By Divine Appointment, part II

From the book Tao; The Pathless River by Osho:

The real order arises not from the outside but from the innermost core of your being.  Allow disorder, don't repress it.  Face it, take the challenge of disorder.  By taking the challenge of disorder and living it- living dangerously- an order arises in your being.

Tao is very much against knowledge.  Tao says that even if you are ignorant and the ignorance is yours- it is good-- at least it is yours, and it has an innocence to it.  But if you are burdened with accumulated knowledge, scripture, tradition, then you are living a false, pseudo life.  Then you are not really living, you are just pretending that you are living.  You are making impotent gestures.  Your life has not the intensity, the passion-- cannot have the passion.  That passion arrises only when you move on your own, into the vast sky of existence.
Why can't you move alone?  Because you don't trust life.  You move with Mohammedans, you move with Hindus, you move with Jews, because you don't trust life, you trust crowds.  To move alone one needs great trust in life....the trees, the rivers, the sky, the eternity of it all-- one trusts this.  You trust man made conceptions, you trust man-made systems, you trust man-made ideologies.  How can man-made ideologies be true?
Man has created these ideologies just to hide the fact that he does not know, to hide the fact that he is ignorant.  Man is cunning, clever, and he can create rationalizations, but these rationalizations are bogus-- you cannot move with them into truth.  You will have to drop them.  Tao says that ignorance is not the barrier against truth-- knowledge is the barrier.

As I was packing things in the house yesterday I found myself taking many mini-breaks, and one could say, stalling a bit.  I'm still wondering if I'm even moving.  But, as my friend Andy pointed out yesterday in a mini-break satsang conversation, there is an incredible and gentle power in wonder.  This is so true. The power of innocence is astounding.  We can fall under the illusion that it is the aquisition of worldly knowledge that make us effective, but it is that innocence and wonder that has the sight to see what is really going on behind the scenes so to speak. It is that wonder that can see that knowledge doesn't really change much of anything.  It merely rearranges the furniture on the metaphorical deck of the titanic. 

It was a child that pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.  As we go further on the spiritual path we begin to see many naked emperors on the road.  And, not only people, but metaphorically speaking, many things that once filled the ego with excitement or fulfillment losing thier juice, and in effect, their power over us.  We begin to discover the truth that only Love is real.  And, that although it is reflected to us in many beautiful and suprising and delightful ways,  it does not exist outside of us.

A few years back, by divine appointment, I was at the bank and was approached by a man who looked familiar.  It turns out this man was in fact a celebrity, a successful community service-oriented business man, with a strong religious focus and ties as well.  We talked for a bit in the parking lot and he invited me to come by his office sometime.  We talked on the phone a few times and I finally did make it to his office about a year later. 
The walls of the office were covered with pictures taken of him with presidents and celebrities around the world, and service awards covered the walls as well.  These walls seemed to command respect in themselves.  Or beg for it.   He had a strong, almost intimidating presence, but had a very sweet and charismatic side as well.  I really liked him.  After some chit chat came the real reason he invited me up in the first place.  For all of his connections, celebrity, religious studies and affiliation, fame and fortune,  he was not a happy man.  There was something missing and he wanted to know how he could find it.  In essence, he wanted to know how he could find love.
I was a little thrown off by the way the questions came.  He said, I have helped many people, I help them by doing this this and this.  How do you help people?  And, the first thing that came into the mind is that I don't help people at all.  I love people.  I see people.  I just do what I love, and in that doing, people seem to get a lot out of it.  And, when I am in that space of seeing, of really seeing, people, I see God.  How can one 'help' God? 
How to explain this to a mind that was only interested in a quick fix formula?  That was used to dealing with things in a certain way, and getting a certain result.  How to gently convey that it doesn't work like that in an authentic spiritual life.  In love. There is no quick and easy ten step process to surrendering your life to, as Rumi says, 'to the one who already owns your breath'.  And how can you tell anyone 'how to' when you are well aware that 'you don't' ?  

I don't remember what I said, I only know the more I talked it seemed the more agitated he became.  In essence, I wasn't giving him what he wanted.  A system to be applied.  The thing that was probably most confusing and upsetting was that the ego couldn't 'do it'.  That the true spiritual path, or 'finding love', is not about 'doing' anything, it is letting go of 'doing' and of everything the mind has taken on as truth-- and allowing the living truth within to surface spontaneously as a result of this letting go. 

He wanted to know what I did specifically.  But what could I tell him?  Get into an abusive relationship for eleven years, take drugs, gain one hundred pounds, have an existential crisis and let go of your mind to the extent that you feel like you are going to lose it altogether and tthen you do, and instead of finding yourself  in a mental institution, you find yourself in Heaven?  
There is no 'way' to get there.  You are already there.  You just have to let go of everything convinced that it is not there.
He obviously wanted answers but the ones I had were not the ones he wanted. And I understand.  This kind of talk is nonsense to the mind.  Like a friend said, the language of Truth is different from the language of the mind, and sometimes you may as well be speaking Swahili.  We really are here to learn and speak a new language.  One that connects us and liberates us all.
 
