Returning to the Mystery
22 Apr 2015

I LOVE LAMBS! Watching them jumping about in the fields today really touched me deeply. They carry such an innocent playfulness and a real vitality, jumping up and down and butting each other. Contrast that with the sheep who seem disinterested in the world and so serious. It seems that even in the animal kingdom beings get stuck in the rut of living just as humans do. Puppies grow up; kittens become independent. And when we lose that joie de vivre we start to ossify on so many levels.

How do we keep that playfulness… that fascination with this beautiful life? I think it is about retaining life's mystery. As soon as we think we understand things, that is when the world closes down because we no longer interact directly with it, but through our the model of reality or realitymap. Life becomes second-hand. You see that especially in relationship… two people get to know each other… and then they stop relating because they are relating to their image of each other.

We think we long to be known by others, when in fact what we long for is for others to behold our mystery. Then our exchange with them becomes raw, present and powerful. That is why nonjudgmental awareness is so important — it acknowledges the mystery. Two people in love are each a mystery and therefore a fascination to each other. We fall out of love when we are deluded into thinking that the mystery has ended. (In truth it never ends.)

So can we get this world to become a mystery again? Or perhaps our friends or partner? Can we undo years of understanding? Is the movement from mystery a one-way-ticket?

To return to the mystery of life requires a return to innocence of perception. And there are a few ways to do this:

  1. Learn to love unconditionally because in doing so we move our of our heads and into our hearts. And the heart is the perceiver of mystery. Conditional love, however, does not work.
  2. Practice awareness of awareness — basic meditation on the perceptual process itself. This drops our attention below the conceptual habit.
  3. Consider mind altering substances that reveals the mystery in what we mistook as the ordinary. These include DMT, Peyote, LSD, Ayahuasca, Ecstasy and Iboga.
  4. Try to look past the three-dimensional nature of reality to a multidimensional perspective. This overloads the conceptual mind with paradox so that it stops trying to understand everything.
  5. Start a new relationship. This can be a delicious return to the mystery, but it will probably be short-lived if we do not know how to remain there!
  6. Keep learning new things, but not academically which builds up a consistent worldview, but learn different perspectives, different languages of being. This shakes our conceptual foundations.
  7. Focus primarily on the energetics of reality and as this is always in flux, we retain life's mystery.
  8. Spend time with young beings who are still steeped in the mystery — babies, puppies, kittens and lambs!

I will write a longer article at some point on returning to the mystery, but wanted to write some thoughts that came up in the moment, and to share with you some pics I took today of beautiful lambs ♥

lambs - 2015

 

Addendum

It is almost a year since I took the pictures above and met the little lambs. Many of them will have been slaughtered now — just for our incessant appetite for flesh. And the ones that are still alive are just awaiting their execution, many of them suffering as continual baby machines in the meantime until they are exhausted. Fortunately, they don't know the suffering ahead of them… but we certainly do… which is why we have a responsibility to minimise their suffering. I always find it sad to see hear all the "ahhs" when people are around young animals like this, but few seem to connect the innocent creature frolicking in the field with the slabs of flesh hanging at the butchers or wrapped in cellophane at the supermarket. Some terrible violence and cruelty has happened between these two states, but the modern world is unfortunately disconnected from reality. Fortunately people are waking up to this disconnect, and more and more people are turning vegan so that this terrible injustice can finally end.