To write about the Vedic world view and about Vedic meditation is to look at all the endless facets of life to see how is the truth understood here? What about this? What about that? We state the Vedic world view in the simplest terms:
There is only one thing. Consciousness is. God is. I am conscious. There is only one thing.
We can move the sentences around and say that in several different ways, we can extrapolate endlessly, but that's really the full thing, at least as I understand it, right there. And often it is a boon for me to hear that said, or to read it somewhere, written by someone, or to write it myself. I don't think we can hear it too much. But to know it and then continue to live a life that seems fragmented and apart, filled with enemies and potential enemies, and from a place of personal neediness, misses the point entirely. So instead, for example in writings such as this, we take life circumstances and experiences, relationship ups and downs, financial/business problems and, in looking at each of these through the eyes of the Vedic world view rather than the limited perspective we've had for our entire lives, we may begin subtly to shift our own consciousness, changing the way we think and process these things and then begin to see these changes out-picture in our personal experience of life. This is correction of the intellect. This is the task each of us has as we meditate and continue to open to a more and more full experience of the flow of consciousness within.
So today we have the ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
What we do today is to look at the occurrences of that day ten years ago, and the repercussions of those occurrences, from the point of view stated above:
There is only one thing. Consciousness is. God is. I am conscious. There is only one thing.
What we do today is to know that most of us are going to be having feelings galore. Anger, melancholy, despair, sadness, rage, hysteria, hopelessness. Some of these feelings will be ours. Some will be from the collective. We note them, we feel them as much as we need to. We refuse to be defined by them, seeing them instead as sensations passing through our body, giving us information about our immediate response to the world. Not information about the world; rather, information about our response, at the moment, to the world. And of course as meditators we see these feelings and the thoughts associated with them as stress release phenomena, to be noted and released and used as reminders to bring ourselves again and again to the present.
What we do today is we recognize the tragedy of this day ten years ago, but remind ourselves it is not an American tragedy. It is a human tragedy. It is a tragedy played-out in the field of consciousness. Many lives ended, many were changed utterly. The world looked different to us on 9/12/2001 than it had on 9/10/2001. But it was an experience of consciousness, about some people behaving as if they are separate from the oneness and that their fear and anger could be erased by taking lives. When looked at from our thesis statement, this is absurd. As absurd as it would be for us to respond with hatred and separation and killing in order to relieve ourselves of our own anger and fear. It won't work. Ever. It can't.
What we do today is to know that what each of us brings to consciousness truly is brought to consciousness. As if we have a huge swimming pool that each of us are filling, bucket by bucket. All the people of the world. Some of us are bringing clear water in each of our buckets. Some of us are bringing clear water in some of our buckets. Some of us are bringing dirty water some of the time. Some of us bring nothing but dirty water. Some of us stand and watch and judge as others carry their buckets, pretending that our bucket doesn't count. But the pool continues to fill, and the more people bringing clear water there are, the clearer the pool will be when we each have to get into it.
As meditators, we call the clear water we bring 'adaptation energy.' The ability to adapt to changes of expectation. The ability to respond with love to all the occurrences of our life. The ability at least to be open to the idea of meeting hatred and rage with something other than hatred and rage.
I am not talking about mood-making, pretending to be loving and kind when what we really feel like doing is killing someone. Literally. Or killing some group or groups of someones. To make this mood of touchy-feely acceptance is disrespectful to ourselves, to our neighbors and to humanity at large. It is more dangerous than honestly to express the rage, and to want to act the rage out.
What I am talking about is to have the feelings, but don't get stuck in the feelings. Let the feelings be there, but let them go as the stress release they are. And then challenge ourselves to answer this question:
If there is only one thing, if that man over there who thinks he wants me dead and I are this one thing, if we share one soul, if his baby is my baby, his lover my lover, his breath my breath, his pain my pain, his tears my tears, what then? What should I do? How should I behave? How can I love? How can I find compassion?
When I bring adaptation energy to this whole, I add to the capacity of someone else to live without having to kill. When I insist that I am right to have hurt feelings and righteous anger, then I am adding to the pressure that may be building within one other person to hurtle himself over the edge to killing.
For me to bring adaptation energy will prevent far more killings than for me to kill the people I think want to kill me.
How do I do that? It's a good question. I live in that question and all its many forms. How do I love when it is the opposite of what these feelings in my body tell me to do. How do I find compassion for someone I am convinced is utterly different than me. How do I recognize God in the eyes of another.
How do I find the way to allow God to be recognized through me.
All Ways Love, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
