Paradox of Worship

Paradox of Worship

When you worship, when you bow, you’re bowing to your own soul potential within.  This is why idols and graven images are so dangerous.  The ego wants to classify and keep everything on the outside, to keep everything limited and manageable.  So a statue of a God, pick one, is a trap because giving that God form allows the human being to stop at that form or image and think, “Oh, okay, that’s a God, that’s not me.”  It gives concrete form to the God and then everything stops dead in it’s tracks and suffering begins.  Suffering begins because the God is now outside you, separate from you and depending upon the myriad of beliefs that were fed you on the way up, you buy into linear time and limited space and think, perhaps “Later I will meet this God in death.”  

Truth is the God within you, right now.  Making a picture or statue of God and then worshiping that thing is perhaps the most dangerous trap of duality.  If you look at that symbol of God in the statue or image and your next thought isn’t, “I am that,” then you’re done for.  You’re going to be separate and that’s where suffering is.  If you can separate God out of anything then you will definitely separate other human beings from yourself.  And that’s when the game begins.  Blowing each other up, torturing each other in the name of a God, that’s where it's at for the ignorant.  If that’s my God, not your God, then you have to die because my god is better than your god.  

My teacher told a story once about Guru Nanak who was the first of the ten Sikh gurus.  Back then (about 500 years ago) the Muslims did a real job on the Sikhs, making them sit on burning hot plates then dumping them in a river, nasty stuff.  Anyway, someone told Nanak he couldn’t point his feet towards the east because of Mecca is in the east and God is in the east.  Nanak replied, “Show me where God is not and I’ll point my feet there.” Truth is, there is nowhere God is not, and the gateway to God is right behind your eyes.  

Worship is a paradox in itself.  In worship you bow to nothing and everything at the same time.  You bow to God and yourself at the same time because you and God are one.  You are both limited and unlimited all in one being.  What’s present is limited but with it, there is unlimited potential.  So when you bow, you bow to the infinite teacher within yourself.  This is the eastern concept of The Guru.  The true Guru is one who brings you from the darkness into the light.  In Kundalini yoga we chant the words “Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo” at the beginning of each class.  This is called the Adi Mantra.  It means, “I bow to the infinite teacher within.”  It’s all inside you because the God is inside you.  Alot of people can’t handle it.  It’s too much for the mind that’s let its self become the slave of the ego.  When the ego is running the show the mind is like a battered wife.  It just says “yes dear,” with bloodshot, dark-circled eyes and watches the suffering go on like bad reruns on Nickelodeon.  Meanwhile, the soul suffers too because it’s powerless in the face of this suffering.  This is where sickness and disease can come from.  The soul has a tremendous power and when that energy is blocked, it has nowhere to go so it builds up and when that energy gets too much, it manifests itself as cancer, heart attacks and a myriad of other diseases.  If the soul isn’t allowed to flow through the human, it destroys the blockage—the ego oriented physical body.  The particular disease depends only upon where the blockage is.  

The greatest thing you can do in this life is to learn to bow.  It opens the heart and allows the soul to flow through.  It tames the ego and becomes the gateway to gratitude.  When you develop a relationship with your soul and live a balanced life, then it’s one big happy family.  Body, mind and soul all work together to flow in a blissful dance of life.

When a human worships the God within and gives it up to the undying, unmanifest, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent power within, this is in mutual reverence.  Because God and the Human are one, the God bows right back as though it were a hall of mirrors.  In this way, bowing to God, the human reunites or re-members with the God that’s been in there the whole time, then God blesses and worships the human.  This isn’t just philosophy, it’s a law of the universe, a law of nature.  Each and every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  This is Newton’s law, which just happens to be the way karma works too.  By the law of polarity, if you worship God, then God has to worship you back.  It’s all one.  Science has proven that everything is made up of the same tiny particles and strings of vibrating energy and if that’s true then nature’s laws apply to everything.  The God within, the God without, bow to it all in gratitude and the world becomes yours.  One reason we don’t know this in the west is that we’ve been trained to accept nothing unless it can be proven scientifically.  You simply can’t prove a paradox and it’s in paradox that God lives.  You have to take a leap of faith and have the experience through practice, through a relationship with your own soul.  

