Thursday, April 30, 2009

Chopra on Flux and the Illusion of Constancy


Everyone and everything you see is in flux.
Your brain creates the illusion of constancy,
Yet in truth the person or thing you believe
To be in front of you is actually a ghost
Of what was in front of you a few thousandths
Of a second ago.

How is this relevant to spiritual growth?

In the illusion of a continual reality
There are actually many gaps.
We go away as much as we stay here.
When you go away, blinking out of existence
For a fleeting millisecond,
You aren’t anchored in physical reality.

You voyage to the quantum dimension and beyond,
For nobody knows exactly where the universe goes
When it blinks on and off.

But we do know certain things:
Physicality is an appearance created by the mind.
In its essence reality is invisible and intangible.
Events are ambiguous. The only constant is change.
Radical uncertainty is at work all the time.

Apply these truths to yourself.
Instead of struggling to make life
Stable, unchanging, unambiguous, and certain,
Accept that you are a product of
An uncertain, ambiguous creation.

This isn’t a flaw.
It’s the glory of the creative process
To constantly flow and change.
The more you can accept this,
The easier it is to accept your own transformation.

Remind yourself of the following:
I am not fixed in time. I am not fixed in space.
The person I think I am is actually a lingering memory.
The real me lies beyond the five senses.
I am participating in the flux of the cosmos
At every instant.
The whole universe conspired to bring about
This present moment.

If you replace mistaken ideas with correct ones,
Reality can replace illusion.
What makes this notion even more potent
Is that the mind creates both illusion and reality.

You have a choice which one to invest in.
Once you accept that you are constantly in flux,
You are in a position to perceive
The changeless ground of existence,
The eternal Being that is the stage for eternal change.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Prayer to the Goddess of Confusion, Chandi Patha

To the Divine Goddess who resides
In all existence in the form of Confusion,
We bow to Her; we bow to Her; we bow to Her,
Continually we bow, we bow.