When you’re in there, with those strong feelings, of confusion and angst, thrown about by waves of emotion or distracted by random thoughts, plagued by doubts about your lack of an effective game plan for life or just plain down … it feels like chaos. Imagine yourself in one of the darker corners of this image, or being tossed by one of the waves as it crashes off a spiralling wing of energy, or crushed as one finger of force presses down upon your local environment or mind/body. Your experience is all-encompassing, complete, true to the life and death of this existence, right now …
But there’s always another side. There’s always another dimension, an aspect of the experience that forces you to evolve, or asks you to be patient, or simply washes over and leaves you feeling … OK. Refreshed perhaps, or even just relieved. At their best, such experiences inspire us to reaffirm our faith in the goodness of the universe. Very often, they leave us feeling that on the other side of chaos there exists an underlying order, a way that life unfolds that we could not possibly have imagined would turn out for the best. Or, at least, could leave us feeling enlightened, awakened, deeper or stronger or just … more fortunate.
When you come out the other side, what seemed like a chaotic jumble may turn out to look like a beautiful piece of art. Or an infuriating waste of time. It might seem like a period of testing, followed by an experience of thankfulness, which goes beyond rational comprehension. No matter how we interpret events, fractals remind us that the beauty of life and the world, the earth and the stars and the subatomic dimensions and all of life in its unfolding, is there at the end … because it is always there within: within each twist and turn of life, each crushing defeat or seemingly cruel turn of fate.
So if you find this post feeling anxious or confused, angry or ignorant, sad or lost, have faith. Some kind of order follows; some kind of pattern appears; something will always return to make you feel thankful for your life. Faith isn’t just for the religious – in fact, it’s another case where religions have stamped their authority over something that is innate, natural to each of us. It is an archetypal experience, to use a Jungian term, which arises spontaneously in anyone who survives something they can see the brighter side of afterwards.
Link up to a fractal doing just that and boom! There you are too.
Mindfulness is a state of being, or at least it becomes one if you practice it. Being more aware of the moment, we feel more alive. The smells, the glint of a button in the sunlight, the sound of a bird chirping as we walk by … these are the sorts of things we notice if we get a chance to, just before we die. Don’t leave yourself open to too much regret; wake up to these beautiful passing phenomena right now.
As well as opening you up more consistently to the moment of here and now, a meditation practice can help you to become more aware of the patterns that constantly run through your mind and model the way you think, that speak as the voices and act as the judgements and assumptions that keep us limited by the way our personal history has shaped us. A meditation practice helps you to evolve in consciousness over time, if you stick at it; as well as open you up to surprising levels of awareness in no time at all.
This video doesn’t distill my teachings around the skills that can help you meditate better, but it gives the flavour, and so it might help you to set the mood for sitting in quiet contemplation. Sit in peace and walk with compassion.
Geoff Berry will present an experiential session of meditation to celebrate Mindfulness Day on Wednesday September the 12th at the Narooma Library from 10.30am. He also offers meditations skills and guidance via www.naturecalling.org
Myth deals with life and death. It explains how we are connected to the otherworld that exists eternally regardless of the the circumstances of our own personal lives. In an effort to stave off the horror of death, we use technology to try and convince ourselves that we are beyond such mortal concerns. Thus the cities of light we have created with electricity represent both heaven and hell; a Factory of Fire that keeps the darkness at bay but also threatens to heat up our planet beyond its carrying capacity for life.
What we need to do now is to recreate modern myth on an eco-friendly scale and remember what the ancestors taught: part of us is always connected to the endless universe out of which we were birthed, that we were born out of star dust, that our true home is right here, right now and also everywhere all the time, that we need not fear death, that we should consume only what we need of the earth, which is alive and responsive to our actions, and that we should treat all life on this planet as sacred, including ourselves.
