Heresy

The inexisting time and space

I have a feelingt that I am going to write about time and space over and over, because they are infinite and, at the same time, non-existent… and because this is one of those topics that covers everything else.  Understanding the idea that they are non-existent is one thing; actually managing to experience the dimension of their non-existence will enlighten us; something that human beings do not normally achieve until they die.

For today’s heresy, I would like to call on Richard Bach and his book “There is no Such Place as Far Away” on his way to celebrate his friend’s birthday, where what he learned becomes the gift to his friend and to all of us:

"I cannot go to you because I am already there.  You are not small because you have already grown, playing between the moments of your life, like we all do, for the fun of living.  It is not your birthday because you have been alive forever; you were never born and you will never die.

[...] Fly free and be happy beyond birthdays for all eternity and we will meet now and again, whenever we want, amidst the celebration that can never end"

My heresy today is a rebellion against the paradigm that begins when we are born: there is no time, no space.  Time-space is just an illusion of the Cartesian plane on which we have been encoded, when in fact, we are three-dimensional beings allowing ourselves to be limited by the illusion of what is non-existent.  This is what I think of when I miss my loved ones and I remember there is no space between those who truly love each other. I understand the truth of this heresy when I can feel the words, the smile, the kiss and the hug of those I love, who are no longer even with me physically, even those who “died” years ago and continue to live within me.

In conclusion, I will again allow Richard Bach to raise our awareness regarding living and feeling with Jonathan Livingston Seagull:

 

"Overcome space and all we have left is HERE,

Overcome time and all we have left is NOW;

And in the middle of HERE and NOW, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?"

This heresy is for everyone I love who lives inside of me, with no time or space.

Letting go

Putting these two words together is a good reason to “stretch our rubber band”.  Letting go means releasing any material, emotional or spiritual attachments, and simply understanding that everything is perfect, no matter what.  It sounds so simple; the truth is, it is one of the simplest, yet most complex exercises there are. Simple, because all you have to do is make a choice, at any time, to let go, set free, feel that everything is okay, no matter what the situation.  Complex, because our emotions, trained by a Western-Greek-Roman civilization tie us up, hold us back, make us want to have and accumulate, things, people, money, love, to want more, and they make us think that letting go, releasing, is somehow losing and never winning.

Well there is the heresy today: Letting go is winning.  By letting go, we gain freedom, the peace of living in a state where you just can’t lose, because you already let go,  you can’t take that away from me because I already gave it up, a state where all I have is my limitless essence, my being running free, embracing the Universe in a bliss of enlightenment and gratitude because by letting go, I realized how light my own spirit was.

Too ironic?  The feeling that ties us down most and keeps us from letting go is love, or what we interpret to be love, but is rather possession.  We feel that we are in love and all we want to do is have, tie down, accumulate, control; and we think it is natural to feel that way.  Isn’t that what love is anyway?  Well, not really.  Love grows and feeds

off of absolute freedom, from the complete detachment that leads to moments of light and coincidence where you give without expecting anything in exchange, where you are simply in communion with spirits, where, as Richard Bach put it, there are no good-byes… How can you say good-bye to something that was never yours? How can you say good-bye to something that will never leave?

Letting go never ends, or it will end when there is nothing left but our essence; so the road guarantees a great deal of growth and learning… here I am, right in the middle of a pilgrimage.

Oh!, charming perfection

The magic of perfection is not at all like what Hollywood and the western world have been selling us, a plastic surgery and Disney perfection, an Unreal perfection, that is, perfection that does not actually exist.  I have painfully learned that the magic of perfection lies in reality, in what IS, no matter what it is like.  I am grateful and amazed at how the Universe is perfect and how even things I cannot manage to understand and do not seem (or are not) “good”, are simply perfect.

And that, of course, is my heresy: perfection is not a synonym of goodness, beauty, loveliness, good sense, logic, order, symmetry, abundance, happiness, ecstasy and clouds in the sky.  Perfection is simply a synonym of reality.  What is, is perfect.

