Let me tell you who you are; you are a being who has been born into this incarnation, who has been born into many incarnations before this and for most of you, who will be born into many more after this.
This is all a part of the Living Spirit, the Way, the Tao, the harmony, the flow. In biblical terms it is called the Garden of Eden.
Within that perfection exists the choice of man within the system. The choice to go with or against the flow. The instruction for existing in the Garden of Eden was, do everything you want within the flow but do not taste of that fruit. So what is that fruit? That fruit is the fruit of knowledge, the fruit of dualism. It is the fruit of subject and object, where you stand separately and you ‘know’ rather than ‘be.’ Do you want to bite the fruit and know what God knows or do you want to leave it alone and be what God is. It’s a choice.
Take a bite and now you think you know that you are separate; you are no longer ‘it’ because you know about it. Now you are covering yourself with fig leaves and God’s saying to you, “Who ever told you that you were separate? Why are you so ashamed?”
Birth after birth it goes like this and in each birth, what are you doing? You are born into an incarnation, you experience separateness and you attempt to regain the state that you had in the garden, which is in you still… the God within.
But you’re still trying to maintain your separateness as well because you want the power to be God and still be you. You keep trying to create heaven but you are doing so through more cars, more beautiful partners, more coffee, more television. You are functioning under a philosophy of more is better. The predicament is that more will never be enough and another strategy for more is always developed. It becomes, what’s for dinner then what’s for dessert and how about a cigarette after that. Then out for a drive, then bowling, then the movies, ok what do we do now? This is operating under the pretense that if you get the rushes close enough together, your life will turn into the Garden of Eden. This becomes a bit nerve-wracking because you’ve got to move pretty fast to keep up.
This is the philosophy of rushes and this is what most of the culture does even though Christ said, “Lay not up your treasures on earth, where rust and moth doth corrode.” This means, don’t invest in the external stuff, and here’s everybody worshipping their stuff.
Once you know that there is something other than what you have bitten into most of the time, your choices take on a new kind of karmic significance. Because now you start to have the choice to take action; to go in harmony with God’s will or in opposition to God’s will. Which is what started your dance in the first place, the choice to go against God’s will, the story of the Garden of Eden. Your will is a manifestation of your desires, your attachments, your clinging, this is what the Buddha says.
This process slowly tunes you back into the harmony of things. It’s like, if you’re driving to school and you are in a hurry and the traffic becomes a terrible opposition to you, you struggle to move faster and faster. But you could take a breath and say, ‘Well, I’m in traffic; when I get to school, I’ll get to school; I am doing the best that I can, but it is also about this moment.’ You open yourself up to the flow and accept that there is a certain rate at which the traffic moves.
-Ram Dass
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