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Welcome to Valley Vedanta Meditation in Studio City
Inspirations to ponder
COMPASSION HURTS
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Yor destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. Yu must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” ~ Andrew Boyd
Andrew Boyd is a writer, particularly for social change in satirical platforms. His 2002 book “Afflictions: The agony of being connected to everything in the Universe” … will “reduce your most comforting self-delusions to scattered atoms”
Sri M reminds us: “As long as you have a human brain and a human body you cannot be totally omniscient. The mind expands to a great extent but still, there are limitations.”
This journey towards consciousness/enlightenment/omniscience is not for the weak of heart that is for sure - it most certainly will at some point disrupt the delf-delusions that give us comfort in our worldly experience. This is perhaps why the maharishis, swamis, and wise sages of India spend most of their time away from society, and without the cumbersome attachments. They live without possessions, without need for relationship, not because those are acts of sacrifice or spiritual duty, but because they are truly not needed – are of no service to the journey. Those who have only the sparsest connection to the human experience are known to transcend right in the middle of a sentence…it takes work at that point to remain in the bodily experience.
The key to finding this balance of remembering and experiencing our connection to total consciousness and having a human experience, I believe, is to prioritize and make as much time for meditation, awareness activities, connecting with Nature as possible and limit the amount of human negativity to only that which is really necessary to be a somewhat informed and functioning member of society. Sometimes in our lives this is not as possible as we would like; at those moments remember compassion for the self and the human experience to with which you are equally connected.
“Karuna” = Sanskrit for compassion
CAN THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE BE TRANSCENDED?
Can human beings really become Buddha-minded, Christ-like, Guru or Rishi level aware? Sometimes it feels as though it is an endless cycle of “improving/approaching…almost there” and slipping back…individually and as a collective society, collective species. When I get in that disenchanted somewhat negative space I meditate, I read the works and thoughts of those far more advanced along this path. My friend and colleague in meditation, Jeff Kober, posted the following from Sri Aurobindo (underlines are my emphasis):
…the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation of Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible. My view is that this conversion is not only possible, but inevitable in the spiritual evolution of the being here.
Sri Aurobindo, in a letter to Nirodbaran, 7-7-1936,
“Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo”
It is inevitable, in the Vedic view, because remembering our oneness, unity consciousness is precisely why we (consciousness) had the impulse (or “chose”) to have the human experience by allowing forgetting, or ignor-ance, in order to enjoy the experience that remembering brings.
So those moments when we or the collective seem to be seriously forgetting or seemingly not moving forward, it is not “slipping back”...it is a side by side reality that we are both human and we are the ineffable consciousness itself. Sometimes we are more dominated by or living in/operating from one other the other… the ultimate evolution would be to be in/remember both simultaneously. A truly lofty task, but those moments when it happens make it worth continuing to strive for it, to continue meditating to experience it, even if only briefly or occasionally in meditation.
Sometimes I also practice behaviors that take me back to those times when I too could see this potential in self/in the collective more clearly, where I could exude/represent/live this higher potential…even something as simple as the devotional practice of making chai tea from scratch as done when in India. Using my sensory system, my memories and directing my thoughts to, not only the pleasing task, but to the experience of that time when I WAS more awake and clear, more in touch with and able to reflect light. Letting the body memory take me there when the ego-mind is too distracted to do so.
In wellness and peace,
Beth
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