Life is a pastiche, a process, a melting pot. Life is love and
anger, hope and despair, understanding and intolerance, charity and greed, joy
and pain, peace and suffering. Still, it remains always dominated by a
suffocating atmospheric mixture of fear and desire which play together in a
swirling vortex, each constantly influencing and reinforcing the other in the
unconscious' mental realms.
We are taught to want from an early age in our infancy as needs
are not immediately met. We are not taught to examine the reasons for our
unrelenting wanting. Instead we merely accept it as the natural state of the
human psyche. We want because we are afraid of not having, of lacking, of
feeling the pit of emptiness within and the scrutiny of others who possess that
which we seek. We fear these conditions because the ego demands to reign
supreme, not just over the self, but over everyone. We seek supremacy because
we fear that autonomy will be encroached by others. In the ego's wish for a
place in eternity, it seeks to fill up the empty spaces where inadequacy finds
footholds with the acquisition and attainment of personal desires.
It is this manifestation of personal desire, setting personal
motivations and accomplishments ahead of everything else in the one's world (or
cultural motivations and accomplishments when cultures express desire - whether
militarily, economically, or religiously) which the Buddha warned as being the
root of all suffering. The Buddha taught a lesson which is hard-learned - when
our actions, thoughts, feelings, and/or intentions come from personal motives -
we are in a place of greed, desire, and selfishness. Personally motivated
desire will always lead to suffering.
However, to act altruistically, without considering what personal
benefits or harms may arise due to a course of action, is the highest
expression of love. This is everyone's highest calling in life, the lesson each
of us is here to learn, and the underlying struggle in all our interpersonal
relationships and life choices. Giving in to altruism negates personal desire,
liberates one from the domination of the ego, and opens one up to a much larger
world with the potential to engage in and with universal principles and
universal purpose. To the degree one integrates ones personality in greater
degrees with altruism in every moment and every individual choice, one negates
desire, increases peace and harmony in life and eases the causes for suffering
(not only in one's own life, but in the lives of others, too). Stress (which is
a symptom of the ego when dominated by fear and desire) does not arise from
living out the highest expression of love since stress is only a personal
reaction to one's focus on one's own desires. Stress never attaches to
altruistic actions or motivations.
It is often true that individuals delude themselves regarding
their motives. We all create useful excuses in certain circumstances to allow
us to remain in denial as we pursue individually motivated agendas: "I
know best," "I only want what is best for (fill in the blank),"
"It's God's will (or any other term which denotes some individual's term
for 'higher power')," "I want to save you, or protect you, from
making the same mistakes I've made." This list can go on and on, but you
can see the manifestation of the personally motivated rationale by now. The
real question one can ask oneself in any and every instance remains, "Am I
doing this on even the remotest possibility that I will gain something I desire
as a result (or avoid something I wish to avoid)?" If the honest answer is
yes, then the contemplated course of action is personally motivated, and the
result can only bring personal suffering along with it.
Life cannot exist without some degree of suffering. Life is a
process of becoming. As one engages in the process of becoming, one will, being
human, make mistakes in life. The quality of human frailty and tendency for
individuals to err underlies the process of learning and growth. These mistakes
will, naturally, lead to suffering. What do I mean by mistakes? I am alluding
to actions based on and colored by personal desires.
Another facet of personal desire is that it rarely stops to consider
the free expression of the personal will and choice which divests itself in
others just as surely as it invests in oneself. The interplay between exalting
one's own ego driven needs while also negating the free will of others is the
ethical principle, and fundamental esoteric basis, underlying the interrelationship
of personal desires with suffering. Actions based on personal desire will cause
someone to suffer: either the person undertaking the action if/when their
expectations for the outcome are not met, or the person being manipulated or
affected by the action which negates their free opportunity to choose the
events and circumstances affecting them from and in their environment. In
either case, it is also part of the nature of suffering that it festers,
causing enmity between both parties, leading to suffering in both, as well.
Life, as a process, flows through a constant series of yin/yang
experiences - experiences that reveal the effects and influences of both
extremes of the polar opposites in every duality - whether that yin/yang might
be expressed and experienced through emotions, careers, beliefs, relationships,
economic/political systems, cultural ethos/pathos, or sociologically influenced
dreams for the future. One cannot know happiness without also knowing sadness.
If only one of the states existed, that state would not be distinguishable, and
hence would only be experienced as part of a bland, unperceived ennui.
However, the law of existence which demands that the poles of
opposites must be intertwined and present as the duality of reality
(whether in individuals or cultures and nations) should not denote that it is
not possible to improve the conditions of existence for the better. We can do a
lot to ease suffering by reducing our individual, natural, and cultural
orientations to desire. Humanity will never fully eliminate suffering, but the
degree and suffering felt as well as its pervasiveness throughout the world can
always be alleviated by varying amounts. The only path to reducing suffering
arises by commensurately reducing individual, national, and cultural desire.
The contemporary world is rooted in stress. Those most successful
in accumulating wealth, position, and power require a willing workforce to
perpetuate the division into classes and widen the gaps between classes. So,
the worker is placed under the constant stress if not only having to produce on
the job, but having to protect and maintain their income in order to continue
paying for: rent, house payments, car payments, insurance payments, repair
bills, food, clothing, and, of course, the purchase of all those objects which
are accumulated out of desire - for status, for the acceptance of others, to
create envy in others, to make one feel good, and to create a sense of personal
self-worth. Stress keeps people "in their place," sociologically, as
it also reveals the people who cannot cope - those who societies ultimately
cast aside.
