Have you ever noticed how our lives are a wee bit similar to that of animals who walk endlessly in a circle to turn the mill that grinds the wheat and makes the flour?
We grind away at what amounts to our own particular platitude. Or what I prefer to see as our own particular vasana.
My own particular vasana is: “You don’t listen to me!” I grind away at that one day in and day out. The good people listen to me, the bad people don’t.
A friend’s vasana is: “You don’t trust me.” Anyone who can be seen as not trusting him receives the wrath of God, anyone who trusts is beatified.
For other people it’s: “Show me!” Or: “You don’t love me!” Or: “You don’t take me seriously.”
Why is it that we don’t decide the matter and be done with it? Why do we allow ourselves to be so predictable, narrow-minded, and entrenched?
Why do I allow myself to be so? Why do I allow the ox of my mind to travel in an endless circle, grinding away at the same old platitude, day after day?
Why do I not decide the matter and move on?
I ask the question truly. Really. Why do I not move on? What is it that has me accept the yoke and walk the same rut day after day?
And the answer is that I see pain as real. The pain I feel when the vasana plays I see as real. And every time I feel the pain because I think I’m not being listened to, I consider that pain as real, important, and unignorable.
But as the bliss rises in these days of rapidly-enhancing energy, these vasanas are being dissolved, wiped clean, and I can even see the rut I travel in. Previously the rut was unseen. At least now I see it.
And in the relief I feel from even just having seen the rut, I see the way out. Heavens, just consider the matter from a place of balance and reason. Do people not listen to you? The truth is what it always is: some people do, some people don’t. Is the important part the fact that I’m not listened to? No, the important part is that the issue matters to me.
Who cares if people listen to me or not? Obviously I do. Why do I care? And here the reasoning stops.
I actually don’t care. And this is the missing piece for me. I really don’t care. I’m happy with life as it is. I actually do not need people to listen to me or not. Life is great. Living is great. Dying is great. (1) Suffering is not so great. I will need to deal with that when and if it ever comes to me. But even there, suffering has an end. And I can learn from my own suffering.
Even if I cannot eliminate suffering from the equation altogether, the more equanimous I am with even that, the easier life will be.
I have decided the matter. I now move on. Life was meant to be more than grinding away in the rut of a vasana.
Footnotes
(1) Why not? I’ve written a book on life after death (New Maps of Heaven) and I know that life on the astral planes is wonderful and only gets better the higher we ascend. Why would it not be preferable to be cruising around the astral planes than living in a body, say, wracked with disease, enfeebled by old age? What’s not to greet about release from such conditions?