AWARENESS IS NEVER ON HOLIDAY
Why a spiritual person should stay away from it?
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What you read in the scriptures was written for the people of that time.
Lineages might offer you the wisdom to demolish the mind, but they utterly fail to convey the way of life.
If it promotes Asceticism, you seize to be a spiritual.
A person dwelling in huts in remote mountains is useless to the people who might need his insights.
A person who Leads a life of Asceticism dwarfs his spiritual growth.
As the very essence of spirituality is to be found in the day to day life.
The very purpose of the spiritual journey is to return to the marketplace.
This might also apply to the retreats and communes.
Segregating yourself from worldly affairs is like testing a new motorcycle on a treadmill.
Bikes are made for roads, they should be tested on the roads.
You are made for life, your spiritual practice should be participation in life. A celebration.
It is not about how you operate in the silence, but how to recognise the silence within amid chaos.
The chaos is the device. A meditative device that pushes you towards your unmoving centre.
I have seen many people do it in today\’s era and have utterly failed.
If you read beautiful poems and prose from the old Zen text, they often describe the routine of the monk.
He spends time reading and writing, drawing zen paintings and then steps out of the hunt to beg in the village nearby.
He eats what\’s offered and calls it a day.
This might sound fantastic in the set of time the text is set in.\\
No bread for the monk
I have seen people with first-hand experience of trying to lead such a kind of life.
No one offered a piece of bread and no one perceived what they were doing as scared.
(I can’t state the names of these people for their privacy)
But the point is that Asceticism was not supported by their town, even by the people from their monasteries.
We live in a different world of a different time. This world does not exist in the old scriptures.
Hence a seeker\’s quest is to find a living master, who lives in this time and assimilates with the reality, hopes fears, and challenges of this time is valid.
Times have changed, people will not offer you the bread because you are spiritual.
Especially if you are trying to adapt to the ways of Eastern philosophies being a Westerner and visa versa.
The object in the scripture like the begging bowl, a robe is rare to find in today\’s world.
The objects of today\’s world like Lamborghini and a Hermés Birkin did not exist in the era when the scriptures were written.
There is no relatability to the life of a person who lived hundreds of years ago and a person who walks the earth today.
This makes the whole point of religion and spiritual scriptures invalid.
The aim might be the same — to find peace, but the ways have changed.
A new man should find new ways to find himself.
Awareness is never on holiday
If you need a tag of “conditions applied” to be spiritual, kind, angry, and sad; you have a long way to go.
If you feel good going on a retreat only to come back and put on the same old make-up of formalities to be happy, a cigarette will do a better job than the retreat.
Awareness is never on holiday.
It does not sneak into your meditation hour and go away when you come out of your meditation.
Spirituality is the celebration, not deliberation.
It is to be present in the present moment, all the time.
Not only when you are doing meditation, when you are in a retreat, or when you have bestowed asceticism on yourself.
Right here right now, spirituality is attending the present movement.
To be watchful of the fortune and the adversities with a sense of detachment.
To not worry about the worries of life and even about happiness.
Bliss.
Penance is violence
If love is what is conventionally preached in established lineages, don’t you deserve to be loved?
How will you offer love in the prayers, to the people around you if you bring penance on to yourself?
What are we sorry about anyways? What do we fe guilty about anyway?
Why do we feel need to go through penance of asceticism?
Whatever is available in the the life is there for you. To be experienced. To be lived.
We are the most successful species on the planet and are capable of thinking about what we are thinking.
And yet we deem humanity to be a failure. We feel sorry.
We resort to the polarities of asceticism and activism. Either do something about something or completely abandon it.
There has to be balance. A person who has discovered himself finds conviction in his actions.
His act is an act of awareness. Clarity.
He no longer lingers on what scripture or the newspaper has to say about his perception of reality.
He sees reality as it is.