Real Time

 

 

Due to the influences of our social environment people have forgotten the true essence of time. As far back as I can remember the concept of time was directly related to clock time or dates on a piece of paper called a calendar. In this human made understanding  it appears that time is separated into units next each other. This way of dividing time is helpful in many ways as we plan our daily activities, strategize our future involvements, and synchronize international efforts. But, this is not real time, this is imaginary time.

The ways of the world tell us that there is always something that we are missing, something that we need, and there is never enough time. In this way time becomes our elusive enemy, something that we continue to reach for that is always beyond our grasp. People talk about, “beating the clock” and “running out of time”. There is an ancient Greek mythological tale involving Tantalos, King of Phrygia, who in the afterlife was condemned to suffer for an eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Each time he would reach for the fruit the branches would rise; each time he bent down to drink the water the water would recede, the necessities of human existence always beyond his grasp.

Is this the life that we, as a human race of people have accepted to define us? Do we really believe that there is never enough money, never enough possessions, never enough food, never enough body numbing chemicals, never enough time to consume the things the world tells us are important? Is this who we are? Have we forgotten that we get to choose what we consider precious? This continual wanting that is the way of the world can only lead to dissatisfaction because the resources of the planet, like the years of our lives, are always limited.

I have studied the lives of those who people hold up as icons of fortune, humans who are masters of the economic paradigm of Capitalism. When I look in their eyes as I view them on news reels and documentary presentations, they look so hungry, so lost. They look as though they have become infected with a disease that causes them to create and live in a hell that is similar to the story of Tantalus. Through their eyes I see their hearts and their hearts are filled with anxiety, their minds filled with stress, their bodies riddled from the weight of wanting. They live in an illusion that has been fed to them by an unsatisfied world, a world that tells them massive amounts money, possessions, and political influence, will allow them control over something in their outer environment. Are they in control of themselves? People spend years of their lives on this illusion only to become exhausted, depressed, and in physical shambles. “Where has the time gone?” I hear people say.

To live in this sense of time with no understanding of real time you can find yourself making an enemy of time and an enemy of life. You become like a rigid rock that is continually being grounded into dust by life. The sacred writings within the Abrahamic traditions read, “For you are dust and to dust you shall return.”¹ These are powerful words from the wise ones of antiquity that help us understand the nature of our impermanence. However, people seem to have misinterpreted the words. Life is not supposed to grind you into dust. It will if you allow it, if you have accepted life as your enemy.

During the meditative process clock time disappears and the human bodymind becomes reacquainted with real time. In meditation each second becomes “pregnant with infinity” and time becomes always now, no past or future, but the infinite and eternal now. I usually set a timer at 15 or 30 minutes when I meditate. I am often impressed when the timer goes off that it seems as though I have been away from the mental “rat race” for hours or in some cases seconds.

During this practice, thoughts about what needs to be done in the hustle and bustle of your day are no longer necessary and no longer present, freeing your whole being to be truly current in the Spirit of real time. In this place of peace that is in you, you exercise the vessel that you are as a temple of this Spirit. You have allotted real time for a divine reunion with the Spirit of life. In these moments your mind is free to explore the depths of your being unhindered by clock time.

 

 

1. Gen. 3:19 NAB

Guy Schell © 2018

The Necessary

 

What is more important, exercising love

or claiming the certainty of its source?

What is more necessary, drinking clean water from a stream

or labeling the origin of its flow?

What is more essential, eating the tree’s fruit

or naming its root?

What bears more meaning, working with the visible

or claiming to know the unseen?

What makes more sense, addressing the obvious

or guessing at the obscure?

 What has higher value, being right

or experiencing peace?

What is more imperative, knowing yourself

or reliving your ancestry?

What comes first, sharing the present

or your name displayed for future generations?

What is more urgent, preserving life on the earth

or expanding ones country?

Without the former how can you know the latter?

