Naturally you

So yesterday I was sitting there, smoking a cigarette with my mom.

The dog was lying nearby in the sofa.

All of a sudden I got a strong feeling of aversion towards the ramblings of my mother, which tend to be some sort of far-fetched and crazy sometimes, closer to bullshit than to any kind of wisdom from the elders.

So a voice came in my head which said, I’ll show you something different. An angry voice full of resolution.

And as my spirit was lifted up and carried to the outside world of the garden, I rose my head a little and the dog, from her position of just lying there, rose her head as well. As I kept my focus on being aware of the outside world in the garden on the other side of the window, I felt a shaking and the dog moved firmly from the left to the right and back a few times.

Then the voice said that is better, now let me return to you. And my awareness drifted back from being in the garden to being with my mother in my body seated on the couch, and as I came back I was lifted up once again and the dog rose her head again, and then I settled back into my body as the dog lay her head back down on the cushion of the sofa she was lying on.

I stayed cool, as if nothing had happened, but this was the first time my oneness with the dog had been so elaborate and long.

Often, I have a wave of energy that I need to release, some tension that has built itself up in my awareness, and then my spirit goes out to the dog, and she will move, from left to right, or just move up her head for a second, and then the tension will be gone, as it seems the dog releases it for me in the movements of her body.

But now, it was a whole song it seems, made up of different parts. Moving my spirit to the outside world, feeling the shaking, returning and being raised up once again, and finally, settling once again in my body. And it had been in perfect sync with the movements made by Emma.

Emma is our dog.

She is the most lovely, most beautiful, most adorable little brown fox with eyes that can just beg the heart out of you.

She loves me, and I love her.

But it seems that sometimes, there is no difference between me and her. Sometimes she is like a part of me. She does not go crazy, and I do not feel anything but the trance, but the trance seems to move her, as if she were a companion and an important part of my inner spiritual experience.

And it makes me wonder, you know, it puzzles me, the dog moving as part of my inner life. What is the difference between my inner world and my outer world?

Am I the dog, is the dog me, am I the room where the dog lives in and breathes and moves in?

It seems, I think, that the dog and I are one.

My inner movements, the things that I feel happening on the inside, are happening on the outside. It is the outside that I feel alive within. It is my inner life that is living in the outside world.

So if I am not just a body with a brain, but I am a field of awareness that is coming from around me, then I guess ‘I’ am not ‘in’ my body. I am around my body, I am in the outside world.

And you know what?

If my body were to die, I think it would make no difference to me. The outside world, that is my true self, would still remain as if nothing had changed.

I do believe at some level, we are all just the outside world living in different bodies. But it is there that I must return to my theory and findings about the mirror, and the illusion and mistaking of the spirit for the body.

The spirit is omnipresent, but we assume it is somewhere ‘inside’ our body. We think the spirit is attached to, and part of the body. We think the body is the source of the spirit.

And this faulty thinking leads to much fear. It entails the fear of death. For if our body dies, or rather, when our body dies, which is sure to happen, our spirit will disappear.

But if you see spirit as a thing of the universal field, dying changes nothing to your life and your existence. You will still be dwelling everywhere, you will still flow with the rivers, you will ride with the wind. You will burn with the sun and you will love with the singing of the birds in the morning.

‘You’ will still be present, you will still be aware. Your spirit never changes, you are the eternal one. You are all around, and you are living, thinking, feeling somewhere in the air, somewhere perhaps in the heavens of the sky, where your true home and roots reside.

It is just a mistake you make, thinking ‘you’ are ‘in’ your body, thinking the end of the body will be the end of you.

You are all around.

And there is more.

For if the dog is me, then you are me. It is just that the dog has no problem with this, whilst you fight every way to understand. To realize.

You are not me. You are you. You are different from me. Hell, you will even repress and suppress me, and do everything you can in your power to look down on me and laugh at me, just to prove who you are… Not me.

This is an illusion, this is a sorry mistake.

You are me, you are the spirit everywhere, you are God as far as I know what God is, you are the awareness that is the source and truth of every being in this universe and perhaps the universes beyond.

And when I talk to you, it may be a river that is talking to you, or a fire, or a bird or a bug even, it may be the grass or the wind in the trees, it may be a nature spirit praying on her knees. For you to remember who you are.

If I talk to you, it is nature talking to nature, trying to awaken the natural in you.

