The following is a brief story by the contemporary philosopher Brian Johnson relating wisdom by an obscure 20th century philosopher and spiritual teacher named Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov from his book, “Golden Rules for Everyday Living”.
Omraam wisely reminded us that: “The past is past but it has given birth to the present, and the present contains the roots of the future. This means that you must build your future in advance by improving the present.”
Aïvanhov was a Christian mystic. He was born in Bulgaria in 1900 and taught in France until his death in 1986. He reminds me of some other somewhat obscure spiritual teachers like Vernon Howard (see our Notes on The Power of Your Supermind) and Sri Swami Satchidananda (see Notes on The Golden Present). I also thought of Rumi as I read the book (see Notes on Rumi Daylight) along with some old school Stoic philosophers (see that collection!).
Today’s wisdom.
Aïvanhov tells us: “Never let your inner feelings of malaise reach such proportions that you can no longer put them right. Suppose you absentmindedly stepped in some wet concrete and are so lost in thought that you neglect to step out of it again; what will the result be? The concrete will harden; in fact, it will become so hard that someone will have to go and get some tools to break it before you can get your feet free, and you may well be hurt in the process. Well, this is what happens in the inner life: if you fail to put your mistakes or faults right very quickly, it will be too late. The remedy will be very costly and may well cause further damage.”
I absolutely LOVE that metaphor.
Imagine cruising down the street.
You’re so busy looking down at your smartphone (hah) that you don’t notice the new concrete that was just poured on the sidewalk. You step right in it.
Then…
You’re so lost in thought (and/or tapping away at the screen you’re staring at) that you don’t move and/or notice the concrete hardening around your feet until… OOPS! You’re stuck.
Moral of the metaphor: Ideally, avoid stepping in the concrete in the first place but… When you inevitably do, don’t let it harden!!
In other words: Notice and then FIX YOUR MISTAKES quickly while it’s still relatively easier.
Aïvanhov puts it another way: “When a disaster occurs in the ordinary way of life, we see how firemen or soldiers immediately come to the rescue to put out a fire, repair bridges, clear the roads, rescue the injured and so on. People find it perfectly natural to repair physical damage immediately, but when it comes to the inner world, they don’t know what to do; they look on without reacting as the destruction continues. No, you must look into yourself and see what needs to be repaired, five, ten, twenty times a day, and not leave it until later. Otherwise, when ‘later’ comes it will be too late. You will have already fallen to pieces and been annihilated.”
Step in any concrete lately?
btw: Any time I think of spiritual teachers and metaphorical concrete, I think of Pema Chödrön and her wisdom. In The Places That Scare You, she says: “This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have. Most of the time we don’t do this. Rather than appreciate where we are, we continually struggle to nurture our dissatisfaction. It’s like trying to get flowers to grow by pouring cement on the garden.”
btw2: Perhaps my favorite wisdom gem from Aïvanhov is this: “It is time you understand that true spirituality means that you yourself become the living expression of the divine teaching you follow.”
We are wired to savor. To live awake and attentive, present in the moment… “being spontaneously surprised by the goodness and beauty of living.”
What is not a surprise is that savoring is also good medicine for our blue moods.
But I forget that. Well, that’s not quite accurate; let’s just say that I get distracted, exhausted and too often, live numbed.
A young man boarded an overnight train in Europe. He was told, “There have been a lot of recent thefts. We take no responsibility for any loss.” This worried the young man, because he carried a lot of stuff. So, he lay awake, fearing the worst, staring at his stuff. Finally, at 3 am, he fell asleep. Waking with a start twenty minutes later, he saw that his stuff was gone. He took a deep breath. “Thank God,” he said. “Now I can sleep.”
Here’s my question; What is it that we carry (so dutifully) that keeps us from savoring? From living awake and present? The list seems longer these days (including things we didn’t sign up for). It is no wonder that we sometimes feel undone.
I’ve talked about wrestling with depression and anxiety. When it rears its head (shrouded in mystery of course), I treat it like a challenge, or competition, expecting to figure it out. As if I’ll move past it, on to “real life”. So, of course, I google it. (Not a good first move. Just sayin’.)
I scan the page and a pop-up screen flashes and squawks (literally), asking me to take a survey. My blood pressure now up, I close the box and scroll the article, sidetracked by several ads, playing as videos. Including an ad for a med I cannot even pronounce. There’s a depression(s) guide, with 30 plus types of anxiety to choose from, five articles to read, rabbit trails to follow. At the bottom, pictures with 8 more recommended articles, including foods to avoid. So, I hide my chocolate from the screen in case the computer is spying on me.
I take the healthiest option; I start laughing, turn off my computer, and say out loud, “Thank God. Now I can sleep.”
So. Back to savoring.
“We are part of what is sacred,” William Kittredge reminds us. “That is our main defense against craziness, our solace, the source of our best politics, and our only chance at paradise.”
Here’s the good news; The sacred isn’t always where you expect it. Say, the immediate vicinity. Can the beauty of living, surprised by the goodness and beauty of this life, be enough?