I had compassion for someone who was so obviously brilliant and had created such a "good" identity, how could one not help become attached to such a wonderful thing?  He definitely had his work cut out for him.  And even though giving it up would bring him the freedom and the love and the joy he longed for, from the ego's standpoint that would be a very unintelligent thing to do.  There would be nothing in it for him.  Why on earth would he do that when he had so much to lose?
All of those other things at least gave him something. 
The religious affiliation gave him the safety in numbers sense of things, even though he was still lonely, and it gave him the comfort that he was a spiritual man, even though he knew deep down he didn't really know God,
The awards gave him a sense of accomplishment, even though he knew deep down there was something else he was supposed to be doing,
The service he did gave the ego a boost and helped convince himself that he was a 'good' man, even though he hadn't done the inner work to forgive himself and didn't really believe he was,
And the celebrity gave him a sense of importance and love, a false love based on separation, but this, and these other things, he would only admit to himself when it got bad enough.  Most of the time all of this had been enough to keep him going. He was getting older now.  He was running out of time and his soul was in pain and no longer willing to play the game it had been playing.  He could no longer fool himself into the illusion that everything was going to be okay if he just did more of what he was already doing. 

It seems we all get hooked into playing parts and stories and identifying with those, and it takes everything we have to let them go and trust that there is something a million times greater than the we 'we' think we are.  And in order to find it we have to go within and begin unlocking the mysteries of the soul and stop looking to the outer world for 'it'. 
This might be too much to ask of him at this point.  I know it was too much to ask of me. It came only through the grace of a divine discontent that led to an inner hunger, curiosity, and obsessive focus in finding out who I was, and continues today after getting taste after taste and an ever deepening awareness of real freedom, real love and real joy and of connecting with others on the path through the expansive and beautiful energy of the heart. 

Another one of those divine appointments, which has become a regular weekly appointment, is with a group of inmates I have the honor of working with, who are doing sigfinicant inner work, and who with the satsang and fellowship is tremendously rich.  We're currently going through the Artist's Way book by Julia Cameron and one of the guys was talking about how he took a painting class when we was around 11 or 12 and his ability to paint was so great they had him paint a mural and got the whole school painting! He talked about his obsessive nature and drive, and about how he was put on ritatlin as a child.  His dad didn't approve of the painting thing, so he turned that energy towards working on gocarts.  Then later he turned it towards criminal activity, I'm assuming drug selling, then later while he was behind bars, learning an astonishing amount about the criminal justice system and the law.  He was actually incredibly successful at everything he turned that obsession, ie. love, towards.  More recently he turned it towards the stockmarket and even while he was behind bars made a lot of money with his wife doing the investing.  Someone else in the group wondered what would happen if he turned this energy upon himself.  If he got that interested and that focused on the inner dimension of his being.  Turned it to discovering his spiritual nature. 

It is very clear that this evergy, the wild and obsessive energy that school systems and parents seek to 'calm down' and supress, can also be seen as Love that has the power to move mountains.  It is a force all of it's own and when let loose it can do anything.  It is just a matter of where we focus that energy, that Love.  
The Tao is about letting that energy, that Love, flow, and allowing ourselves to surrender to that flow.  The western culture has become focused on directing that flow to serve it's own agendas.  Instead of flowing naturally, there are manmade channels that allow us to move off of our true path and true destiny and into the land of the 'shoulds' of society and of ego.  Ego meaning edging god out.  And, since these channels still look like rivers, and since they are still flowing, we think we are on the path.  But, we are on an illusionary one, a worldly one, and the water that it brings will never truly quench our thirst.   The waters may look real but they are not living waters.  They are not alive in the soul. 

These days we even give children drugs if they refuse to be redirected into a false current.  Into a manmade river.  And then we lock them up when they get older for participating in the same game.  Only it is a different game.  At least  the drug dealers on the street don't  force anyone to buy their drugs, they have enough buyers that need to use the drugs to supress that energy.  So, it is much different. Our children don't have a choice in the matter. They can't  "just say no".

It is true that whatever we put our energy into we can succeed at.  Whatever we are sincerely interested in we can materialize into form.  Whether we are conscious of these interests or not.  This is where we get the notion of co-creation.  We become conscious co-creators as we learn to stay awake and direct this energy.  We begin to see that we can have whatever we want.  Celebrity, fame, money, high positions and status, and, when those begin to bore us, or haunt us from their poor substitutes for the Real stuff, maybe we'll begin to turn our focus and energies inward and begin to focus on qualities rather than outer things.  We will begin to court freedom, or trust, or wisdom, or peace rather than a fixed outer goal that the ego imagines will bring it those things. 
And, shock of all shocks when we turn our attention inward, wisdom will show up, as an awareness of Who We Are.  A Peace beyond this world will show it's face.  Freedom will find us.  And, lo and behond things will manifest in the world from these inner states, from a solid foundation of spiritual awareness and reality ,and without attachment, because we are well aware they are simply reflecting.  Not even 'coming to us'.  But Us.  

But before we get to know ourSelves, before that inner Emperor is discovered
we usually come to know many naked ones.  Many disguises we wear.  Many stories we tell.  Many ways we block that love.

But once we get back in the flow, and unblock that river of love and begin to really flow again, in that chaotic and dangerous, that beautiful and innocent stream, and once we trust that life within above all else, unattached to results, we will begin to live by divine destiny rather than one that was created for us by someone else. We will begin to see through those naked emperors on the road, and we will discover once again our true face, our true self, our true home, and meet by divine appointment rather than manmade ones

and bless it all
bless it all
bless it all