Stay on my Seat!!!

Famously the Hindu God Shiv does not rise from his meditation on Mt Kailash for anything... except with great seduction for his wife Sati.

This is a good illustration of the difference between the life of liberation and the life of worldly living.

The latter is the usual experience of wanting and our decision to go and get that wanted thing, and the trials and tribulations of the process. The success, the failure, the satisfaction, the despair ... all the opposites that we negotiate to end the wanting.

The former path requires us to remain seated during every desire. In other words to forgo the getting process, and to forgo the leaving process in the case of unwanted things.

We all know that desires come and go. How often is getting something was so important that we could not afford to fail? Normally we accept the possibility of defeat and move on. The problem with the myth of Love is that we are fooled into thinking that this 1 person is so special we cannot afford to fail. It turns bad because there is no freedom.

So if we can accept that few desires are that critical then we can sit through most things knowing that the desire will come and it will go.

Now there is great suffering in this strategy if we are not entirely dedicated to the path. Like Shiv I was kicked off my seat my a possible partner, but I was still awares of the value of remaining seated and so I have hung around undecided ever since - unable to get seated again because of her, and unable to sort things out with her because I have this instinct to go back to my seat.

Well that is the choice that I still have not made. Right now I have binned morality and eithics. These are not useful things. As someone from Bosnia once said to me: when you are in the middle of it morality doesn't come into it, you are fighting for your life. When we are in our life stream morality is abstract and mostly unhelpful. It is obvious whether what we are doing is really right or wrong, whether we have regard for other people is the only rule: ultimately what Jesus said - do we treat others as if they were ourself?

If we are going to get off our seat then we enter the simple game of desires. There is no other way. I want that, I will get it: I want that, I won't get it. I hate that, I will avoid it: I hate that, I won't avoid it. What we desire be it a cup of tea or sex makes no difference.

The only problem with this approach is that the more used to getting off our seat we are the less likely we are to ever return to our seat. However forcing ourselves to remain seated as I have discovered is equally pointless.

On the other hand we should remember that all the wise do say that being seated is the best. Why? because in reality everything that we strive so hard for has only one important effect - and that is the effect it has on us. And where are we? we are not out there, we are always here and now. So it is only because we carry ourselves with us everywhere we go and into all these new situations that we can experience all the things we desire. But, it is not the new situations that count, but ourselves and the here and now.

Once we realise that the self is always with us, the mind is always with us, and the places we go and the people we visit and the things we do are not always with us - we know our true friend and our true nature. Being seated we are with that true nature always and that joy is the joy of being seated. In reality the seated person in a closed cell has everything the playboy adventurer has! That is the key mystery to uncover.

But I insist that this does not come with force. I have forced the issue, I have suffered because I have strived too hard down a path. I needed to because I had no guide and was hungry to know this other path. But it was horribly painful because I was not entirely resolved in my decision.

Understand and Decide. That is of the utmost, urgent priority!!!