I wrote a blog entry earlier today but decided not to post it. It ended up being a political rant--quelle surprise!--and for health reasons, I'm not going there. I am by choice a Taoist, and therefore I have no reason to complain about anything. Everything is as it should be. It just is what it is, and how can you complain about reality? Reality just exists. I am going to spend my energy and my time focusing and acting on things that come from my heart, not things that come from my head. The reasoning here is that most of what comes from my head is tinged (or soaked through) with ego. And only what comes from my heart, my truest self--that is, my soul--can possibly make me happy in any real way.
And that is the discipline I am choosing for my blog. This blog is going to be a medicine that transforms me over time, each day requiring myself to focus only on what is coming from my heart and not my head, only what flows easily and naturally from my heart, not what I am striving to prove or to achieve. Those are born from the ego, and do not lead to peace and contentment.
Lao-Tze is my model, the Tao Te Ching by bible.
I was raised a conservative fundamentalist Christian, a Seventh-Day Adventist. I have a problem with the Christian churches in general, with pretty much all organized religion. The institutions by their very nature go against what Christ's life as he lived it. About the only true Christian I have ever read about was J.R.R. Tolkien, who gave away the money he made as a Cambridge don, to the point of living in penury. Now THAT's a Christian, in my book. If you're going to claim to follow Christ, then you'd better live the way he himself lived. Popes with their silk robes in royal colors, ruling over millions of people. That's so obviously NOT Christ-like. Most Christians today would HATE Christ. He didn't have a job, and when he worked a few days here and there he was a carpenter or a fisherman, a man who worked with his hands. Although he was brilliant enough to be a rabbi, he eschewed everything that was for show. He was homeless, in point of fact, relying on the charity of others for food and shelter. What would modern Christians think of a teacher like that? I think they would either laugh him off as a fool or have him swept with disgust off the streets as a vagrant.
Christ himself was an amazing being. According to The First Coming, a book I read by a professor in the highly regarded Religious Studies Department at Princeton, a young Jewish rebbi showed up in central Asia, in the Himalayas, northern India, Tibet, Nepal. And he studied with all the great mystics at that time. He was enough of a spiritual genius that his travels and studies were noted in records of the time. Well, that's my Jesus, the one who studied for 10 years with all the greatest Eastern religious thinkers. Their philosophies fit in perfectly with the way he understood God and man, without the anger, fear and hatred found in the Old Testament and Pentateuch. This Jesus understood The Way to be mystical, about an inner journey in which one finds Heaven on Earth, by fully embracing this moment as perfect in itself, not waiting or hoping or wishing for a more perfect future somewhere else.
That's my Jesus. He's one of my circle of spiritual teachers, and well loved and respected by the rest of the circle. Besides Lao-Tze, there is Li Dong Yuan. I know him as the founder of the Earth School in the history of Chinese medicine, but it turns out he was also an amazing writer. I came across some of his writing in an anthology of Chinese thought and literature, and I was shocked to find what an accomplished writer he was. It was almost poetry. Who else, who else? Kiekegaard was a big part of my early training. Stories from Native American storytellers and healers. Chuang-Tze, definitely. Some early American writers like Henry David Thoreau, maybe Hawthorne, certainly Emily Dickinson.
Time for bed. More on this. Dobre nocs.
No comments:
Post a Comment