From a young age, we are told by adults around us that we have to grow up and become someone or achieve something. As we grow older, politicians and authority figures in schools, workplaces, and religious institutions tell us that we have to give our lives to something “bigger” than ourselves. When asked what this “something” might be, we are told something along the lines of country, religion, environment, or the greatest something called God — the highest and greatest truth!
But have we ever stopped to ask these know-it-alls whether they are damn sure of what they are touting? Take country: what is it but a construct imputed upon a bunch of people and geography? Take religion: what is it but a construct imputed upon a set of beliefs and behaviours controlled by a bunch of elites? Take environment; what is it but a construct imputed upon life itself — the life of trees, flowers, rivers, mountains, soil, clouds, air, bees, birds, fauna, and flora of every kind? Take God: nobody seems to truly know what this is except for a bunch of diverse ideas, beliefs, and experiences that converge around the label “God.”
Really, are these constructs suitable bases for us to give our lives completely to? Or are we indulging in mass folly and hypnosis to give our lives to products of constructional consciousness erroneously grasped as realities in their own right? Are we ourselves not an integral part of Life? Are we not simply Life itself? For “we” are none other than Life’s endless expressions, like waves on the surface of the fathomless ocean. Just as the wave is not separate from water, we are not separate from Life. How else can we be?
We do not need to give our “lives” to anything outside or inside us. Life has no outside or inside. Both inside and outside occur within Life and cease in Life, as nothing other than concepts bubbling out of living awareness and dissolving into living awareness. With concepts, we divide seamless experience into inside and outside. Look closely into this and you will see. And what you see will set you free. We only need to live the Life that we are — being fully alive, fully awake, fully aware, knowingly and clearly in the transparency of now.
Forget about giving your lives to something. Every “something” that you seek to offer yourselves to is but a construct that quickly becomes an idol. And the most insidious and dangerous idol of all is that which we call “God.” The moment we use this word, we imagine that we know what it points to, thinking of it as some ultimate reality that we can grasp by emotion or intellect, unwittingly falling into the allure and trap of idolatry.
Life itself is for living — raw and direct, immediate and without pretensions; free from dogmas and unencumbered, as tremendous open contact with what is in each moment: each moment of time that is none other than the timeless refracted in the prism of thought. Primordial and free, Life needs no self-glorifying sado-masochistic sacrifice or offering. Just live Life to the full, be free as and where you are. Just make sure seeing is clear and bright.
Now this does not mean that we should never use the term “God” at all but that when we do so, we must do so safely which is to say mindfully. And to be mindful means that we embody the wisdom of non-identification and non grasping when using language, abiding in the unconditioned repose (nishanti) of non-proliferation (nippapanca). Only then is there safety and freedom.
Image credit: Rupert Spira.
