The Dogs of War will take Us to Peace
‘‘Life beckons me. It whispers, it calls me and in the end, it screams at me….Disappointment is the great gift of the beloved.’ Tony Parsons
We might say that to discover what is permanent, we have to meet impermanence again and again.
Birth is painful, ask any mother.
Cracking the shell of ego is no different — to do so takes relentless pressure, a momentum usually over many lifetimes with countless false dawns, cul-de-sacs and wrenching disappointments.
Hurt breaks us, a rock bottom both blessing and curse.
The Prodigal Son was down with the pigs and dying before he returned to his father’s house (consciousness).
The world is dying, we can see it in panorama. Turn in any direction and things don’t look so clever. To want the light, to know you are that light, takes reams of darkness.
The problem is both global, collective and deeply personal. The world will not change unless we do, unless we look into the cavern of our mind and admit things aren’t working.
That’s tough work. We will no doubt point to all our accomplishments and possessions to fend off the reality of our pain.
But give praise constantly if you were born into a messed-up family and discovered the thwarted heart. Used wisely, trauma is the gift that keeps on giving.
Not everyone cuts a channel through defeat. Some don’t make it; many die. Despair is no place to linger, yet we must all taste its bitterness.
Eating Bitter is a Japanese idea which suggests the true man faces and eats his shadow, does not capitulate to the easy lie.
Alas, most humans prefer denial aided and abetted by a world that is conceptual only and trades little in reality.
I was talking with a young multi-millionaire last week. He told me some things I knew, others I didn’t.
I do understand the banking system will crash likely this year because again it is built on a lie. Money is just figures on a screen, backed by illusion, not gold. Governments have simply given away too much money these past few years.
It’s just one example of the game of life. So, don’t be surprised if you invest in the game and you come up short. One day the banks you trust will simply bail in and take all your money.
The manifest world and the world of ideas live outside reality but who can see it? I hope you can, your life may depend upon it.
I discovered the blessings of disappointment and wrecking pain as a small child when I would sit on the stairs at night waiting for a father who never came.
For most of us it is only this level of pain that will final send us on the vital search for the permanent and the ending of the unreal.
What can we rely on in a fallen world? Nothing or no-thing is literally the answer. So, I set out on a long search for that which never comes and goes & which does not end with the body.
The implication is what we are looking for is not a thing. It can never be an object or a thought form. In fact, it is that which gives rise to all apparent forms.
In the East, they may say, ‘Neti, neti!’ Not this, not this.
For years, I searched high and low, in people, places and things until I sat like Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree and heard the holy Om!
This at last was it! I had spent years looking for a permanent love in an impermanent world oblivious to its impossibility.
I discovered three layers of being and started the shift from ego to consciousness to awareness itself, the knowledge of the final truth: there is only one of us here.
The week after I made this discovery, it was confirmed by the great sage Nisargadatta who described exactly this transition in his three-stage hierarchy.
Love thy neighbour as thyself takes on new meaning when you know without doubt your neighbour is yourself.
As this consciousness started to deepen and move, utterly dependent on meditation and later vichara or self-enquiry, it became evident more people need to see reality before they can abandon selfishness for universal love.
And so, as I matured, I saw I had been born knowing another love, so blissful and vast, nothing here would ever touch it. That’s why to the jnani (guru) death is a final graduation and cause to celebrate.
As Nisargadatta said, ‘death is never a calamity’. But it’s impossible to understand such a perspective while still rooted in a human identity.
Yet he is absolutely right.
With the mortality rate soaring, take that as comfort, for none of us have that long in this world.
The dogs of war are hungry for destruction and have lost all insight or rationality. The hawks of the empirical world will not be satisfied until the world is a wasteland.
It is quite impossible to be prepared for war in a nuclear age; what we can do is to realise ourselves as free and independent of the body.
I would urge all beings to place their primary focus on their own enlightenment. Some like to call this ascension. It is certainly a new birth to another reality, one always here, yet hidden by the mind.
It is the one Jesus taught but was misunderstood.
We are on this beautiful planet to experience and to learn, above all to remember home; that it is never outside but always in here.
Instinctively, I have been sharing this message since boyhood. My family scorned and scoffed, colleagues would laugh, yet I have never wavered from this understanding.
There is every chance a new world will come to pass, but until more destruction wreaks havoc, too few will long for peace, swapping the path of becoming for the stillness of being.
Yet I am not with those who imagine peace can be permanent in a dualistic world. It cannot. Here, we are bound by cycles of time, ups and downs, the rollercoaster that blunts then awakens.
And so it rolls on until we no longer imagine our opinion is any better than another. All are false.
The real is beyond the mind, the real is the very fact of oneness or the Self.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
