Spiritual Sundays | Twenty Four
Enemies Everywhere
Dear friend,
My friend Luke rang and suggested we go to the cinema. We grew up in the same town, where we formed our first rock band. We’ve known one another since our teens. For years we lived together in poverty as musicians, till Luke got his lucky break and I became a teacher.
It’s fair to say we’ve seen each other through the lowest and the highest points of our lives and had our fair share of disagreements. It’s such a pleasure to be together. So easy and comfortable, having seen each other through the extreme lows that come over the course of a lifetime, the most dysfunctional parts of ourselves cause us to collapse into uncontrollable fits of laughter.
To laugh at ourselves, there’s so much freedom in it.
I love him.
He is the only person I’ve ever struck in anger. One time he made a joke about the sister of a girl I was keen on, a typically dark observation and I punched him. No premeditation, it was an uncontrolled reflex. Immediately I was horrified, not by the act, but by the potential consequences. Luke is not a small man and if he wanted to he could’ve caused me some significant damage.
But he didn’t.
I guess he knew how offensive the remark was.
It shocked me. The punch was automatic. I blanked out, only becoming aware of what I’d done after the fact. I remember running away across the main street, putting enough distance between us so I could gauge his reaction. We were young men then, on the cusp of leaving town to attend college.
The film we saw was Francis Ford Copolla’s ‘Taxi Driver’.
Filmed in New York City in the summer of 1975, the city itself one of the main protagonists, we accompany Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro on his descent into purgatory. Loneliness, isolation and the corrupting influence of materialism are the themes that stood out to me.
Separation and violence.
How strange to wake this morning to the news of the violence that took place yesterday in Pennsylvania.
More death. More loss. More grief.
Hurt and anger, two sides of a two headed coin.
I have no words, but let me try. How do these viscous downward spirals playing out across the surface of our planet end?
One things that occurs, is to recognise how frightening the world can seem at this time. That no good can come of flipping the two headed coin, creating enemies of one another. When people experience themselves as separate from the life giving divine principle, when power and possessions, status and material power are all we measure our safety by, we cannot but help making enemies of one another.
Whenever we feel threatened we naturally defend ourselves, and the false self’s form of defence is to attack in thought words and action.
It is not easy to forgive.
It is easy to blame and judge. Understandable, but a sure way into increasing conflict and suffering.
Some of my neighbours are holding a garden party. Uplifting music is pumping out of a blue tooth speaker loud enough to vibrate our kitchen floor. Children are squealing and dogs barking. In this moment we are the lucky ones. We’ll take another breath and we have another chance to choose peace and to learn to understand one another.
There is great good in the human spirit.
There is no one way to embrace a spiritual world view. Each path leads to self knowledge and ultimately, self realisation.
No matter how many people profess faith yet do not practice forgiveness and compassion, instead choosing to indulge in judgement of one another; as individual expressions of the one life force, we each have the power within us to choose another way.
We can pray for peace. Renew our commitment to it.
We’ll lose it when we feel threatened, take that as granted. Every time we blank out and the false self takes over, we can notice. Each time we see it, the false self is depleted. This way consciousness increases.
The more aware we are the closer we come to realising who we are, beyond the clouding influence of the false self.
It takes a mustard seed of will, which is often all we can muster.
It’s enough.
It accumulates.
Within each of us.
The power that creates universes.
Is inside.
You.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey