple one liners. He said of this, “The truth is that nothing has ever happened.” Hard not to laugh.

We do not even let go, god lets go for us when we convince him we are ready by discovering who we truly are.

And by meditation this we do by saying what God said, “I know myself”. By knowing myself I erase all the apparent boundaries in the universe, I reenter the boundless, return to infinite love and let the supreme reclaim the long wandering weary me.

Then god’s eternal statement “I Am” becomes “We Are”.

We started with gurus and seat belts. If they do wear them, it is only to make us comfortable. After all, they know they are not going anywhere.

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