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I wrote the following reflection on October 13, 2009.
Tonight, I enjoyed the meditation class and sit at the church. We have an excellent, spirit-filled woman who leads us. We read from a book for thirty minutes, the next thirty minutes, we sit in the dark in meditation. Well, tonight, I especially felt in harmony with Love. After coming out, I bowed with folded hands and kissed my hands – a sign of respect to the Sacred. I did the sign of the cross, then greeted the leader and got in my truck.
When on the road to get groceries and feeling very light and open, I turned on the radio. This was odd, for I rarely listen to music in the truck. A song by the Eagles came on and more music during the trip.
What came to my attention was the harmony within the two experiences I experienced. In one hour, here is Brian, reading and sitting in Silence. Following, he is listening to rock-n-roll, while riding down the road and swinging to the beat – as best he can in the pick-up truck.
Do these go together? Yes. Our spiritual evolving is to unify apparent opposites. I can pray deeply in Quiet and, later, listen to the Eagles "Already Gone," as I drive down the road in my bright red Chevy. They go together. I am not more holy just for praying and meditating, and I am not less holy for listening to the Eagles.
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We do not condemn the natural order, including our body, as corrupt, sinful, or evil. Jesus and the dove image for us the nondual of flesh and spirit. Jesus, then, is a reminder to us that the Path is not merely other-worldly. The Way is both an other-worldly and this-worldly reality, an Unseen and seen convergence.
In this unity, touching one, you touch both. I used to speak of two stages of meditation.
(1) You sit beside the river, on the shore, and witness the river and all phenomena moving in it.
(2) You are in the river. The river and you are one.
Yet, what about the shore? Since Consciousness projects polarities, the diversity grounded in unity, for unity is the prior-order, the self identifies parts as wholes in themselves, rather than wholes made of wholes and making up a more complex, higher-order whole.
The self sees objects in opposition. This process would be like the eye seeing the hand and feet as not of itself, but of another body or bodies. Then, the eye would seek to act independently and champion such self-regulation as the most mature way to live. This false self-independence is what western cultures have popularized, in opposition to prior ages when the self and the culture were merged into a primal symbiosis. A prime example of the false-unity being church and society and politics, the same many religious conservatives want to recreate, with their religion deciding the nature of the false heaven-on-earth. Yet, this symbiosis is not unity, but conformity.
This symbiosis is, also, the image of the Christian heaven: yet, here, there is no true peace or natural harmony, for the "Christian" lives in opposition to all "not-Christian" forever, even if all the "not-Christian" are separate in some hell. If we do not find the reconciliation within ourselves, we will create it outside ourselves; so, a heaven of one religion would be a hell.
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