 

Guy Schell © 2018

 

You are not your Thoughts

A Faithless Understanding

I remember sitting on the floor in my 8×13 storage room that I had rented and  converted into a bedroom/ office in 2013. It had been 13 years since I had attempted to meditate. By meditation I mean sitting still and thinking about nothing. The main motivation for the attempt had nothing to do with believing any particular religious doctrine or having faith in something that could not be proven by science. I had meditated 13 years previous and had experienced definitive positive results. I was counting on a tried and true method of relieving the stress that had completely engulfed my life. It was the want to free myself from this stress that was the chief motivator. I meditated for about an hour and I remember calling my sister after I had finished and told her that I didn’t want to leave the place that I had traveled to in my mind. It was so beautiful and life fulfilling that I had no desire to be anywhere else.

I have continued this practice daily now for more than four years and have come to understand that faith is quite unnecessary. I read somewhere once that Carl Jung the noted doctor who founded analytical psychology when asked if he believed in God answered “No. I don’t believe, I know.” I have come to the same place as he.

In the consistent practice of silent thought clearing meditation no faith is required because during the meditation, once the mind and the body becomes stilled, you become a witness to the beauty of the eternal pulsating love-energy that is God’s creation unfolding right in front of you. Any questions as to- how do I know this is true?- disappears when you are immersed in and become a part of the creative act itself. For one to “need” faith they first have to experience doubt. Doubt is the product of statements such as: all my bodily perceptions are telling me that this can’t be true. There is no urge to doubt when God’s love-energy is pulsating in every fiber of your being. Without doubt, faith has no purpose!

Consider all the years of religious indoctrination. All the religious services that I had attended with my parents as a child growing up in the Midwestern US, and continued to attend as an adult. All the efforts made to get me (and millions of others) to have faith and believe in something that was invisible when all I had to do was sit still and clear my mind in meditation and the invisible became immediately visible and known as a matter of course.

Millions and millions of words spoken, written, and sung, shoved in front of me for half a century, words assembled in reasonably fashioned sentences to create reasons to overcome doubt, and it was the words themselves that distracted me from the God that was right before me and can be known in the silence. The Sufi Poet Hakim Sanai discovered this in 900 years ago:

We tried reasoning

our way to him (God)

it did not work

the moment we gave up

no obstacle remained.

 

He introduced himself to us out of kindness:

how else could we have known him?

Reason (words) took us as far as the door

but it was his presence that let us in.                                                                                  (Hakim Sanai , Walled Garden of Truth, approx. 1100AD)

A Chinese emperor’s librarian, Lao Tzu wrote about this 2600 years ago:

Can you step back from you own mind
and thus understand all things?

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch 10/16, Mitchell, Harper Collins 1988)

I was never taught this when I was in school. Considering the positive healing effects for people of all ages, why was this not being taught in our schools? Is it possible that those who were deciding what should be taught to us were afraid of what would happen if we found out that we could experience worry free peace all by ourselves? Satisfaction, contentment, and calm, without running out to buy anything or consume anything, Hmmm….. – I bet that would put a serious damper on the corporations whose very existence depends on us being “needy (greedy) consumers”.

A few years ago, my youngest son said to me that he didn’t believe in god or religion anymore and apologized to me, “I don’t want to upset you.” I laughed for a moment and then responded, “I don’t give a tinkers damn if you believe in a god or ever step into a church again. My only concern is – do you know peace. I am glad that you have tossed aside the box that others were trying to put you in. Now you can get down to the business of discovering yourself!”

Copyright © Guy Schell

 

 

Spiritual Access

Breathe Life

 

Take a moment. Close your eyes. Breathe deep. Hold it. Focus on your center. Hold it. Exhale. All of it. The last of it. Hold it. Focus on your center. Now breathe normally. Boom! You have just absorbed the gift of breath and it is pleased to propel you forward. You are no longer the same person you were before the breath. Life and you have merged and you are a new creation. Do this regularly through out your day and you will fall in love with that which sustains you.

The Tao and Catholicism

 

Two things come to mind this morning as I have been of late reviewing Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.