I should stop there, because when I write the phrase: what is, is perfect, in my heart, I feel that everything has been said.  The truth is that if we cannot see it, it is because our eyes are contaminated with judgment or prejudice of what perfect should be, like beauty or other attributes we take as synonyms and conditions sine qua non of perfection.  The truth is we should take off the glasses they sold us in Hollywood to see reality with the naked eye, just the way it is… Perfect.

Regardless of whether we understand it or not, we are so used to the glasses that we can’t see how something chaotic, painful and countless other “negative” adjectives can be perfect. Reality is and will continue to be perfect even if we don’t understand it.  All we have to do is accept it, not even understand it,  it is practically a dogma of this new heretic religion, it is a dogma of the Universe that is and will continue to be perfect with or without our approval.

So the invitation today is to contemplate the absolute, constant perfection in our life, particularly the perfection that requires us to take off our Hollywoodesque glasses to be able to see and, although we do not understand, simply say to ourselves from the bottom of our heart: all is well, everything is perfect!

Aristotle and Buddha

I continue to pick up the petals on the path of life, this time through a reading given to me by a friend, one of those friends who came to me as a student and wound up being my teacher.  The reading discusses the new science of "blurred logic”, which is basically relative logic, where things are not necessarily black and white, but rather a series of different shades of gray, where values are not necessarily the absolute values of a binary system: 1 or 0, but rather values of a “Real” system, such as 0.0000004, which is not zero and certainly isn‘t one.

It sounds complex, but it is not.  History describes how Aristotle, the father of logical thought, based his dissertations on a binary system: what is, intrinsically defines what is not.  That is to say, it is either zero or it is not, in which case, by simple deduction, it is one.  Then, Oriental masters such as Lao-Tsu and Buddha defined reality beyond being or not being, and describe it as something that is and is not.  Not-being includes being and vice-versa; in short and in my eyes, the perfect description of this magical universe that is not static but flowing and transforming, a Taoist universe.

The heresy?  Well the heresy is in the gray, in the shades of gray.  The heresy is that there is nothing absolute.  Life is not linear.  We judge others based on linearity.  We stand up and think we have to choose one: good or bad, black or white, hot or cold.  The heresy is that there is no good OR bad.  The truth is in the combination of good AND bad, of being AND not being because good/bad come after judgment, not before.

My invitation for today?  Get rid of the linear, Aristotelic glasses that require linear thinking and judgment, and embrace Buddha and Taoism to be able to perceive that the truth in life has shades and if we can see the world through these eyes, we will be capable of overcoming the pettiness of judgment.

When we stop shining

Today, I want to talk about a beautiful, noble yet mistakenly interpreted feeling: compassion.  We have intrinsically thought that compassion implies pity and sorrow, and thus, we have turned the simple yet powerful act of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, smelling the possibilities with their sense of smell, feeling others’ pain as our own, into something vile; compassion is the elevated feeling that leads you to total empathy, to understanding what your reason, your mind and your ego cannot abstract, by the simple and magical act of beating with someone else’s heart that becomes your own …

Our limited, misleading description of compassion, demonized as pity, makes us think we are good when we dim our own light, so others can shine.  My heresy?  Based on compassion, our light should shine so generously that it will generate light all around it, minimizing pity, maximizing compassion.

We think we should be "humble" (another misinterpreted word) and we should belittle ourselves, when the truth is, if we are as great as we can be, we are allowing others to be as great as they really are, as they can become.  But in an attempt to go beyond this idea, in the search to find what causes this feeling of hypocrisy disguised as humility, I came to the words of Marianne Williamson: “What scares us most is not our darkness, but rather our light”, that is to say, when we think we are being compassionate with others, we are really just feeling selfish pity, and when we think we are helping, by turning out our light, we are just fleeing from our own light, we are afraid of our own greatness.

So forget it.  Shine.  Be as great as you are, as you can be, beat to the rhythm of the Universe and all the beings you find on your way, and let the light shine on them, protect them, inspire them and, above all, surround them in an embrace full of compassion, which in Hindi, is nothing more than “Namaste”: I love the place in your heart where you and I are ONE.

Namaste.