But it seems, to my experience, that there is a lot of ego to fight within each person. There is a lot of unwillingness, a lot of resistance, a lot of closedness and fear. Somewhere, there is a lot of disbelief.

Haha, there is it seems infinite disbelief, there is an infinite fight to restrain from understanding that you are me.

You will never believe it, you will never want to accept the truth. That you are immortal and that you are the spirit of nature.

So in the end, I ask, what is there?

Nature is talking to nature, the birds are talking to the sun, the sun is talking to the trees. There is a whisper in the fields of morning dew that tells the worms and the bugs of plentiful and there is the river singing her lively songs to the rocks.

All of nature is one great symphony, and even people are always talking to each other.

Then why is there this conflict? Why is there cruelty and war, and exclusion and suppression? Why is there all this ugly fight everywhere on earth? Murder, rape, torture, war. Why are we fighting one another? Why, with everything communicating with everything, is there not just and plain mutual understanding? Why the problems? Why the fight?

I believe form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

I believe the whole cosmos is there, but it may as well just be absent and nothing. There may be a symphony of communication between all the parts of reality, but there may as well just be silence. It is the same, creation need not be. It doesn’t have to exist. Creation is like a thought, a sound, music. Why is it there? Why not just silence? The thought may disappear again, the sound may fade, the music end. And silence returns. Creation disappears, form becomes emptiness again.

I think this is what happens, when you realize you are the spirit everywhere.

You see the truth of unity, every being in oneness with the source of spirit, born from silence. Every form a thought of emptiness.

But as long as you think you are in the body, as long as you think you are the body, and as long as there is this illusion fueling the fear of death, you are in conflict with the rest of creation. You have fights with your neighbors, you have fights with your wife. You are afraid of your boss and you try to put your colleagues down. The black man is not you, the Indian is of another kind. And the rest of creation, it is just a dumb, mute and irritating spectacle to look at.

You do not understand much actually, apart from being a mortal spirit in a mortal body, and one day, ‘you’ will be no more. And this fear, this fear that comes from a mistaken identification, it makes you restless, and it makes you a little less lovable. It makes you a pain in the ass.

So what can you do?

I always took the advice of a shaman I once visited here in Belgium, in my home country, most strongly at heart. Joska Soos said that all is sound, all is vibration, and to heal people, you had to use the sound, and to learn how to use the sound, you had to listen. Listen.

So I listened. I sat on my couch for hours a day, year after year after year, just listening, listening to the words and the thoughts and ideas in my head. I did not cling to them, I tried not to be fighting them, I tried to let them come and go as if I was watching the waters of a river flowing by underneath my eyes and vision. And the words of my beloved shaman Joska Soos are still I think the best advice there is. Listen.

And one day, you may find oneness. One day, you may find that the thing you see before you and the thing you feel inside you, cannot be different. One day, still listening and listening forever more, you will find your existence is not dependent upon this one piece of flesh and bones that you think you are.

You may drop that piece of flesh and bones just as easily as taking off a piece of clothes. You are still there. You are creation itself, and you are everywhere.

And if the spirit in me moves with the body of the dog sitting some distance away from me, why not would the spirit in me move with a thunderstorm to bring rain and fertility in times of dryness and drought? I think I want to believe, want to believe that I am you and you are me, and I want to believe that there were souls who brought the rain in times of drought, and I want to believe that I will always live forever.

I want to believe, because I see that it is truth, that it is a simple observation and a conclusion I cannot deny.

And I will try to bring the rain, and I will try to bring the stars to dance within your heart. And I will bring the rivers to run through and fill your veins, and I will bring the birds and the angels to sing to your confused and worried feverish head. I will bring the sun to shine through your eyes and the jumps of the dolphins to make your whole being ecstatic and alive.

I will bring it all, and you will fight me, and you will not accept, and you will know better, and you will know fear.

But there is no other way, there is only the sea, the great majestic ocean, that is knocking at your door, trying to break down your walls and take you away. There is only nature talking to her dearest human child to remind him that he is part of her and he will never be alone, lost or forgotten.

But don’t believe the voice of fear, don’t make the mistakes of the illusion, don’t think ‘you’ are in your body. You are all around, and when your body eventually drops to the ground, ‘you’ will still be standing.

I believe in my dog.

What do you believe in?