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, contemplating the art of seeing. And I love Simone Weil’s memorable assertion that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
This week I read that it’s a new day on Amtrak. No more sit-down meals. Which takes us again, to savoring. Rainesford Stauffer writes, “Just like Amtrak citing prepackaged meals as a chic and contemporary workaround to a prepared meal, the emphasis on ease — on maximizing every second — is supposed to be sexy. But it can feel exhausting. The idea that young people like me are always on the go, always in transition and always on, masks that we might actually desire slowness, want to relish an experience, or enjoy taking a moment to feel comfortable and human instead of curated and optimized.
Our experiences at work, in our homes and even in transit can be chopped up into pieces of purpose and service. Anything else — any lingering, any humanity — can feel superfluous, or even wasteful, especially for a generation scapegoated as entitled for wanting things that used to be considered basic. It’s as though doing more (even when we’re doing something as simple and sedentary as riding a train) with less is always the ultimate goal.
It’s not difficult to see why, when an advertisement highlighting convenience and quickness pops up, we believe maybe this really is the thing that will make life better. Maybe this is what ‘contemporary’ looks like. But I wish small things — meals on a train, unplanned moments that can’t be logged as self-improvement or furniture that is owned — didn’t feel old-fashioned. I wish people knew that my generation wants more than to optimize our lives, or to feel trendy because of how fast we’re hustling. I wish slowing down didn’t feel like a luxury.” And I say, Amen.
So. Today, where can I pause, see, savor? And say, thank you? I learned a new word this week; Fika. Fika is an everyday Swedish tradition, about sitting down and having a coffee while spending time with someone else. Plain and simple, a moment to slow down, and appreciate the goodness and beauty of living.
This week I shall Fika.
And do you know what spills from savoring?
When we see, we allow ourselves to care, to be invested. To see around us a profusion of “raw, unalloyed, agenda-less kindness” (David Foster Wallace). That’s easy to forget. Gallup released a recent poll on success, about what we value and the disconnect between personal views, and our perception of how society views success. The results are no shock. We think society honors fame and money. But personally, we would choose trustworthy, considerate and helpful. It’s a reminder that we measure the wrong things. And when we do, we carry superfluous and cumbersome baggage.
When I savor, grace comes to life. Grace allows us to risk loving, to be unafraid of a life than can be messy. To make a space for something less than perfect in ourselves and in one another. To offer kindness and compassion. In a glance, in a word, in a touch. To create spaces, sanctuaries, where healing and hope are offered.
To believe in goodness after harm. And to know that this light and love will always spill to the world around us.
This week, distracted by work, rain and mental shenanigans, I turned toward the foothills of the Olympics. Resting in a saddle, a rainbow, taking a breather, blessing the earth. Or being blessed. And making me very glad to be alive.
Jim Rohn says: “Ideas can change your life. And sometimes all you need is just one more good idea in a series of good ideas. It’s like dialing the numbers of a combination lock. After you’ve dialed five or six numbers, the lock may not come open. But you probably don’t need five or six more numbers. Maybe you need just one more number, one more idea. Maybe a seminar or a sermon can provide it. The lyrics from a song could do it. The dialogue from a movie could do it. Conversation with a friend might do it. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll find that one last idea you need. Once you find that idea, the lock comes open, and there’s the door for you to walk through. Just one more idea, no matter where you get it, may be all you need to open that door of opportunity.”
Science is simple. Sure, some of it—particle accelerators,
astrophysics, photon torpedoes—can be a little tricky. But the scientific
method itself is straight forward:
1. OBSERVE what’s going on.
2. GUESS why things are happening the way they
are.
3. EXPERIMENT to test your hypothesis.
4. MEASURE the results and decide whether you were
right.
That’s pretty much it. The scientific know-how behind everything
from WD-40 to the Hubble space telescope all came from following those four
steps.”
Consider the possibility that
everything you ever thought was wrong with you was really right with you.
Consider that every painful experience in your life has been an important
ingredient to your development and evolution. As the extreme tons of pressure
needed to launch a rocket into space, you have accumulated experiences until
you can launch yourself into freedom. Of course the ego interpreted this as
suffering.
Humanity has created the most violent
forms of suffering and now risks extinction of it’s own species. We are the
most powerful and dangerous species in the history of the world. There seems to
be a lot of fear of the consequences if we do not change our behavior.
Yet we have used our genius to engineer
the healing of disease, feed the hungry and save millions of lives through
technology. This compassion has kept us alive in spite of our desire to
dominate each other.
I have often talked about this as the
“normal vs. natural” condition of humanity. We are natural at birth:
loving, curious about our physical environment, ready to take risks to discover
and explore. We soon learn to become normal and the shadow of fear takes over.
It has been this way since the beginning of humanity.
Consider that even suffering is part of
the divine plan. Yes, even the role of our dear friend the ego. Without
the interpretation of the ego, we could possibly have never experienced the
motivating force of suffering to convince us to change. It has been said “You
can get it with a feather or you can get it with a hammer.” One only
has to pick up a history book to discover which path we have taken. And because
hammers hurt, pain has become our companion throughout this path.
