LOSING IT
So here we are. The one big Being got a big idea, and here we all are. Lots of little beings all dancing about. Sounds cool! Life should be a breeze. All the little beings just bopping about, going wherever and doing whatever the big Being wants. And since He’s all peace and love and stillness and wisdom, all the little beings are full of peace and love and stillness and wisdom, too. Right? Well, not exactly. I mean, look at us! So what went wrong?
That’s a difficult question, because if He’s the grand Puppeteer, then surely every move the puppets make must be by His intention and design. Can the puppets get ideas of their own, cut the strings that make them dance, and walk off the stage? Can the characters in a novel escape the author, and flee the page into a totally independent reality? It seems unlikely. So He must bear ultimate responsibility for whatever His puppets do, and however they exist. Yes?
But how so? He may be love, but just look at what His puppets get up to, and what happens to us. Hatred, wars, killing, disease, disasters, famine; arrogance, intolerance, stupidity, trickery, thievery, debauchery. That and a lot more. You name it. That’s not love. But if everything is a part of His projected dance, surely He must be responsible for absolutely everything, good or bad? Not just the love, kindness, selfless service, forgiveness, humility, wisdom, and understanding bit.
And there’s another thing. We puppets feel that we are self-willed and free, having individual identities. Most of the time, we don’t feel like puppets at all. We feel as if we are doing everything ourselves. Until a tree falls on our house, an earthquake destroys our city, the stock market crashes leaving us penniless, our husband or wife leaves us, our children abuse us, disease takes away our health, and death finally removes us from the – er – stage. Not to mention the host of major and minor events that constitute our lives, and happen without our consent. In fact, we don’t even know what’s going to happen to us in the next two minutes. We are not even sure of what we are going to think next. That doesn’t sound much like freedom.
So – umm – we feel we have a free and independent identity and will, and yet have little or no control over our lives. We didn’t choose our parents, country, home, education, and so many other things that hem us round, and yet we insist that we are free. We are like pawns in a mighty chess game, trapped by circumstances way beyond our control or devising, yet still insisting that our moves are entirely those of our own free choice. I’d say that shows that we’re in a pretty confused state of – er – mind.
Mind? That’s something we all know about, but what is it? Maybe if we understood the nature of the mind, it would resolve a few of life’s conundrums. After all, it is through the mind that we try to understand things. And what is this self that thinks that it is free?
Let’s back up a bit. The little beings (that’s us) were all nice and cosy, consciously and blissfully floating around as a part of the big Being. But somehow (and that must have been by His intention), we developed a sense of a separate individuality, of an individual self. And that’s where things started to go wrong. As our sense of separateness and our involvement in the multiplicity of created things increased, so too did an unconsciousness or forgetfulness of the big Being. Until finally He was totally forgotten. And despite the fact that He continues to pull all the strings, and keeps the show going on, we puppets now regard ourselves as independent beings. We no longer believe in a Puppeteer, or if we do, our ideas concerning Him may be so wide of the mark as to have little meaning. And this sense of self is lodged in our minds.
So there are two primary factors contributing to the condition in which we human beings find ourselves – our mind and our sense of self. And of these, the mind is the more fundamental problem because it is the mind that generates the sense of self. Both are worth considering, but since our sense of self is so dear to us, let’s start from there by asking the basic question, “Who am I?”
