Riffin' On Chain-Reactivity and the Maturation Norms

“All created beings have their source in these two natures. Of all that is material and all that is spiritual in this world, know for certain that I am both the origin and the dissolution.” 7.6 Bhagavad Gita Knowledge of the Absolute

Two natures?! That doesn’t seem very…Bhagavad Gita-y. I mean, silliness aside, the fundamental characteristic of the Oriental worldview is that it defines everything in terms of a Single Vehicle, the Great Social vehicle for liberation…God/truth/justice/any virtue that seems exciting and brimming with possibility for you specifically at the time and place you find yourself trying to orient your world through a strong conscious anchoring of one’s behaviors/being in “virtue”… “life” is one of my favorite framings for the Singularity, personally, especially in conjunction with today’s passage…

Because today’s passage starts with a vantage point that while utterly full of holes/conducive for leading individuals into pits of great despair & uncertainty, is pretty commonplace in the Western world regarding grand conceptions regarding this thing we call life. We tend to think of the world in terms of two natures, moreso than one (as does most of the Eastern world…enlightenment is a rare/peculiar state, although I do believe that we find ourselves rampantly steeped somewhat in it because of the quality of secular cultures ((informed by advances in the social sciences such as psychology over the last 120 or so years)) ) “material” and “spiritual”. Loosely, us here in the West, at the street level, tend to see one nature associated with the “origin” of life…and the other with the “dissolution” of life (which immediately sets the stage for a production in which the world is devoid of spirit in a meaningful way, and the spiritual realm hungry for more...material...embodied beings, themselves...)…in the material our spiritual nature can take form…but our spiritual nature is that which both causes the dissolution of life, in addition to being the new form (not quite material) the material earns/takes on so as to escape this world successfully in the mortal death and merge into transcendental communion with…Spirit!

((Turns out one can't wait until death to do this))

            Which works as a framework. We would hope so…our religions were so imbued with the potency of truth that several of the early and prominent figures associated with the ministry of Christ’s teachings were killed in extraordinary ways by all sorts of independent tribes of civilized peoples the Earth over. That’s what, it seems to me, to my eyes as I study the progression of civilization after the time of Christ, albeit this was always a historical trend… has been consumed by the potency of spiritual truth entailed in said teachings in the time inbetween- the random and unjustifiable aggression/murder in the name of the great Vehicle of Liberation…God....the effective dissolution  of boundaries that eventually see one human family living in peace, moreso than nation states that could find themselves in conflict with one another.

                It’s simply the notion that there can be a meaningful differentiation between material and spiritual realities that is inherent…that doesn’t arise from the nuances of the context at hand, or some sort of fallacy introduced and associated with one camp which must then be undone…which becomes disastrous in the West’s common approach to “spiritual” and “material”. There is some sense because of the Church’s stressing on the eternal realness and utter vicinity of Sin/Evil as something that isn’t part of God the Father’s left-hand tactics to force individuals into spiritual boundlessness as a state of being (suffering in service to opening one’s heart…suffering in service to Love) that the “material” can’t be synonymous or as fitting a vehicle as the “spiritual”…that atoms and cells and the such don’t have the possibility of somehow being an effective storehouse for the Infinite and it’s always deferred until the afterlife until we taste the realllll thing…

                But then, what are miracles? And also too, the power of example…the sheer power of “witnessing”… we used to call it witnessing when you would see a great sermon because it would orient the immediate events of your future life. It would change what you experienced after hearing it…and time and time again when we linked up to share our secrets, we could see quite clearly that there was divine intervention in the world along the lines of our conscious unraveling of the very sermon we witnessed…we hadn’t yet sifted through it, hadn’t yet reached realizations or even the point of action… but we were on our way, and the potency of the truth entailed in said sermon…it shaped the days which unfolded after said sermon…reinforcing the notion that to teach the truth of God from an impeccable platform truly will reliably shape the unfolding affairs upon the planet in man’s favor.

You witness the truth of the sermon, a messianic truth, at that...a liberating one...in all happenings after the fact...

                Truly, a “material” reality or nature… is a wayward definition. All identies and forms of definition at some point become wayward…in deference to the realization of Oneness as an inevitability…human knowledge and conscious awareness…these things are constructed towards this aim. The greatest tyranny of life at some level is that things are not about things…they’re about God.              

I really implore you to see how the thing’s identity…what it actually is, as it was designed…is special and unique, and that what is about the God-given identity itself…is also about God. That’s the level where things become effective storehouses for the Infinite as they are…in the forms they crudely appear in. That’s the big secret- to thine own self be true. Heaven is both a place within, as well as the impulse to action...

                But “material”… “spiritual”…these are tones meant to usher in koans, riddles constructed out of paradigms that talk themselves out in conversation… whether you work with one or the other, you have an equal chance of reaching your ultimate destination, as the “origin” and “dissolution” of these paradigms/tones  is Singular…it’s Krishna, as today’s passage reveals. Taken as a single sentence, it relays  rather exhaustively that no matter what you’re looking at in life, you can get to “what it ought to be” and to get to that place you unconsciously are trying to get in regards to your personal sensations… if you see the forms as blessings from, and in utter service to, God/Love Supreme...you will be successful.

That method, applied to the climate crisis, will be the source of ultimate solution to said crisis. This, the most honest and seasoned of us know to be true in each and every act we do as public figures of the Dharma. There's something coming, but it's already latent, deep in the room tone...