Thursday 3 September 2015

IS THERE REALLY NO SHORTCUT TO NIRVANA?







Is it worth it? Is it really worth it? All the ups and downs of life. The loves and broken hearts. The quest to make the world a better place, the deep-seated desire for self-transformation. The repeated mistakes and the ones we know that regardless of what we say now, we will repeat again.
The endless toil from day to day to just find a place and space to just be. At times death seems like the great liberator, but when it knocks at our door, we negotiate another day, another moment, and another experience. And then we ask her to be kind, to take us in a way that is gentle, though transformation is never gentle - its fire! And to be purified, the fire must burn and burn until we turn into ash and again rise from the ashes.
Often when I sit in front of the fire in the forest, there are no more questions or wants or desire. Even the pain, the human agony of just being part of an evolving species, seems to take back seat at that moment. But then an unseen force compels us to be part of the world, part of the movement that churns us and washes us and rinses us until we are purified.
Rebirth is such a sweet word, such a melody full of promise, just that there is one problem standing in the way. How can we ever be reborn without dying? And death is such a trickster, it wants to devour us, annihilate us, make sure we feel the power and cruelty of its embrace before it allows us to finally rest in peace and resurrect into the promise of a new dawn. Only an empty vessel can be filled, there is no other way, the garbage must be discarded! 

Often we pray to a magician that will award us the rebirth without the death, give us the shortcut to nirvana, but in this business, there are no shortcuts and Nirvana is just an illusion. Our rebirth, as all moments of resurrection will just take us up another step in the endless ladder, another experience, where at its end the great goddess will come again to test us and enquire if we are ready one more time to be roasted in her flames in order to cross an even wider and more turbulent river standing between us and who we truly are.
How many times do we touch the shadow and not the heart?! So often we rather kill the moment in order to fend off unwelcome change. And what do we really have – only the moment.
Your gaze, your embrace, your love - fuck, when will we wake up to know there is no you or me, there is only us. You did this and that, when in fact there is no you, there is only a mirror standing clear in front of our eyes, day in and day out and if we wish to change what we see, if we wish to change what we get, there is only one place to look, and I am sure we all know where that place is.
So as they say, there are no shortcuts to nirvana, but there is a way, as old as the stars, perhaps as ancient as we are, and I suppose that is not that old. We have to make friends with death. We have to welcome her deceitful and divine touch, no matter how painful it is, actually no matter how real it is. For if we die, it truly doesn’t matter, but if we manage to pass through her and be reborn, we add energy to this great lullaby called life on earth.



 Another world is possible, for that we must first change the inner world