You are deliberately forgetting who you really are and the knowledge that your real self is the foundation of the universe.
Our problems emanate from our lack of understanding of the difference between what we do and what happens to us.
The dividing line between voluntary and involuntary action doesn’t exist. For instance, going out to take a walk outside the room is a voluntary action as per definition. Consider: how and when did you decide to go out at that particular moment? That wasn’t a well-thought-out decision. It happened on the spur of the moment. That’s involuntary.
When you don’t think about it, it goes on. You think you can control your breath, but when you are not thinking about it, it is still going on. All vital functions to keep the body alive are, in fact, involuntary: digestion, circulation of blood, function of glands, batting of eyelids, Et al.
You and the universe are not two separate entities. You are one with the universe.
If you know in one moment that you are circulating your blood, you will in the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Your physical organism is one continuous process with everything that is going on. Alan Watts
The body is one with the whole universe. In physical reality, there are no such things as separate events.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done. It’s just doing it. You can’t switch on your brains one by one in the morning; it come awake all at once. Consciousness is a specific form of awareness. When you look around the room, you see a number of things and miss innumerable others.
If, under hypnosis, you get the question of identifying the color of that woman’s dress, you may very well recall it. This analogy suggests that whatever we are consciously paying attention to is very small compared to what lies beneath the layers of consciousness.
Like we don’t have our attention on how we function our thyroid gland, similarly, you don’t have your attention on how you are shining the sun and moving the moon. because there are no disjointed things in existence.
Birth and death are not cycles
When you die, you are not “non-existent”. You may consider wondering about certain thought experiments, like going to sleep and never waking up or waking up after never being in sleep — birth is one such event — we wake up not knowing when we slept.
Nature abhors vacuums. Birth and death are the circulation of the same energy of the universe into different forms. We are born like them; indeed, we are all of them. Their coming into being is our coming into being.
You don’t have to know how to breathe; you just do it. You are a fantastically complex thing. But you don’t know. You can do all of this without having an education. Our body is one with the energy of the universe. Alan Watts
If I’m the hand, then I’m the sun, the plants, and the food. I shine among the stars and feed their fire. I’m the water of the ocean, and I form waves. I rise as mountains and strike as thunder. Tat tvam asi — sixth chapter of the Chandogya Upanishad
The idea that I’m something in this body is the ego’s handiwork. The ego is nothing but the focus of conscious attention. It’s like a radar on a ship that is deployed to scan for trouble in the environment.
Conscious attention is the design function of the brain to scan the environment and identify trouble. If you identify yourself as the troubleshooter, you are opening the door to a perpetual state of anxiety.
The moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize how harmonious all this is.
Lichens: Miracle of Harmony
The quiet and simplicity of the lichens’ exterior hides their complexity within. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus creates a comfortable bed by dispersing the strands of its body throughout the ground. The bacteria or algae that inhabit these threads harness the energy of the sun to construct sugar and other nutrient-rich compounds.
Both partners undergo change, as in any marriage. The fungus body expands out, transforming into a structure resembling a tree leaf: a top crust that serves as protection, a layer for the algae that captures light, and microscopic pores for respiration. The algal partner loses its cell wall, gives up sexual activity in favor of speedier but less thrilling self-cloning, and gives up protection to the fungus.
Lichenous fungi can be grown in a lab, but without their partner, they are malformed. Similar to algae, lichens’ bacterial and fungal partners may usually coexist separately, but only in a small number of habitats.
By releasing the restrictions of individuality, the lichens have created a union that can conquer the entire planet. In particular, in the treeless far north, when winter rules for the majority of the year, they cover about ten percent of the land’s surface.
There is a verse by famous Urdu poet Mirza ghalib,
इशरत-ए-क़तरा है दरिया में फ़ना हो जाना
दर्द का हद से गुज़रना है दवा हो जाना
It means: The desire of a water drop is to lose itself in the sea and merge with it. When the pain crosses its limits, it transforms itself and becomes medicine.
The universe has not created any boundaries. It’s a man-made concept.
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Without all the deadly games the bacteria and viruses play inside our bodies, we couldn’t be healthy. Discord at one level is harmony at another.
Everything that we do is as miraculous and free of all blemishes as the patterns of waves. Our lives, as we know, couldn’t have been anything else. Had it been any different, it wouldn’t be there. Life is a dance of energy
Some people use the symbolism of god and the universe: god is a brilliant light hiding beneath all forms. The fact is that you are looking at a brilliant light now. The experience you are having with ordinary things of daily awareness is the same experience of witnessing God. There is no difference at all.
That’s the greatest discovery of all.
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Photo credit: Ifan Bima on Unsplash
