(Re)Balance
As recently noted, I’ve been feeling rather ‘human’ the last few days – ungrounded, out of touch, and off-balance. My personal sense of balance seems to be returning once more, but it is awkward and uncomfortable to experience those reminders. So what happened? Well, I suspect those things mentioned in my last post, but also upon some reflection, ego. My ego sneaked out and exerted a preference for Spirit, upsetting the balance between Spirit and Humanity. Ego, and a preference for one thing over another. Hmmmm… another lesson in balance and discipline, perhaps?
According to Buddhist philosophy, we should strive to accept equally all things which come our way, whether pleasurable or painful, whether “good” or “bad”, desirable or not. To help us overcome these dichotomies, we meditate, which allows us to realize and then abandon our expectations about how things should be (our ego). Without ego and the resulting emotions swaying us this way and that, we can come to terms with the illusions of the physical world, minimize or eliminate their hold over us, and regain our sense of natural balance within the world. But if we allow ego to show a preference of one thing over another, we permit a separation of the whole into “this” and “other”, “good” and “bad”, etc., to occur – and we start the cycle all over again. And if we allow this division to occur on one level, it quite naturally extends to (re)creating the duality between Spirit and Humanity. And boy do things get thrown out of balance when that happens!
Although the concept of a division between our base humanity and our higher selves is deeply ingrained in many cultures and belief systems, it’s a misleading philosophy. Originally intended to simplify the moral code for ancient, less-educated civilizations and inspire human-kind to reach for a more honorable existence, it has instead served to create a subtle but ubiquitous division between our human existence and our spiritual nature. This dichotomy creates additional tension to classify and label (“I am good, not evil”… “I am X, not Y”), which only serves to encourage ego.
In truth, we are both Spirit and Human, dark and light. We are Yin and Yang -humanity within the divine, divine within humanity. In truth, we are One. And as long as we view the physical as gross, mean, base or evil, we create for ourselves a duality, create imbalance, set up internal (and external) strife and encourage the further separation from Spirit. So does this mean that we should abandon our reach for the Light, and let go of our high expectations, moralities, or ethics, embracing instead our base humanity? No. It is part of our human existence to reach for and embrace the Light, just as it is humanity’s lesson to learn how to exist in the world without necessarily being of it.
Now that’s part of the real trick, isn’t it? But if we are to glean anything from these cycles, perhaps the lesson is that these cycles are natural and part of our overall spiritual progress. Perhaps we should look at them as a reminder to persevere in our self-discipline, to meditate regularly, to attend to the physical as well as to the spiritual, and to realize that balance and imbalance are really only states of mind – manifestations of our own ego. And in so doing, perhaps we’ll find ourselves more frequently in a state of natural balance…
Namaste.
“So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)
“It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the “I Am,” our real presence, can awaken.”
-G.I. Gurdjieff
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