Human beings are a finite infinitude. We discover ourselves to be the part and the whole at once, consciously. We are water molecule and we are the flowing of the river, we are human and we are divine ….. and we are capable of knowing this, living this knowledge. Spiritual Realization is to Make Real this lived understanding in the continuum of our existence. We are born to know it. It is our true and unique function and purpose of being. It is Why We Are. And it is this paradox of being finite, a single life, a moment, a cresting wave and also infinite, eternal, the whole of the ocean that is our glory and our torment.
The cow in its field, chewing its cud, does not wonder why they exist. They do not feel angst, torment, over approaching death. And this is a great ease to them. It is the state which drug users and meditators who grasp to quietude long for. The question of meaning does not plague cows. Sometimes we envy the animals. Their contentment, their ease. Sometimes in our sufferings we try and be like them, we try and forget what we know, the question that torments us ….. drugs, drink, television, Youtube, religion, social hierarchy all conformism and consolation act as an opiate lulling us to sleep. Numbing entertainments – the opiate of the masses.
Our capacity to know that there is a possibility far beyond what we seem to be living. Our need to understand the question of meaning in the face of death. This is the plague that touches every life and is both our torment and our glory. It is our glory because it opens the door of divine transcendent possibility. It offers the possibility to discover that we are indeed much more than we are taught, we are much vaster and deeper than a shallow consumer society whose aim is a sleep walking life.
We cannot be satisfied with being merely the wave, merely human. And this is precisely because we are not. Our longings are the budding new growth of divine wings. Our torment is over being confined to a tiny box to small far. The ocean cannot be happy limited to the size of the wave and lost in forgetfulness of its immense reality. Neither can we.
This torment opens a pathway beyond the usual fairy tales of ordinariness, college job family death, it is the single greatest gift possible. Caught between the tension of intuiting and not knowing – most people chose to drown longing in the everydayness of mechanical evolution, society, reproduction, shallow consolation and distractions. Concern with fame and shame, gain and loss, fleeting pleasures and pains, and yet the ember of divine longing smolders within us waiting for us to pay attention for a moment. Even a moments attention will allow it to burst into flame.
Come out from the hiding places of societal convention with its nihilistic materialism dogmas, its scientific reductionism religion, its straight jacketed pseudo option politics. Throw off the comfortable bedcovers of sleep and face the challenge of this journey. Wake up into the quest for true wisdom for the knowledge that leads from darkness to light, from untruth to truth, from death to the deathless.
-T.K. tsogyelgar.org
