YOU WILL NEVER SKIP THE MIND
Navigating Love, Hate, and the Marketplace of Life
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The horizons I have seen in my spiritual path, happened when I was with people.
People who loved me, people who hated me and people who took advantage of me.
Life was in turmoil.
I am thankful to all of it. As the hate created noise in my world, so did the love.
It was a beautiful accident when I reflected on it.
Hate is nothing else than love that lost its path.
I was at peace with myself to understand these polarities.
At every step of this journey, the chaos of samsara was the greatest teacher of “what it means to be silent”.
If you are not happy with your world you try to change the world.
If you are not happy with what you see in your world you tend to see somewhere else.
If you are not able to seek silence within, you tend to seek it in the mountains.
Caving.
While you can borrow some silence from the cave, it is not eternal.
Out of many ways in which you can find silence, the best way to find it is in the middle of the bazaar.
The marketplace is the place to find and test your silence.
I am not against going to ashrams and retreats it may offer insights for your spiritual practice.
But the purpose is to find something applicable to life.
You might skip your physical environment for a week or two, but you will not escape your mind.
No matter where you go you are going to face your mind. No matter how still you sit in the meditation, you are going to face the mind.
Moreover, the idea of retreating from the daily affairs of samsara can be romantic.
But it holds a danger to put on a new identity of a spiritual seeker.
An identity which is a trap. A trap that keeps you from liberating yourself from the polarities of the world.
As the spiritual identity like any other identity thrives on the drama created by the seemingly opposite elements of life.
You go to the caves and create a conflict that propels the story of your spiritual life.
It is entertaining.
But you miss on the life, and most importantly the purpose of spirituality.
I must confess that I have been to many retreats and ashrams myself.
Mostly because I like to explore new avenues and ways of life.
Moreover, I like to meet people who are close to nature, nature within and without. Raw nature.
Most of the ashrams are nested in nature.
But I didn’t find a guru or a master who could answer any of my questions regarding the life outside spiritual realm.
They had a handbook of answers that were specific to their lineages.
The goal of spirituality is to dissolve the mind and bring your presence to the world.
To bring your meditation out of the “meditation sessions” and bring your gods out of the “temples”.
The goal is not to imprison yourself with new sets of beliefs only because you are bored with the old ones.
The mind plays a trick.
It can trick you to be in bondage by offering you a golden prison.
It might seem like an achievement to be in a golden prison, but we should not forget the fact, that you are still in bondage of the mind.
If you see the Buddha, kill him — Zen proverb
You get what you want!
Your urge to be on a spiritual path is your initiation into the spiritual world.
You don’t need any external stimuli and validation to know that you are on the path.
Your mind does.
While it can be helpful to surrender to a master in the monastery, or to the gods in the temple; it is the spirit within that is going to guide you towards the silence.
Once you acknowledge this, you allow the energy, the flow and the intuitions to be the guiding light.
You gather the courage to take the journey alone.
Which is required of any spiritual practice. To shred all the external and internal notions.
Become empty and a medium for the divine.
It can be done right where you are.
As the silence you are searching for is not anywhere else but within you.
As the marketplace becomes a distraction, retreat might also be a deceiving activity.
The doing must be dropped, and the doer shows his face.
Be present to the society world and the foolishness of its system.
Laugh at it and move on to your practice.
When you reach the silence, be in it. The real practice is to be in silence while battling the chaos of the real world.
To become so much silent that your activities in the samsara become a dance of ecstasy.
Dance even if all the world is on fire. Dance even if the mind is burning in its phantoms.
Celebrate — create a ruckus, the party so hard the neighbours would get pissed off and teach you one or two things about silence
Become silence.
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