“You may be beguiled by a flash or prestige, but without substance there can be no grounding sustainability. Modern culture offers yearly examples of transitory fame. It’s simply a matter of time before prestige withers and attention fades. Doing life without concern for developing deep roots of consciousness isn’t really living, it’s sleepwalking.” — The Science of Mind
And when we finally wake up from our sleepwalking, we are shocked to observe that decades of time have elapsed and we have missed what constitutes participation in our own lives. Do you think this is idle prattle or an impossibility? Think again. It happens more often than any of us can imagine or care to count. We all know those that are completely enveloped in success, prestige, advancement, honors, accolades, transitory fame, and the flash of life that is perceived as living. Until one day as Ram Dass so aptly suggests something happens . . . “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
Taking it one step further, modern culture doesn’t just offer snippets of transitory fame, it now suggests something that can be described as a secular culture of darkness. What is really in alignment? Of course the response always rests in ourselves. Ask yourself simply . . . what has beguiled your consciousness and left you with no grounded sustainability? The root of this directionless existence started many years ago, imperceptibly at first and then became an accepted way to function, act, speak, and project an image. The lucky ones by some precipitated occurrence of fate, destiny or bad timing . . . experience withering prestige, lack of attention, missed opportunities, failure, ill health, loss of a spouse, child , parent, or a myriad of other catastrophic events. All of a sudden . . . a connection is made consciously perhaps for the first time, which gives substantive meaning to our existence, and credence to this thought by Byron Katie, “Life is the constant opportunity to wake up.” It doesn’t make a tremendous amount of difference when this happen . . . incredulously . . . just so it takes root and happens so that you are witness to your own conscious awakening. In the basic sense, as Nikki Giovanni states . . . “If you don’t understand yourself, you don’t understand anybody else.”
Begin with yourself honestly, without any detours or short cuts . . . they don’t really work anyway, do they? There will never be another NOW moment . . . once it passes, it’s gone and so are we. We only have the moment . . . which for some, stretches into decades and at the end of that time if one is consciously present we can say as Science of Mind suggests . . . “So many people search for happiness outside of themselves. They are looking for something they never lost. Harmony, balance, and peace exist wherever we are, but to find them we need to acknowledge them. It’s like the sign in a Las Vegas casino that reads, you have to be present to win.” Place your bets . . . and roll the dice! JLR