Feels good to be alive!

January 5, 2008

There is an aspect of being God that I rarely heard anyone mention. Brooks talks about it, I might have heard of it during my Zen years a time or two, in passing. This experience may be left out and overlooked in spiritual teachings cause mind has no access to it, therefore it doesn’t consider it important. The experience I’m talking about is an absolute, boundless and everlasting bliss of being alive. Can you imagine life spent on feeling the earth under your feet? Smelling the air, admiring the trees? Imagine a whole life spent on doing just that. What a wasted life would it be, wouldn’t it? Life that would achieve nothing, contribute nothing, make no difference, serve no greater purpose. Life in which one would DO nothing, just BE. Just be alive. There was one thing that Brooks said a while ago that really resonated with me. He said it during one of his workshops while he was guiding us through the dying exercise (I love this one, by the way, the absolute freedom, the feeling of a great weight falling off of my shoulders). He said: there is no reason to understand it. I use it as a meditation, I say to myself “there is no reason to understand it” and immediately I snap out of my mind and come back to myself. Once I am myself I experience everything, very clearly and strongly. The cold air on my face when I walk my dog at night, the moisture in it, the wonderful smell of trees, the beauty of Ojai Valley, the majesty of mountains. I can feel it with my entire body, and that’s all there is – just the experience, because my mind is temporarily overlooked. I took my shoes and socks off once while walking my dog in the evening (it was dark so no one saw me, thank God 🙂 and I stood still in a middle of the road, feeling the earth under my bare feet. It was an exquisite experience. There was no barriers between me and the world, no separation. In moments like that, whenever I choose to be myself, be present, I am absolutely and completely happy. I laugh to myself out of a pure delight of being alive. Being here, as a human, on earth – it just feels so good! The beginning of my life was spent on trying to survive it. When I started my spiritual journey there was more to it, there was searching. Looking for who I am, looking for what else is there. Eventually there was looking for a purpose, for “why am I here”, “what am I supposed to do”, “what is the reason for my existence”. There was not much joy in it, it was work. I called meditation “work”, cause for me it was work I was doing in the world, I called working with Brooks “work”, for the same reason. That was the reality. To work, to do, to strive, to struggle, to create, to change, to build – for a reason, for a purpose, or without it – that’s reality. It makes sense to the mind. Standing blissfully on a dark road, in a cold, barefoot, is – well – strange, if not outright crazy. Certainly it doesn’t make any sense, not too the mind. It does make sense to God though, it does make sense to assume that we were created in this beautiful world to enjoy it, we have been given all the faculties to do so, to experience it fully. I believe we have a choice in what reality we live in. We can believe our mind and work, do, create, struggle, understand, fulfill a purpose. Or we can choose to experience the wonderful paradise we are living in, we can feel fully the beauty and bliss of being alive. Maybe others will say that we are “wasting our time” – but think how enjoyable and blissful would the process of “wasting” be. might be worth it 🙂

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