When you can see the beauty in the
entire process as an individual, then we will see it as a collective. You will
understand with new insights that it has all been appropriate and part of a
great plan. I am certain that we could have danced through the ages with
lessons more in tune with the feather analogy. But that is definitely not the
way it went down. We have taken the hammer, to each other and to ourselves.
Most of you know by now that I love
metaphors. So here is another one for you that will help you learn to bless
this whole process.
We know that the butterfly, which takes
a completely different form from the one part of its life to the next, most
often symbolizes transformation. The final days of the caterpillar cause
it to eat hundreds of times its own body weight. It violently consumes its
environment. One caterpillar can almost devour a whole tree as it approaches
the end of its existence. Its voracious appetite drives it to the point where
its skin is stretched. It becomes very heavy outgrowing its own skin many
times, until it is too bloated to move another inch. The discomfort
stimulates it to find a final resting place where it can hang upside down
attaching to a branch forming a chrysalis. This dark place encloses the
caterpillar and limits its freedom as it views the upside down world for the
last time.
After the caterpillar entombs itself in
its cocoon, it does not simply begin to transform into a butterfly. It
literally disintegrates into liquid ooze. If you were to crack open the
chrysalis half way through the process, you would not find a creature that is
half caterpillar and half butterfly. You would discover a bunch of ooze.
This goop is now what is left of the body of the caterpillar.
Then something very interesting begins
to happen. The emergence of new cells appears. These cells do not come from the
previous goop. They seem to come out of nowhere. Scientists do not know how
they appear and they are completely different from the original ooze of the
caterpillar. These new cells are called “imaginal cells” from the
word, imagine.
At first they appear individually and
are perceived as foreign to the original ooze cells. These cells resonate at a
different frequency. They are so different from the caterpillar cells
that the immune system thinks they are enemies and begins to attack and destroy
them. But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. After a period of
time, the immune system cannot destroy them because they are coming too
fast. More and more cells arrive and then a turning point in the process
occurs.
The imaginal cells begin to find each
other. At first they cling to each other. The law of attraction is in effect as
like cells cling to like cells. The next process is equally miraculous. The
small groups of clinging cells find other groups of cells and form clusters.
This new community of clusters now feeds from the nutritive soup that was the
liquid caterpillar and the ooze supplies an important step in the maintenance
of the clusters.
As the clusters bond with each other,
they interact and exchange information from one to another inside the
chrysalis. The imaginal cells become directors of the process. The DNA
intelligence orchestrates which is to become antenna cells, what cells will be
digestive tracts while others begin to change into wing cells. The violent
attempt of the host immune system to annihilate the imaginal cells literally
activates the sleeping DNA of this new cell to grow, cluster and create a new
creature. When the nutritive soup has been absorbed and the final
imaginal cell completes its process, we have the emergence of one of nature’s
most beautiful miracles – the butterfly.
If you are in the middle of your
“nutritive soup” and feel the attacking of your own ego as the upside
down world appears to close in around you, then you just might be right on
schedule.
Like the caterpillar, humanity is now
called “consumers” in the market place. Not a very flattering label.
We have taken a toll on the environment and each other. Throughout our history,
imaginal prophets and leaders have been attacked and eliminated by violent
means. The ego of humanity, which consumed many beautiful souls, has been an
integral part of our spiritual evolution. The hammer has cracked open the
imaginal cell to begin the final chapter of transformation. This is normal consciousness.
We are the imaginal cells. We are
clustering and understand our own limitations and potentials. We have been
taught to love our enemies and understand that they are so consumed by fear and
ignorance that they do not know what they are doing. The natural imaginal cell
that has emerged from the nutritive soup of our ancestors has found each
other. We are clustering. If these words resonate with you, then
something deep within you is being released. There could be thousands or
millions reading these words because our chrysalis has become transparent by
the Internet.
Any discomfort of your past activated
the ego to experience suffering. Without the pain, the global immune system is
not activated. We have done this individually and collectively. We are the
immune system kicking in. We are also the imaginal cells that are the
intelligence lying dormant in our own DNA. It is our job to find each other. We
are part of the largest movement in the history of the world. There is no
center to this movement. There is no spokesman and humans from all walks of
life and corners of our world are turning their complaints into a commitment
larger than themselves.
We are on the threshold of a new
reality. We are resurrecting ourselves from the normal reality back to the
natural existence that is our divine birthright. We are moving away from fear
and toward love. We must allow and surrender to our true nature as loving
beings. We must learn to bless that which we once cursed, to embrace those whom
we have rejected and to express gratitude for all we have experienced. And
where do we start? We can look within and find that which we have not forgiven.
As we continue to cluster and awaken
our global heart, we will overcome political corruption; heal economic
degeneration, environmental disasters and the bloated accumulation of
over-consumption. All personal and collective chaos is happening for a reason
beyond our normal thinking mind. Our Warrior Spirit will see us through to the
light of the natural mind of Spirit where freedom awaits. And we will create
that butterfly.
An additional note: It has just
been discovered by biologists that the genetic code that is responsible for the
wings of a butterfly is also the exact same gene code responsible for the
beating of the human heart.
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