Winged Fish

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Day 2 on Joseph Campbell from a recently recovered interview from this master of storytelling and philosophy on the nature of stories and universal consciousness.

“You don’t have to be quit of your bondage in order to experience release. …The bondage of the vehicle has nothing to do with the bondage of the consciousness, you are free even in bondage… the shackles fall without leaving your wrists.”

Joseph Campbell’s commentary on the nature of suffering is absolutely spot on to me. What does it mean to suffer? Are we at our best when we no longer identify with our pain, recognizing it not as who we are? At that moment of realizing no shackles can bind us, we become the fish able to fly above the ocean and soar. We become, as Joseph terms it, the Mayan idea of the winged serpent, the lowly one that can fly.

I highly recommend this video.

I love Joseph’s line, “Jesus came to the cross like a bridegroom to the bride.”

That struck a big chord for me. It’s true that how we accept our greatest challenges defines us far more than our greatest triumphs.

Here is an excerpt of some thoughts formed during an interesting conversation I had with a friend after I was inspired by the above video. I am not an overtly religious person. Much of dogma has always perplexed me, even when I was an altar boy. Yet, I believe in the message of Jesus as well as some other great masters. I may ramble and don’t have time to simplify this, but nevertheless I will share my thoughts.

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…These days, when I look at things around me, everything has a shiny, clean feeling. It’s noticing a shift in a sense, first internally, then in the outside world, by paying attention, really by intending it. Still issues to deal with of course, but easier.

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Perhaps the true key to holding the entire world in your hands is becoming a perfect and undistorted lens of the miraculous aka love. In a moment of complete centered love, we become the template, the center of the storm. Through the elimination of any egoic desire, we can achieve any desire. Through the recognition of and power of surrender, we find victory.

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I imagine my own relationship to the divine like that of a superstar that ordinarily cannot go out in public who suddenly gets to be anonymous and find out what all the folks on the street are doing. That’s the divine pretending to be something else through us. We create unique facets of divinity through our unique experiences and how we handle them. That is how I liken the experience of God walking with the wrappers we all currently occupy as bodies.

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What I’m speaking about is not really religious. It’s not even esoteric. It is a psychological way of seeing the world and there is scientific fact there. Science is showing how thought affects form, of how emotion contracts or expands DNA, even from a great distance. The most powerful emotion, is, of course… love.

Studies are being done about how water changes it’s structure when the emotion of love is directed toward it. When measured by an electron microscope, light and thought can hold the pattern of DNA even long after it is gone. A sense of love and well being is a key to good health. A group of people meditating with an attitude of love can create tangible effects on everything from random number generators to the crime rate in an area. There’s something about becoming a clear template of emotion, using the purest of emotions, love. The science is building around the need for a completely egoless sense of love and compassion being the energy that powers the template of creation. By clearing your thoughts of any ego or negative, it seems you charge not only your own immediate environment with creative energy but you allow any shift to become possible, even on a global scale.

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By sensing inside compassion and love for everything in your reality, we are taking responsibility for it all, and simply walking into the room is affecting other people’s DNA in ways that are scientifically provable. Good vibes spread like a virus from person to person. Random Acts of Kindness beget further Random Acts of Kindness. Our emotions seem to create a coherence of energy in the wider world or a breakdown of coherence. You see it all the time when someone walks in with either a chip on their shoulder or with a genuine love of life. The energy just seems to rub off.

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This is common sense even from a psychological perspective.

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That’s what balance means to me, the total letting go of the negative and the total acceptance of responsibility for the entirety of a situation, even that which cannot be controlled while retaining the ability to maneuver and thus manipulate that reality. The Hindus believe that such a total acceptance is the key to stepping off the wheel of karma and I agree. When we have cleared away all our emotional mud, it doesn’t matter what direction we go, it’s the right one because we’re totally free. We can fly like fish.

Suffering, on the other hand, is not pain, it is the constant reliving of pain, the re-creating of it again and again. When that happens, we lock ourselves into prison. I think the point of Jesus was not about suffering, it was about bearing pain lightly on the back of a greater knowing, a greater joy that even pain cannot lessen.

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I can honestly hope that I am able to hold that sort of balance whether I am doing the dishes or doing anything else that life throws me. The test is not in holding onto my best in my best moment, in meditation, or while I am witnessing the miraculous, but rather, the true test comes quite at the opposite end.

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At the best of times, at our most creative, our most easy, we’re really doing nothing. Instead we become the lens and all that is required is a perfect state of mind and the surrender to allow the miraculous to occur. It’s like we have to hit reset, go back to square one, back to a totally clear template in order to be able to work the remote control of the universe.

