If your ego is invested
In not being invested
Your ego is still invested.
In this way, ego turns ‘being more spiritual than others’ into yet another way to assert its devilish agenda.
In this way, the very idea of enlightenment could be considered a trap for the mind.
If your last desire was to be free of your desires,
You would still desire,
And you would not be free of them.
A catastrophe faces humanity – everything and everybody is doomed.
Some cruel twist of fate dictates that only you can avert the apocalypse.
To do this, you have to give your life in a heroic, but painful fashion.
No glory, just ‘the right thing’.
The choice comes down to dying now, in anonymity and perhaps doing the ‘right thing’. Or dying later, alongside everyone else, perhaps your loved ones.
You’d have no conscience to nag you because you’ll be wiped out with everyone else (…unless you happen to believe in some kind of meritocratic afterlife… perhaps)
Whatever good (or, dare I say, bad) that you do, will eventually be forgotten. The paper or hard drives that hold the information about you will eventually fail and never be replaced. The people who hold you in their memories will eventually pass away.
Knowing that, would you still be willing to ‘do the right thing’?
Can you find a better reason to do the ‘right thing’?
Is the ‘right thing’ even right for you?
When a spiritual system becomes more involved with behavioural control than matters of the ultimate, you could call it a religion.
Disclaimer: you are more than enough
Considering the times you live in
You’ve been able to take in far more, and far ‘better’ information than the likes of Marcus Aurelius, Jesus, Buddha, Pythagoras, Einstein (etc.)
You’ve been able to read more ‘great’ books
(…and maybe more ‘not great’ books)
You’ve been able to access nearly unlimited culture and art through the wonders of the information superhighway
Learn about almost anything you want
Look up more information than you could ever consume for your entire life.
Yet,
On an intellectual or philosophical level
You have not necessarily made ‘better use’ of this information than these people.
(…though I probably don’t know you and even if I did, this would *not* be a judgement on how you have chosen to spend your entirely unique existence).
Anyway
What I am getting at here is this:
Perhaps reading more is not the solution,
Nor reading better
(…both of which can be seen as a type of intellectual consumerism also predicated on the idea of you not being enough).
Perhaps the solution is what you make of this information
These books you read
Conversations you have
Artworks you scrutinise.
After all, what you think about
Will determine what you do
And thus the trajectory of your life.
So,
Could you find alleviation for the human condition
Standing in a check out line?
Or utter profundity in an episode of Jersey Shaw?
Maybe – I’m sure some people have
Was it Bodhidharma who found enlightenment staring at a wall?
(…no sacred books, 7 day meditation retreats, dogma, gurus or online bootcamps required).
Ensuring that you expose yourself to the ‘right’ stuff is relatively easy
So, I suppose the question is how do you make ‘more’ of what you are exposed to?
That I don’t know.
This is the big mystery.
Of course, it doesn’t matter anyway, unless you want it to.
Religious proselytism may come from a good place
In the sense that you believe you can help/save people by signing them up to your belief system
But at its core – it is fundamentally arrogant
To think that you have the answer to what is arguably the most important question
And that everybody else is wrong
That everybody needs your help
And, get this
Even if you don’t make a conscious effort to convert people
And you still hold this belief inside you
Well
This belief takes up space where some spiritual humility could be
Because, as with everything
You could be right, and you could be wrong…
You would do less evil to others
If you could really feel what that evil would do to them
