Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The iron wall starts here.

So often I’m assailed by the white robed bare foot community with their delicate words of ascension into the realms of the enlightened. They speak of it, these pajama wearing types as if it were getting on a hot air balloon ride. Where on a clean spring day one drifts effortlessly up into the open serene sky, with the world ever visible below. Where once in the soft gaze of heaven god appears in his ever manifest beauty and the whole of the universe is revealed.

Ridiculous.

The act of changing anything is a complex undertaking, like climbing mount Everest, or more probably, an out and out war. For the reality of those whom seek** the ultimate self one has the fight of a life on his hands: his two most opposing sides. Neither side can settle for a truce or arrange a cease fire. Neither could live with the other once the presence of one is recognized. How could the enlightened self live with the selfish ego? And how could the ego allow the open endless spirit put down so many of the carefully laid traps it spent years creating?

All great endeavors require the destruction (if that word is to negative for your delicate ears, then: re-invention by the dis assembly…) of previously created paradigms. We have to willingly assail the wall of the self in order to find the cracks. We must change the whole of our being in one swallow. This is never not a violent act. The only other option is to simply leave the self as it is and return to the cave to fade from the world.

Did the Buddha simple sit by a tree one afternoon after having a nice meal and some wine before bed and come to the conclusions he did? No. His war of the self took years and even when he thought he had it mastered, sitting there under the Bod-hi tree, he was attacked again by “Love / Death” and his many incarnations of the maya of life. Even then he had to fight and as the gods threw swords and spears from a million million million minions, the Buddha didn’t sit and take the wounds, he fought them off with his own devices. He was at war!

The point of my rant is simple. We are a species of re-creation. Each birth is a genesis into the universe. A starting over. With these origins some other thing must be sacrificed and even in the most violent ways, destroyed.

A samurai or a warrior’s spirit is not in his sacrifice, but in his overcoming. His death is a kind of rebirth to something not so obvious. His actions are in fact the cocoon of his metamorphosis, it is by way of his every action that he can even spin the silk by which he changes.

** There are few real seekers these days. Most of us (including myself) are satisfied with the fox of the ego whom is a cleverer being than your conscious mind could ever be. For the Fox accepts all faiths, all ideas, all values, all thoughts, all ways of approaching. it is clever enough to even accept those things that supposedly destroy it knowing full well that without the actual war against it, the actual usurping of the power from it, it will be like a character in Shakespeare, whispering just the right words into the ear at the right time and never fading from it's place. It has nothing to worry over, for it realizes that it must exist if we are to remain as we are today.