Humanity has re-created (or perhaps redesigned is a better word)
the planet. Humanity has done this out of the personal and collective desires
for an unending and unfathomable "more." Yet, while the quest for all
this "more" makes the already wealthy exponentially wealthier, and
the affluent more comfortable and more estimable in others' eyes but generally
lazier to a commensurate degree, this "more" also leads to greater
doses of suffering on a planetary scale as the divide between affluence and
poverty widens, as extreme poverty spreads, as famine becomes endemic, as
species are rendered extinct, as the quality of the environment deteriorates,
and as we use up the planet's natural resources at an alarming rate without
ever stopping to consider the needs of future
generations who are, after all, our children, grandchildren and great
grandchildren.
This culture will, ultimately, consume itself
into oblivion. People will survive, no doubt. But the structure of the culture,
the economic, political and sociological models upon which the contemporary
social order are based will all perish as the culture consumes itself into
oblivion. The people of the future will have to develop a more sustainable
mindset and more sustainable method of integrating humanity with the natural
world as they seek to integrate necessary comfort while maintaining a viable and
naturally abundant ecosystem (which the planets is capable of providing for us
if we allow it to) while overcoming the desire for luxury and
predominance.
Humanity will have to reduce its numbers
dramatically. Human sprawl must cease to usurp nearly all the habitable land
and wisely understand that if we so reduce the planet's diversity, we
ultimately doom it to evolve into a lifeless waste heap incapable of
functioning as an living, interconnected, and vital ecosystem. Thus, humanity
must find a way to teach, individually and collectively, the personal
responsibility that accrues with existence and the need for balance between ego
driven personal and collective expressions of desire with the moral and ethical
imperative of honoring and respecting all other lifeforms.
In the process if dying, one discovers that the
implications and influences of duality are slowly stripped away. The ego (and
nearly always the body, too) is immersed in pain and suffering. The process of
dying may seem instantaneous or drawn out over a long period. However, in both
cases, the process of dying demands the ego focus on the pain and suffering
which is insuperably connected with the encroachment of necrosis (mentally,
emotionally, and physically). This dynamic is another law of existence because
the process is meant to purge the individual of personal desire before they
enter the light, feel the sensation of perfect love awaiting at the end, and
reunite with the "All."
What comes after death?
No one who has not been there can answer that
with any degree of certainty. Those who have encountered Near Death or
Out-of-Body states are also incapable of answer with any degree of objective
certainty that question, too, because they did not cross the threshold, and
therefore, have not actually experienced the afterlife (if one exists). No,
those folks have gone up to the door, but they have not walked through it.
Thus, no living being can offer anything objectively or definitively true about
the post-death experience.
All living things possess consciousness. Even
coral reefs know the exact right time of the full moon, and the one full moon
of the year, during which to coordinate their reproductive discharges to
effectively propagate new life. The timing of coral reproduction, the hive
mentalities of ants and bees, the way packs, herds, pods, coveys, schools, and
all other collectives of species of life on this planet (including colonies of
single celled organisms) work together to enhance their chances of survival,
all prove to me that there are hierarchies of collective consciousness.
The Earth, our planet, is also an ecosystem,
utterly interconnected and interdependent. This planet has created, nurtured,
and propagated unfathomably countless variations of lifeforms over the eons of
the planet's presence in the cosmos. Until redesigned by human inventions'
intervention, the bounty the planet offered seemed limitless. Consequently, it
seems obvious to me that there has to exist a planetary consciousness which
exists in conjunction with the ecosystem.
It is my contention and belief that when
individual lifeforms die, each individual consciousness reunites with the
planetary consciousness, and that is what I call, "Reuniting with the
'All.'"
I can only suggest that, from any logical
perspective, the "self," or individual consciousness, would be a puny
thing compared with the "All." The only way the "All" can
be enriched is by and through the love we bring with ourselves into it at the
moment we "step into the light" and reunite with our source, the
fountain of life. As the individual consciousness joins with the planetary
consciousness, there is no more need for the individual self-awareness to
persist. However, all of that-which-was-the-self integrates into the
"All," and so it (and each of us with it) lives on in the planetary
consciousness. This is why all aspects of personal desire and ego must be
purged through the stripping away process contained in pain and suffering as
expressed through the process of dying. What is left is the pure love
accumulated and expressed in one's lifetime, which then joins with the
planetary consciousness, the expression of altruism and love which nurtures
physical reality. In this process, the planetary consciousness can be understood
as the ever-increasing, ever-intensifying, ever-expanding, ever-diversifying,
and infinite expression of the planet's accumulation and apprehension of
love.
In the same way, our solar system is also an
ecosystem, as is the galaxy, the local cluster of galaxies in which our galaxy
drifts through space, and on to our universe, indeed, leading all the way to
the Multiverse. So, our consciousnesses never die, even though they cease being
self-aware. As part of the planetary consciousness, they merge with the solar
consciousness when the Sun goes supernova. This accumulation of pure love and
eons of nearly infinite expressions of diverse experience will seed the new
solar system that arises out of the (quite literal) ashes of the supernova of
the previous one. Eventually, when all the available energy in this area has
been used, the collective consciousnesses of the many solar systems will join
with the galactic consciousness, which will join with the collective
consciousness of local cluster of galactic consciousness when our galaxy burns
all its energy, and so on, through the merger with the Universal Consciousness,
and ultimately, the Multiversal Consciousness.
Rather than mourn the passing of those who die in
our lives, we should rejoice. Our mourning is an expression of our own losses.
But in reality, death purges and perfects the soul, making it ready to reunite
with the "All." The soul becomes an instrument of pure and perfect
love which then enriches the planetary consciousness, and through it, all of
humanity, as well. Suffering ends. The ego is overcome, and the individual
expands into the "All" in the merger of reuniting. This is an event
to rejoice because love is served. This is the esoteric meaning of
"Love-ism."
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