What Lives in the Waters?

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” 

-- Rumi

There is only one life on earth, perhaps even in the universe. 

Life is happening. We define our idea of life in various ways, but they are probably all wrong. The only thing you can know for certain is that you, whatever you are, seem to exist. Life goes on.

Let's cut it down simply to the size of the Earth and look at it. Scientists tell us that molten metals and rocks cooled many billions of years ago and formed this planet and others which orbit around a huge nuclear reactor that provides warmth and radiation and light. The combination of various elements on this lump of rock produced amino acids which produced something that we might recognise as the first life.

Perhaps everyone will tell you how that first life died out millions of years ago, but they would be wrong. 

That first life procreated with cells from its own body. It split itself in half. Even if the original half ceased to exist, the second half lives on. If I cut a banana in half I still have a banana. If I eat the first half, the second half is still banana and part of the same banana which I ate. Life is just a little more complex than that.

Nothing ever dies. 

Nothing has ever died. You and I and the trillions of other life forms on the earth are still that one original life. Each generation divided and became more complex and the older forms ceased to exist but you and I both still carry the life from that original life within us, within our cells.

If something reproduces by creating cells within its own body and then those cells leave its body and assume an independent sort of life, they are still the generating organism. It made them. They were part of it. They were formed from materials it created and then they separated from it so now it is living its life in two places at the same time.

Fast forward that to the present day and that one life is now living its life in trillions of places at the same time. It has not died because it continues to make new cells and separate them from itself so that it continues to live.

Everything is One Life and it always has been.

The Ego Muddies the Waters

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am coming back again to the theme of surrender. To finding the true purpose of one's life by simply living it in full surrender. This may seem an alien concept to many, to most if I am honest, but it is the way that life is actually lived. As long as we pursue the desires of the little me, the ego self, then we are not fulfilling our true potential. Many great men throughout history have realised this, a fairly recent example being Albert Einstein.

So how do we live in full surrender? To paraphrase Wayne Wirs: 'you must become less so that The Source may become more.'

The less there is of you, the more there is of your true purpose.

Wayne always provided evidence for this in what he termed the Siddhis. As far as I know it is a Sanskrit word that does not translate well into English but is usually used to describe the strange effects that occur around those who have passed through the various stages of enlightenment and are living in harmony with The Source.

Things happen. I experience this myself. I tend to call them synchronicities.

Things just fall into line. Life goes more smoothly. It is not always what people would term good and happy, but the concepts of good and happy do not mean anything once you reach this stage. Good and happy are just points on a sliding scale and the whole scale is acceptable because that is how life works.

Contentment best describes the state of the truly enlightened. Everything is okay. The world is pervaded by a sense of okay-ness.

Ideas just pop into your head (feel free to see what Einstein had to say about that). You are pondering something and someone just walks up to you and says something about it that clarifies the situation, without your asking or seeking their input. You are startled by a white crow that flies across the road ahead of you, so you study it for a while. Later the same day the symbol of the white crow pops up again, but this time in a book title or a store sign or a conversation overheard and it proves beneficial to you.

There is no 'woo woo' here. There is nothing flaky about this. It just happens. The universe just lines up to let your life's purpose play itself out. You are not running the show, you never were. You (little ego you) were just getting in the way.

It is hard to explain to someone who believes their sense of free will is actual free will. Again, this is a step that is reached when you are further down the enlightenment trail, for want of a better description. We have a sense of many things, but that is all it is – a sense of. There is no true separation in the world. There are no separate organisms that live and die, there is just one life expressing itself in billions of ways. Human egos like to think otherwise.

Your ego is just an imaginary bunch of patterns that thinks it exists and does its best, out of love for itself, to create the life it thinks it desires. Mainly it just gets in the way. Those desires simply make you unhappy. There is only What Is. There is no such thing as what is not. Most desires are basically an argument with reality, seeking something that does not exist and being sure that it will create happiness as soon it does exist.

Desires are a rejection of reality.

I am sure you can see now why they are a problem, and they all come from that ego that thinks it exists. I'm sure you have read enough books on enlightenment by now and spoken to enough enlightened people to realise that there is no such thing as a single personality in the ego. Carl Jung many years ago identified basic archetypes, each one of which can become the dominant ego at a moments notice when called upon or needed. Every unenlightened human is living with multiple personalities, they just don't realise it.

Language consists of concepts, so I am doing my best to explain this but the reason I usually address myself to people who have passed through some of the process of enlightenment is because it is very difficult for those who have not to know what the hell I am talking about.

(There really is no such thing as enlightenment to those who are living it. When the Zen masters tell us that we are already enlightened, they are speaking the truth, it is just that most people don't know what the hell they are talking about either.)

If you have ever had a time when you were working on something and you lost yourself in that work and found that the work had gone very well; that you could not remember the time when you had been working on it; that you were in the flow - that is the enlightened state.

That is what it feels like when you are not running the show: you – the little ego.

When the little ego gets out of the way the great work happens.