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If you are reading this, it means we are past the 21st of May and that, either:
a) we were passed over for The Rapture that was to take place on the 21st and have been left to live out the final days; or
b) Harold Camping was wrong and in fact this is not the beginning of the biblical End Times.
There is a function in our brain, residing somewhere in the left hemisphere, which filters from the abundance of sensory data available to us at all times those "facts" which, when taken together, will support our ideas of the world and the image of ourselves that we have built over the course of our life; and further that discounts sensory data which might tend to challenge our worldview. This is one idea of the ego, the "Gatekeeper," denouncing anything and everything new.
When we have built for ourselves a storyline that leaves us feeling only lack and limitation, that causes us on a daily basis to feel guilt and shame for who we are, for the way our life has turned out; when we are given to believe only those story lines which tell us our "salvation" is not available within but rather exists outside our self, in a certain level of success, a certain amount of money, a church, a belief system, a guru; when we have, built into that monolithic set of rules and colorations of reality, proscriptions against questioning our deepest held beliefs, the ones put there in our childhood and with a promise of damnation or stigma or excommunication; when all this is what we must seek through and with to find meaning in our life, and happiness, and a sense of self-worth, of self-valuation, we have before us an impossible task. The very tools available to us are tools that are guaranteed to give us only some version of what we already have. There is a closed-off logic that is absolutely unassailable from within, and we must look elsewhere for something that explains why things are the way they are, why I am the way I am, why I feel the way I feel.
It is easy to understand why someone would embrace the idea that the end of the world is at hand. It would explain so much. It would give a system of logic that could embrace war, disease, apparent social decline, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes. And it would take from one the responsibility to change oneself (and if this one feels incapable of change, what other choice is there?).
In Vedic meditation we are not asked to believe in anything, nor are we asked to stop believing in anything. Nothing is to be taken on faith. Nothing is asked of us but to have an open mind and to be willing to follow some simple instructions, and from there, to make oneself available twice a day for about 20 minutes. In that 20 minutes what happens is that the part of the brain that filters out what may be threatening to its mythos is set aside, and an experience is had that indeed opens the door to a different way of viewing the world, of viewing oneself; that gives one an experience that is other than the day to day "reality" that one has been subject to. And this allows one's conceptualization of the world to loosen its grip and open the meditator to a world view that can begin to allow for happiness and self-valuation, that may one day allow for the idea that the place of one's salvation is as close as the breath. That is right here, within each of us, and available to all of us if we choose to have it for ourselves.
Today I will be grateful that the world hasn't ended, and I will treat myself and those around me as if it could end at any moment.
Blacksmith Shop, Young's Point, Montana
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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