Eternal Awareness
By: Christopher Jones
It’s 7:00 pm sharp.
The girl gets in the box.
The magician drops the blade, cuts her in half, and puts the box back together.
The girl hops out, unharmed, to take her bows.
The audience roars and wonders, "What happened? What did I just see?" and the girl runs offstage to get ready for the next show.
Or maybe there's a different girl working the 9:00 show. Or perhaps even a different magician with a slightly different trick.
The Confusion of Mindlessness
This is how our lives are lived. We see people, plants, animals, stars, machines, weather systems, corporations, empires, and so on being born, living energetically, and dying, only to see the same patterns repeated over and over. We know there must be something else going on behind the curtain, but we don't know exactly what it is.
The mystery is, quite literally, eternal.
Our limited perspective - like the audience in the darkened theater - leaves us duped by illusions we refer to as “duality” and "linear time," while the unperceived reality is that we exist in a radiant timeless unity. But arriving to us through the fog of our past are the stories and histories of mystics, saints and saviors who saw through these illusions and found themselves face-to-face with Eternity and Oneness. They escaped the entrapment of watching the same silly show again and again, being ignorant of what's happening and why, and having no way to change their repetitive, unproductive behavior. They were liberated from all that and enlightened to the truth.
But how is this done?
The Liberation of Eternal Awareness
The key is mindfulness. By being aware that every moment is eternal, we approach the spirit of God. Once we know our thoughts, words and actions – no matter how wonderful or stupid, helpful or hurtful, generous or selfish – exist forever, we are going to act with more patience, compassion, love and forgiveness toward others. We become like those mystics, saints and saviors if we can wake up to our own karma, what we do to ourselves and the world around us. We go from being angry, bitter, hypocritical and arrogant to feeling grateful, appreciative, selfless and humbled.
To be mindful is to make a conscious decision, to forego our daydreaming and fantasizing and be truly aware. The New Testament reminds us that our judgment will come “like a thief in the night,” so we have to be ready at all times, appreciating every moment as a precious gift and living up to our responsibilities to ourselves and each other.
Jesus was “led by the Spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil.” He was shown the magnificence of kingdoms that could belong to him, if only he would betray his true destiny. All he had to do was let down his guard for a moment, and countless worldly pleasures would be exchanged for his soul. He rejected the offer, choosing instead the fate of imprisonment, beatings and crucifixion. He sacrificed himself knowingly, telling his dinner companions in Bethany that the woman perfuming him was preparing his body for burial. His title is Christ, the Anointed One.
Hundreds of years before Christ, Siddhartha Gautama faced a very similar dilemma. He was a prince who stood to inherit a wealthy and powerful kingdom in what is now Nepal. He grew up with every pleasure imaginable to a young man in that time and place, but he chose to renounce it all and find liberation from the suffering attached to desire. He meditated in the forest for six years and, after coming near to the point of death, was finally on the verge of complete enlightenment. But he still had to face the devil Mara, who flashed before him all those pleasures Siddhartha had renounced previously. This veil of ego illusion crumbled before the former prince and he became the Buddha, the Awakened One.
Daily we are presented with the scenarios which confronted Christ and Buddha, although for most of us on a somewhat smaller scale. We consider these spiritual teachers our saviors because they provided for us examples of the correct choice of mindfulness, which is not the easy choice of self-indulgence. Being awake and responsible is very different from acting ignorantly and irresponsibly.
The outcome of indulging our selfish desires is portrayed perfectly by the character Marley in A Christmas Carol. Every bad choice Marley made in life forged another link in the chains that bound and weighed on his soul, damning himself to a miserable and ghostly existence.
Aum Mani Padme Hum
Everyone’s journey on the path will have similarities and differences to others, but the right meditation can be beneficial in achieving mindfulness in all cases.
Aum mani padme hum is a meditative mantra. Aum is the universal sound of life. The past, the alpha arising, or birth is A. The present, the living chi, or you at this moment is U. The future, the omega ending, or mortality is M.
Mani is the eternal and indestructible jewel hidden within padme, the lotus which changes from an unnoticed seed possessing only potential, into a vibrant flower ripe for reproduction and sensual enjoyment, only to wither and decay into a formless muck for other living things to utilize. Hum signifies the indivisible oneness of all life, space and time.
We breathe in Aum mani, gratefully aspiring to the eternal, universal mind of God. We breathe out padme hum, humbly offering our beautiful-but-doomed physical existence to all fellow beings throughout time and space. Mindfully we repeat this while seated in meditation and going through our daily lives. One day we wake up and see right through our delusional thinking. We see from a higher perspective, like people hiking a mountain who suddenly pass the tree line and see an indescribable vista that's unseen from places below except perhaps through a two-dimensional picture on a wall.
From this expansive view, we see the reason we're here: to help each other through the darkness and find the shining path of salvation.
Christopher E. Jones is the author of The Death of my Life and the Crucifixion of Larry Ray Swearingen, available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Crucifixion-Larry-Swearingen/dp/1676072047