Don’t buy it!

Commercials have great truths, that why they sell products that have little to do with truth. Their mantras like “Where’e the Beef?” or “Just Do it!” ring though our culture and play in our mind like the wisdom droppings of the Buddha. Right now I’m thinking of the commercial for Fios and the cable guy who has good intentions but no service. This man reflects our modern condition of being out of sync with the Law, the Word, the Dharma, the Will of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, whatever you want to call it. We have good intentions, but we just don’t seem to measure up to our expectations of what life should be.

Of course, the commercial wants you to hook up with this new service instead of hooking up with God or the Dharma. BTW, Dharma means the Force in Star Wars, the wave for the surfer, the mountain for the climbers and love for the romantic or the Will of God. Our consumer culture deceives our soul in its search for Dharma by awakening our hunger for it and then steering that desire into buying a substitute— which in a short time will lose its gloss and we are back again looking for the real thing, only to be deceived again. We settle for the next best thing, but we live and die in a state of dissatisfaction and separation from the Dharma. The church is little help by offering the Kingdom of Heaven after death, which is like buying a product that you can enjoy right now.

The beauty and purpose of this deception is that eventually each of us wakes up and sees that no material wealth can satisfy the souls hunger for Dharma and the experience of being in balance with the universe. Of course, many don’t wake up, but the opportunity is always there right up until death.

Just for a moment lets look at how this deception works. Our soul’s hunger for lasting happiness and peace is always working, always looking, always expecting. Our soul is like a child waiting for it mother to come, or the dog waiting for its master; it’s attention has only one focus, its source and its joy, God. But the soul must experience the world through the mind and it’s thinking captain the ego, but the mind only knows what it learns and is conditioned to know. The mind only knows culture!

When we awake to the deception of culture, our soul stirs like the first kick of the fetus. Something alive quickens within, but the ego doesn’t recognize it and may think it’s just gas. The ego, you see,  is culture so it can’t recognize the soul or the awareness that says culture is a fraud, an illusion. The soul’s first movement is doubt.

The soul awakening is a solitary birth. No body can birth us. We have to do it alone. But there are midwives or mentors out there. Find one.