One is a conversation I had with my mother many years ago. My mother was hardly a saint but was a tenacious searcher for the truth. She was raised in the Apologetic Catholic tradition. This is the theology that was spread through the Baltimore Catechism in the early 20^th century and is still broadcasted by many Catholic Bishops in the US today. This is the theology that I have been referring to lately as the “no way out” theology in that it demands strict adherence to Catholic Doctrines but provides no clear understanding to the paradoxical statement issued by the apostle Paul in Roman’s 15: 19 – “I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I do not want”. In my mother’s search for truth, once she became confined by the stringencies of the teachings of her own tradition, she began to step out of the box that was created for her by religious conservatives and experienced an intimacy with her Creator.

I called her on the phone one day and I don’t remember how we came to talk about the dynamics of prayer but we did. She said something that resonated with me for decades to come. “Sometimes you pray and pray for something for so long and it never comes. Eventually, out of mental exhaustion, you stop praying for it and decide that you don’t want it anymore. This is usually about the time that it falls right into your lap.”

It was not until I began to embrace the Eastern scriptures such as the Tao Te Ching that I found that this phenomenon is clearly marked. My mother did not give up her longing for this good thing to happen. She gave up her wanting, her desire for it to happen in her terms. She gave up determining when, where, and how, it would happen. Once she let go of the wanting, which was the cause of continual anxiety for her, once she gave up the desire and accepted the way things were, not only did her anxiety dissolve but she experienced peace.  With no obstacle remaining to prevent God from working in her life, the good fell right in her lap. As is stated in the Tao:

 

If you want to be given everything

Give everything up. (Tao V.22)

 

Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize that nothing is lacking,

the whole world belongs to you. (Tao V.44)

 

Jesus continues in that same vein in Mathews Gospel 600 years after the Tao was written.

 

But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness,

and all these things will be given you besides.

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.

(Mt 6:33-34)

 

The second thing that comes to mind relates in that as Catholic Christians we were taught that perspectives of God that came from other religious traditions were not valid and even dangerous to our well-being. I had a Catholic women recently claim to me that the Buddha was a false prophet.

One of my sisters said to me once that she believed that after we die we are somehow able to finish those things left undone. When I heard this I smiled. I began thinking that this was at heart the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation. This is such a beautiful thought.

Unable to reconcile the idea that a loving God could send us to a place where we would suffer for eternity (Hell), my sister, like my mother, stepped outside the box of her Catholic upbringing. She imagined a God that always loves us and created a space where we could “try again” to be compassionately involved in creation.

 

 

 

Chakras

Being Comfortable

Throughout the past centuries hierarchical authorities have pushed ideologies that convinced us to be uncomfortable with ourselves; uncomfortable with where we were at in our life, uncomfortable with the way we look, uncomfortable being vulnerable at times, uncomfortable in sharing our mistakes, uncomfortable sharing our life promoting dreams, uncomfortable speaking out when you know somethings wrong, uncomfortable in who we are attracted too or fall in love with. It is as if we were mentally indoctrinated to accept a perpetual state of anxiety for ourselves.

If you want to scare the hell out of political, economic, religious, and civil, tyrants spend 15 minutes each day sitting still within the comfort of yourself. Thoughts that engender fear, discontent, misperception, anger, at first will be set aside as you re-discover the genuine you. Continue the practice and eventually those thoughts will dissolve. Within time you will quite effortlessly begin to transform your life promoting dreams and into realizable quests.

Do this and the petty tyrants in your life and our world, becoming even more insane with the frustration of being ignored and their ideologies being discounted, will also dissolve. Their last red-faced, dying gasp will be labeled with the words, “Who the hell do they think they are! We can’t allow them to freely think for themselves! They can’t just walk around spouting nonsense about giving every human being the same rights and choices! They are not smart enough to understand that if people are left to govern themselves things will become total chaos. Spewing all this tripe about building a better world for everyone, we have enemies damn it! Who is going to prevent these “foreigners” from taking advantage over us? If they are not told who to be afraid of how will we control them? No, no, no…..ahhh … !?!..¡¿¡”

Eternal Life