Resist Your Temptation to Lie – November 7 2018

Resist your temptation to lie

By speaking of separation from God,

 

Otherwise,

We might have to medicate

You.

 

In the ocean

A lot goes on beneath your eyes.

 

Listen,

They have clinics there too

For the insane

Who persist in saying things like:

 

“I am independent from the

Sea,

 

God is not always around

 

Gently

Pressing against

My body.”

Hafiz, from The Gift,

translated by Daniel Ladinsky

 

God, or the universe, has your best interests at heart. Nature is benign and loving and always will take care of you.

 

How do we know this?

 

It’s not possible that I am not separate from nature. Separation is not the truth of life. Oneness is the truth of life. Non-duality. How can I, or anyone, be separate from All That Is? I am at-one-with nature.

 

And nature, by definition, always is evolving. This is all it knows to do. As a part of nature itself, we always are evolving, too. We always will be evolved by the whole of nature.

 

Each day we sit in meditation and settle down into my least-excited state, and in that least-excited state we can feel oneness with something greater than the small self.

 

When we study the teachings of the Veda, those teachings verify this feeling of at-oneness-with. The Veda says that consciousness is the truth of life. That consciousness underlies the whole of life. That there is nothing that is outside this field of consciousness. Not me, not you. Nothing.

 

When we look at the world as if this oneness were the truth, it is much easier to choose happiness. It is much easier to do our work.

 

When we see the world in this way, we can be productive, We can be useful in our community and with our family, We are able to give of ourselves without thought of personal gain. We are able to be of service.

 

When I see the world in this way it makes me smile.

 

When I see the world in this way the idea of God makes sense.

 

When I see the world in this way the idea of what I am makes sense to God.

 

When I see the world in this way, it matches what those whom I respect have said before me:

 

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Walt Whitman

 

The more I question it, the fewer doubts I have. Nothing else makes sense to me. Nothing else causes me to sing, to love, to laugh.

 

And a life without singing or love or laughter is not a life.

 

Today I will imagine a philosophy of life that supports life and does not deny life, that supports joy and does not deny joy, that supports the idea of abundance and not the idea of neediness, that supports me and is not against me.