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Synchronicity is the engine of the miraculous, and much like how I like mac better than pc, I prefer to let my programs operate in other spaces.

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So… how does this translate to you as a reflection of me?

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Perhaps so often we do not dream big enough. We try to compartmentalize and manage and control our dreams. When in the mode of control, of having to be the one that can focus the shift of how we live our lives personally and collectively, we are bound by our ideas of what is wrong and what needs change and how that change should occur, and thus, we limit the miraculous to what we see before us instead of all the limitlessness of what we cannot see.

What if there were nothing to step outside of? What if all you had was this moment? Would you be okay with that? Do you have the ability to truly be okay with that? Can you know, even in the absence of all evidence, that you’re already outside the prison gate and that no step was ever required?

If, as science says, and if as the great religions also say, everything is entangled and connected, then how can we ever truly be cut off? How can we fail?

I would bring forth, for the sake of discussion, that the person who is prepared to go through the mud and rocks for every day for the rest of their existence and not mind it because they see it for what it really is, is truly the person that deserves to have the miraculous at their fingertips as embodied by the best masters throughout history or today or ever.

Joseph Campbell said that when Jesus knew he was a marked man, that he would be crucified, that he approached the cross like “the bridegroom on the way to meet the bride.” He knew that in his darkest hour, his biggest test, he could shine brightest. That’s true heroism. It wasn’t water into wine that would define him, that took now effort, a higher power did it through him as the lens. He was a equal partner in that energy, yes and whatever he did, I’m sure he had to work for it. Yet, that part was easier because it came from a higher perspective, from a reality without the blinders that we wear in our lives. It wasn’t the part that defined the man.

Putting his mortal life on the line without assurance as to the lack of pain, suffering or despair, stepping into a place where he knew there may be no miracles, where in fact the whole point was that there would not be any… now that, was what made him a master, what made him worthy to be the lens of divinity that he was. He wore the blinders of humanity just for such an occasion, to prove that not in rising, but in dying, there was the greatest perfection.

Buddha did the same thing in a much less grandiose setting. He ate some bad pork and so the story goes, died shortly after. Goes to show you, you never know… He in the end, was defined by the simple wisdom he had brought and by the simplicity of his humanity. To be the best of humanity, is to put blinders on and not be blinded by them. It’s to know that there are no wrong courses… unless you’re dining out.

Finding the release of suffering even in the presence of personal pain, now that’s mastery. Letting the shackles fall off your wrists requires no bag of tricks, no magic formulas, no hotline to God. It requires simply the knowing of it to be possible and true and worthy.

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Jesus didn’t say that “the meek shall inherit the earth” for nothing. We suffer our victories just as much as we suffer our pain. History shows time and again, those who wish so much to be big, are gonna hit the wall. Those who KNOW they are big, even when they are most small, get the brass ring, even if they have to slosh through the mud to get it.

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A true master, to me, realizes that all of reality, every single bit for all the eons of existence, really is all just a moment away anyway. Whether we float on a cloud in this life or it takes a million more, only by not minding the wait, do we speed the process.

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The better end result that we imagined and wanted, was there all along, waiting ever patiently for us to realize that fact. We make the process complex, we add ritual, we look for salvation in every corner, too often never realizing that we are our own inner salvation and the Christ, the Buddha, the… whatever, was always inside of us to begin with even as the man himself said. Your body a temple, all that and more you can do, etc. etc.

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We are that and just didn’t know it yet.

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The shift that has occurred in one, simultaneously takes place all over the world. It only comes crashing down again when we close our perceptions with the same old expectation. With the expectation, we’ve just shifted back into our old reality again.

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We can choose a different expectation. Perhaps it’s that each morning the world glows a little brighter, a little cleaner, and that there are miracles just below the surface that simply haven’t been perceived yet but that are released like little bits of candy on Halloween, a few at a time.

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You are not the same person you were when you started reading. Neither am I in having written. Those two people don’t exist. The moment changes again and again and so does our perspective and thus so does our reality if we let it. Each moment is an opportunity to create a new universe full of the miraculous if only we can imagine it and hold onto it not too tightly.

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Each day, when you walk into daily life, the world you return to at the end of that journey doesn’t have to be the one you left. Your appreciation of each simple aspect of your path, especially then one less travelled, the one with rocks and mud, is the shift in the higher direction.

How we perceive the bumps can, and will, change the whole world.

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You okay with not getting credit even though you deserve all of it?

I look forward to seeing what you do with your universe next.