How do you worship?  You don’t need big churches or even extensive rituals.  All these things are just to tame the ego controlled-mind, which will resist the reunion with everything it’s got.  All you need for worship is an attitude of gratitude.  Simply bask in your gratitude for everything you see.  Even if something hurts, learn to express gratitude for it.  Oh yeah, same to you.  When you’re grateful for it all, none of it can hurt you anymore and so it goes away.  It’s just like a bully in the schoolyard.  if you don’t buy into his bullying, eventually he’ll go away.  

Here’s a funny one.  When I was in junior high school I got into this fight with a smelly Irish kid who was a consummate punk.  It was over a game of space invaders.  I had my quarters up, he jumped in front of me, but I kept playing.  Outside, he kept trying to fight me, but I refused.  He was a little smaller than me but I didn’t want to fight so I didn’t.  To tell the truth, I was scared because I’d never been in a fight.  So it was a beautiful, awkward pushing match that amounted to nothing.  Then next day that smelly little coward sent three of his friends to kick my ass and you know what the first smelly kid said?  “I heard you kicked my friend’s ass.”  Isn’t that something?  I had been humiliated all the way home, thinking, ‘Why didn’t I fight? I’m such a loser’  I remember it like it was yesterday, hearing that kid say, “I heard you kicked my friend’s ass.”  What I know now that I didn’t know then, was that the kid was a bully and my not fighting him was a defeat in his eyes.  This is the basis of Turn the other cheek and it’s the same thing with the unpleasant things in life.  If you just say, that’s fine, it’s all good, then eventually it will go away.  It will sting for a while first though, just so you know.  After all, you’re getting it on both cheeks.  It was Ghandi who said, “Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”  He felt the sting as you all know and we all felt it with him… that movie was four hours long!  But look at the legacy he left behind.  Nobody will dispute his contribution as a man of peace.  Not to mention that I didn’t even have to say Mahatma and you knew whom I was talking about.  He’s a one-word name like Madonna.  It’s his selflessness and compassion that we remember.  Now I’m sorry I brought Madonna into it.  

P.S. Just for the record, I had Georgiane Kraft on my side the day the three punks jumped me and with her help, we sent them packing.  Nothing too exciting, but we survived.  Last I heard, she was a police captain in New York City.  No kidding.  

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The Paradox of the Common Soul

A Word About The Common Soul

We live in a dual world.  Not many will deny that.  Everywhere you look outside there are opposites and polarity.  Up and down, hot and cold, in and out, love and hate and the list goes on.   In fact of the many things out there, it’s hard not to find an opposite in something else.  It’s simply how our world works out there.  As long as you’re working in that world out there you’re in the garden of good an evil.  But even in this world of opposites there are clues to the one-ness that is our soul’s connection to the common, universal soul.  

Paradoxes are everywhere in life.  Paradoxes are these subtle clues in the world to wake us out of the dream or illusion that everything is black and white duality.  A paradox is when you’ve got two things that seem to conflict, but could possibly both be true at the same time.  You see what this does?  It breaks down the dual nature of something.  One of the most famous paradoxes is that old riddle: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  I remember my aunts and uncles teasing me with this as a child and it was a big laugh, but it’s designed to cause you to question your own origins and what you’re doing here.  

Paradox is everywhere.  Another great way to look at it is that a paradox is like a “Catch-22.”  This amazing phrase that made it’s way into our language because of Joseph Heller’s 1961 war novel of the same name.  In it, he referred to an Air Force rule whereby a pilot continuing to fly combat missions without asking for relief is regarded as insane, but he’s considered sane enough to keep flying if he is actually able to make such a request.  A catch-22 is a seemingly impossible or illogical situation.  Likewise the idea that we all share one universal, common soul is a catch-22 or paradox.  How can we as individual beings, apparently separate from everything else out there, share the same soul?  How can we be one with everything else?  

Science—quantum physics, string theory and other nuclear physics theories have essentially proved it and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand it.  Science has discovered that when you break energy down into its smallest components, even smaller than protons, neutrons and electrons; there are these tiny sub-atomic particles, which are the basic units of energy.  They have funny names like quarks and bosons and others, but the point is, that these particles of energy make up all matter—your house, that rock outside, everything you see is made up of these basic units of energy.  Now it’s gone even further with string theory and M theory—that these particles are actually microcosmic strings vibrating and theorizes that there are actually the possibility of eleven different dimensions!  

