Spiritual Survival Techniques, Part Two.

I notice old people, how they get around and what seems to occupy their minds. What I notice even more are the way young people consider old people, the way they often treat them, as if by some magical event they will never be an old person.

People develop a style of living to which they become attached. They don’t want to give it up. I’ve heard people say, “Well, if I can’t live the way I want to then I don’t want to live at all.” Things we can easily get away with when we are young become increasingly difficult to maintain as time moves on.

People eat a lot of meat. Your digestive system throws up a lot of mucus to deal with it. Maybe you have noticed this after eating a steak. Because of poor dietary choice people create a swamp in their bodies. Things breed in the swamp. So you get people hacking into their hands as soon as the weather changes. The aging process accelerates.

The main reason that people get obese is from drinking soda. More than anything else it is your Big Gulp pit stops that give you the wide load. People don’t make that association. Some of them think diet soda is the answer. I’m not going to deal with aspartame here. You can find out the ugly details on your own.

Designer coffee is the rage now; Coffee Anan double dense fruit surprise or what have you. What coffee does is fire your adrenals. It’s like starting your car over and over until you might even burn it out. Nobody think about this. No doubt there was an article recently about how coffee reduces heart attacks or improves you sex life. Actually it radically decreases sexual function at a certain point, as do cigarettes.

“I did it my way.” seems to be the theme these days. Your body is like a car. A new car can take a lot of abuse. The one thing most important in car maintenance is changing the oil. Impurities have the same effect on you that they have on a car. It’s a simple thing to keep your car running well. If you keep pouring bad gas into it; if you don’t flush it out and pay attention then you need to go to the mechanics.

I watch spiritual teachers. What is it that they do differently? One of the things is that they eat very little and not very often. This would of itself provide a healthy and long life. What’s the point of working yourself to death while consuming bad fuel so that you can live with chronic health concerns in your golden years?

I hesitate to use the word God sometimes because of all the bad associations religion has placed into intelligent minds. Let us think rather of an all embracing consciousness that is in everything and that it is possible, by letting go of the individual identity, to achieve a cosmic identity by uniting with it. This essence, this all pervading awareness is closer to you, at all times, than you imagine. Sometimes you may be closer to it and you notice something. Other times you do not but it is still there. You wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t alive inside you. It is the very life you live. It is in your mind and intimately aware of your thoughts.

If you were to assume what I say is true; you don’t need any facts to back it up... if you would just assume this and remind yourself of it constantly a dialogue would ensue. Like priming a pump, you get no water at first. If you talk to yourself in the mirror for awhile you come to notice at a certain point that someone is looking back at you and listening. You can talk yourself into anything. You have, you do.

I have said before that Heaven is not up in the sky. It begins where your feet touch the Earth. You don’t go anywhere when you appear to die. You go where you are. You are in Heaven already or you are not. You could be there quite soon actually. It’s a matter of aspiration. You already aspire to things and there you are. There isn’t anything here that is worth having except peace of mind. Out of the tranquility of merger with the one comes the magical vision of a new and shining world. We cheapen our vision by the quality of our desire. Some fires put out more smoke than others. It depends on the fuel.

Besides a rigidity of mind and a tighter circle of pattern reoccurrence, old people can count on a number of problems that affect nearly everyone. One of these things is the loss of range of motion. This is where a dance of some sort comes in. Daily limbering will add years of effective life. Even if you have lost considerable range of motion you can get a good deal of it back. The defeat in the mind from the memory of the life that led us to the point of despairing in our own efforts is what resists our capacity to renew.

The lure of cheap food and entertainments coupled with the innate laziness of a person, who is planning to change tomorrow, have never been more ubiquitous. It all hurts. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

It is the pain we experience from ignorant desire that drives us to freedom eventually. Eventually, nothing is better than wanting nothing. There are hidden springs in the human system that pours forth incredible states of being. They can be tapped. You might have to dig out the well. You might have to dig. Eventually you will. Eventually the drive for freedom becomes everything. Eventually you can’t take the smoke and the noise any more. I’m not inferring that you can’t live in it and be out of it. These days sanctuary is a hard discovery.

I know these things because of my mistakes. I have made a lot of mistakes. Sorting out what doesn’t work often reveals what does. How often do you catch yourself in the midst of your life and ask, “What am I doing?” Everything we do leads to the specific resolution of what we do. Ignoring it, mocking it, disputing it, these don’t affect it. It is inexorable.

For a legitimate system of escape go to BOTA; It takes years but it will delight those so inclined. Tai Chi is easily learned and satisfying beyond what you might imagine. It’s much more user friendly than yoga. Liberal macrobiotics is a fabulous health choice. It takes ten days for your taste buds to change. Remember this before you give up. A constant awareness that you are accompanied opens an internal phone line. The answers are all there to be had. It’s the motivation that is lacking. It is peculiar that people would prefer a state of bondage over the promise of freedom but so they do.

We don’t see things as they are. We see them through colored lenses. The whole of life is no more than a game of hide and seek. It brings me back to that Biblical phrase, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things will be added unto you.” People don’t’ seem to get that. If you find the source, the cornucopia appears. You literally get it all. It isn’t necessary to see this in a religious sense. See it as a practical application of a universal truth. These spiritual teachers aren’t trying to get you to the dinner table with Pat Robertson. They just want you to grasp certain truths that will grant you the keys to the kingdom. All manner of worlds overlap here.

Some burn with an intensity for a love affair with the divine. Some dispassionately seek it through intellectual inquiry. Some discover it through the practice of particular rituals. That it has been discovered we know. We have the life examples of these people. Don’t say there isn’t anything out there, or in there, until you have looked; until you have looked as hard as you can. Or you can just remember that it fills and surrounds you all the time. It doesn’t have to be discovered. It has always been there. Practice its presence and it will reveal itself.