Karma
Before people begin meditation practice, shell-like crusts of tension have formed around their hearts. They’ve built an armored facade many layers deep…a façade made up of fear, anger and insecurity… a façade they think protects them from life, a façade that often takes a lifetime to dissolve and does little to ward off danger. Time eats away the façade’s fragile cover until nothing is left but the present and its reminder that human beings must do something about themselves. So many years are spent with a pasted together shim-sham kind of life, and people lose sight of the most important element of all: to live in the moment. People dote on the past as if nothing else exists and construct the present from dim memories that hide in shadows. Why devote conscious and unconscious energy to what has already died? Why shift between the past and future and forget life in the present? Why live in a world of illusion, a world the ancients called “maya”. Life’s dreamlike state shifts between what was and what will be and blankets people in a tapestry woven from fear, guilt and longing, a world of make-believe, a montage of dimly lit images that frazzle their brains and hearts with nonstop bewilderment. I once said in a novel: “If this child isn’t a happy eleven-year-old, he’s not going to be a happy thirty-year-old.”
Fear of the future disrupts our childhood, teenage, adult years and old age with a cacophony of internal abuse. We exhaust ourselves trying to figure everything out. The present wears antique costumes and parades through our day with vague images of a turbulent past. We’re physically forty-five years old and mentally and emotionally a stunted seven. We don’t live in the world we inhabit. We live in a world of mind and emotion that flits between past and future like a game of ping pong. No wonder the world is fabricated from “maya”. No wonder it’s a dream. Eight billion people see the world slightly different from each other, but each of them tries to fit his neighbor into a conceptualized box he’s created from fragmented images of his own version of truth. No one fits, yet almost everyone imposes their own version of rightness on the rest of humanity.
We can transform pain into joy and gratitude and build a chakra system that turns tension into an energy force that activates Kundalini.
People that live with open hearts don’t abuse their husbands, wives, friends, parents, children or lovers. That arena is populated by unconscious human beings… and they have no idea what they’re doing. They act out deep-rooted anxieties. These anxieties are haunted by tainted memories of parents, relatives and friends who abused them when they were young. These memories are etched into the unconscious and surface like a nest of dragons that wage war with the world. The anger is so deep, it drives people to revenge themselves on life’s injustices.
Forgiveness has no place in a person whose rage destroys enemies, where a cycle of hate and anger perpetuates itself until opposing parties admit they’re both wrong, a world in which revenge transforms life into a kaleidoscopic outpouring of negativity. They strike out at a vision of a world that reflects their own inner condition. They twist and tear life’s fabric into their own preconception of things; they rage against the horror created and don’t take time to look at life’s subtle prism.
If we forgive ourselves and others, a cycle of revenge comes to an end. We take full responsibility for internal change and no longer blame other people for our problems. The act of forgiveness lets us move forward. We’re no longer stuck in emotional and mental quagmires we’ve lived in since childhood. Both friends and enemies find a place in our hearts. We no longer judge them or try to figure out what’s right or wrong. We transform the psychic poison that’s consumed us for years into kindness and learn to contain the rage and demonic energy that once compelled us to lash out at the world. We can transform pain into joy and gratitude and build a chakra system that turns tension into an energy force that activates Kundalini. A healthy chakra system will transform what’s killing us into open hearts full of love and forgiveness – the essence of Tantra – and essentially what I learned from my spiritual mentor, Rudi…
(To be continued…)
