Resilience

An Authentic lifetime in Love, an Authentic realization or any Authentic movement toward the Soul is deeply offensive to the human ego. It will rise up and cast as many logical doubts as it can with conclusions that make a person believe that they are doing the “wrong” thing by persevering into Love through the Authentic practice of meditation and conscious living.

We can feel and think the results of the ego (Devil) by how many of us can find its lair within us. To actually “SEE” or recognize the “little man behind the curtain” is very difficult. It requires a new kind of mind. Most people are unwilling to work on developing the ability to recognize the ego for what it is…and is NOT. There is no interest in, nor resilience for, moderation and the Middle Way. We live so off balance that it makes our lives appear to be a rocking boat in the middle of a wild and crazy ocean storm.

We see someone we “admire” who has the attributes we would like to have, and shares the same philosophy (bias) as ours. So we adopt their attitudes and beliefs that sustain our bias and become “one of them” as it were. Most people do not have the resilience to sustain an Authentic life beyond their genetic impulses. This lays waste to their current lifetime and makes it impossible to enter into an Authentic spiritual practice.

During my time in India, the Master of the ashram I was in had a long beard…and hence, most of the men grew beards. Monkey see, monkey do. A beard did not make any of them a “Master” nor did it guarantee enlightenment. It was so easy for them to grow beards and ignore or discard the actual Practice. One cannot mimic the person nor the process of spiritual awakening and its Authenticity.

Allow me to explain.

Entering the Way is a robust kind of living. Ugly assumptions must be released, as well as genetic habits that inhibit our lifetime through a Karma that does not ingratiate living from Authentic compassion, intelligence and Loving kindness. Spiritual resilience allows us to release ourselves from the confines of bias and hate. We no longer seek to be tough, but rather to become pliant.

The difficulty is that we are nothing but a bundle of habits – we are more subject to our habits, than to the state of our Authentic Heart. We live in bodies with endless habitual impulses that undermine our efforts toward the practice of awakening. We have become hardened by our genetics and the misinterpretation of our lives based in the bias of our body’s chemistry.

Being subservient to the body, we lose the ability to awaken to the meaning of our presence in every moment, wherever we find ourselves in life’s predicaments. So, instead of being willing and pliant to our Heart, we make everything difficult by making Life our adversary, thus, we spend our lives defending our spiritual indifference and inadequacies through pride and vanity.

Listen to the antidote Lao-tzu offers in his precious Tao:

Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.

If you can understand the meaning of this Sutra you have found the essence of what it means to be resilient in the Way; you have found the path of the Authentic.

It is not that ignorance is bad. We are all ignorant in some way or another. But in the case of our current age, this ignorance has become an absolute. We suckle from the teat of hate and self-righteousness making our ignorance the whole of our self-preservation. We actually live off of the darkness that invades the human mind with a rebellion of its own senses, like a snake that eats its own tail. We are not an “enlightened” people.

The essence of this life is to cultivate the resilience to seek and realize whatever fact would lead to liberation. We do not have time to rebel against our spiritual prowess. We are here to awaken into a Love that has nothing to do with the human ideals of being “loved.” Just this slight jog of understanding that Love is neither a “get” nor a “give” is fundamental to the awareness of its Presence within us.

Love is Love!

It needs NO explanation. It needs NO comment. It lives within us as the perfect Presence that simply IS. Now is the time to jettison the self-interests of the ego for the sake of the reality that we are simply and purely…Love.