The only thing that differentiates a rock from a piece of iron is that the two are vibrating at different frequencies.  Even we, our physical bodies, are made up of the same stuff.  We are all these basic units of energy and the only thing that makes us individual and different is that we’re all vibrating at different frequencies also.  Just as each and every snowflake is unique, so is each and every being on this earth.  This can be a real mind-bender and it is supposed to be thus.  You have to take this all on faith.  You can read about quantum physics and string theory and all that stuff and you’ll find out what I just told you… we’re all the same stuff.  But at some point you have to jump off and take a philosophical leap and start seeing things as all coming from the same place and that’s when a paradox or catch-22 opens your mind and gives you a taste of the power of your soul.  

I’ve just outlined the greatest paradox of them all—we’re all made up of the same basic energy but we’re still as unique as snowflakes.  The ego hates this because the ego is limited.  For simplicity purposes let’s just say the ego is what keeps your reality in place—the life you see before you with your eyes.  The ego is limited because the life you live is limited.  You’re born, you have some experiences and you die.  The very nature of life is limited by virtue of this fact.  But the mind is unlimited because it’s connected to the common soul.  The reality you experience in every day life is a projection of the mind.  Your thoughts are things.  They’re electric.  Your brain sends electrical impulses to the nerves and the muscles in the body and it makes the whole thing go.  So your energy follows your thought.  You think something, you do it and the sum of the things you do becomes the life you experience.  

The problem is between the mind and ego.  The mind is unlimited because it’s connected with the common soul and the whole ball of wax.  Yogi Bhajan, the great Master of Kundalini Yoga has told us that each time you blink your eyes, the mind releases a thousand thoughts.  So the mind has these unlimited thoughts while the ego is limited to what it can see and classify.  That’s what the ego does, it classifies everything to keep things manageable.  The mind is like an ambassador between the ego and the common soul and because the mind is connected with the common soul, it knows that we’re all one.  What happens then, is that the mind becomes torn between the ultimate truth of the soul and the limited outside world of the ego.  

Now in most of us, especially in the western hemisphere, the ego is in charge and runs the whole show.  Because of this, it wants to go back to classifying everything as black and white duality.  Every time you’re hit with a paradox in your life, it puts you at a crossroads where you have to make a choice-- Duality of the ego or Universality of the soul.  Every time you take that leap of faith and choose Universality and work on the assumption that we’re one common soul, you open the mind more and access that unlimited power that is the energy that is in all things.   The ego resists this with everything it’s got because Universality is like death to the ego and it becomes threatened with annihilation.  The ego wants to manage, maintain, and run things.    However, we are all given will power or free will.  If your will is strong enough, then you are able to leverage the mind open more and more.  With practice, the mind opens to the soul and then the ego ends up working for the mind and what results is a balanced individual who creates a life of bliss guided by the soul.  

Whenever you come across a paradox or catch-22 in your life, it’s the Common Soul knocking on the door of your mind, inviting you to open it more.  Connecting the common soul allows you to develop a relationship to the soul and allows you to live out your destiny.  

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The First Step

The only real way to get this thing going is to just do it.  I’ve been plagued by that “where do I begin” curse and thus I’ve done a whole lot of nothing.  My biggest concern has been putting up something for people to grab on to.  As a writer in general, I’ve been keeping journals religiously for the past eleven years.  So my recent studies of yoga and travels with practice that to summer solstice in New Mexico and many other little journeys along the way, have given me lots to write about in terms of experience.  Yoga has become the best thing in my life over the past three or so years that I’ve been practicing with discipline and here’s why:  Yoga gives you the physical experience of your soul in the present—here in the body.  Yoga and meditation allow you to have a real-time experience of who you really are.  I could go on for days about this and probably will.  Here’s what you should know about this very first and somewhat auspicious post at The New Guru Union Blog:  I will be transcribing old journal entries and in some cases just transforming them into essays.  In other cases I will simply discuss things.  If necessary I’ll mark some of them as journal entries and give the date.  This is a work in progress and I’ve stalled thus far because of that chicken and egg curse.  So here it is, the first step in an infinite journey.  Warts and all.  Thank you very much.