I hypothesize that: When tension goes up, awareness goes down.
Moreover, our awareness that our awareness has gone down also diminishes.
I ask us to keep these two notions in mind.
Long ago I was in a situation that so triggered me that I couldn’t see or hear a man shouting at me from a few feet in front of me.
My mother died in a housefire. When a fire broke out in a planetarium, I didn’t see or hear the man shouting at me to sit down until I awoke from my fear-paralyzed awareness. I’d left my seat, with no recollection of having done so.
When tension skyrocketed, I lost all awareness except of the felt need to flee the building.
That’s an extreme case, but I’ve also noticed that I’ve lost awareness (say, of bliss) and I didn’t see the process of decrease occur. And tension was the cause of it.
Losing awareness is also losing the awareness that we’re losing awareness. The ship goes down with all hands. And no one remembers.
***
Why am I broaching the subject?
Well, when the big day arrives (the Reval), I’m almost certain that, besides the flood of abundance, which will be enough for all of us to handle, we’ll also have to handle a flood of new financial and security concerns.
That’ll mean tension will go up and awareness will go down. And the awareness that our awarenesshas gone down will also go down. There’ll be nobody minding the (higher-vibrational) store, so to speak. Everything will implode without anyone seeing it. Or remembering.
This is a note in a bottle for Steve, a short while from now.
You’ll need to hold on to every scrap of awareness that you can to weather the emotional storm of the Reval and its aftermath. After the Reval, having strategies of relaxation will become important.
When tension goes down, awareness goes up. You want to reduce the tension, stress, anxiety level, that will arise in your life. It’ll be important because your responsibilities will also go up, probably providing another source of tension.
How do we lower tension? There are many strategies. Music. Massage. Bodywork. Reduced work hours. Yoga. Meditation. Contemplation. Trips abroad. Reading a hand-held spiritual book. Devotional singing. Sathsang. Repeating the Names of God. Solitude. Hiking in nature.
All these spiritual practices are aimed at relaxing the body, mind, and spirit.
Relaxation will raise awareness by reducing tension.
***
Everyone still holding on to the protestant work ethic, you won. You won. Time to lay the ethic aside. It worked then. But it probably won’t work in the future we’re building.
Now we need to relax into bliss, even while building a new world. Neat trick? I haven’t figured it out yet. But I can sense it coming down the road. Or maybe I’m being teleprompted.
We need to build a new world coming from love and its form, bliss. That’s definitely the assignment, in my view.
Confronting to say it. Probably confronting to hear it. How am I going to create bliss? I’m nowhere near creating bliss.
My knees are shaking.
***
So, yes, Steve, another message in a bottle.
Stay in the middle, in the center, in the heart. Other ways of saying it: Remain balanced, detached, equanimous; don’t swing out into the extremes of passion; remain grounded, centered, in the moment. Speak from a loving place if you can, from a neutral place if you can’t. Enough synonyms that you can triangulate?
The spiritual heart is protected from the winds of excited passions.
It’s the only place that’s safe from the towering waves on the ocean’s surface.
The heart is where you’ll find an endless artesian well of love, a secret underground river that will buoy you up as nothing else can. That’s where you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Put all your money on the green square of the spiritual heart beyond the hridayam (aperture).
It’s quiet down here in the depths of the heart.
Light a match and see who you’ll find here.
An ancient spring of love. And God. Good choice!
***
Steve, pay attention: Keep focusing on the heart. Let the winds outside blow. The heart is the feet of the guru.
Remember Krishna:
“Fools pass blindly by the place of my dwelling
Here in the human form, and of my majesty
They know nothing at all,
Who am their Lord, their soul.” (1)
“There in the ignorant heart … I dwell.” (2)
“I am … known to the wise in their love when they worship with hearts overflowing [torrential tsunami of love?].” (3)
I know you’re right, Krishna. Almost all of us walk by you again and again, in the heart where you are, never knowing you’re in there. Love is in there. You are Love. You are there as Love – and in a million forms.
Every form is your form. And you are beyond all forms. And you’re known best in the heightened experience of love. In a sense, love carries us to you.
***
And thank you, Jesus, for the handful of corn (abundance), which I’ll hand back to you next year multiplied.
No, I won’t make popcorn out of it and eat it, even as prasad. (4) I won’t keep it solely for my own pleasure.
No, I won’t park it in a drawer and do nothing with it, to be returned to you intact next year but with no growth (evolution).
I’ll sow it all around me, as the Magdalena counseled, with great abandon, and let the crop grow. Abundance will breed abundance. (5)
In this calm before the expected storm, I’m building my boat to sail across the turmoil. It’s an ark that I’ll launch on that endless inner ocean of love and bliss, in the heart, when the storm breaks.
Lashed to the mast and leaving the steering to the Divine, I plan to make it to the other side of the revolutionary changes in the very best possible shape.
You won’t hear financial advice from me. But you’ll hear an account of the passage.
Footnotes
(1) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 81.
(2) Ibid., 87.
(3) Ibid., 87.
(4) A gift from the Divine; usually food offered first to a form of God; sometimes the leavings from the guru’s plate.
(5) By what in economics used to be called the multiplier effect. Here’s my favorite illustration. A hotel guest paid the owner $100 as a deposit on his room. After he’d gone upstairs, the owner went to the butcher and paid $100 down on his meat bill. The butcher went to the shoemaker and purchased a new $100 pair of shoes. The shoemaker went to the hotel owner and paid him back the $100 loan he’d took from him. Everybody benefited.
In this same way will abundance bestowed on others multiply itself.