Yay!
As your adventure at the Waters of Love comes to an end, it is a great time to reflect on how far you have come. Specifically, in Level 3 itself, you have:
Rewired your beliefs,
Consciously considered your group affiliations,
Gathered tools for individuation journey,
Accepted long-term selfishness as a key to altruism, and
Gained a unifying perspective for all humans.
All this while, one of the meta-themes of the Waters of Level has been compassion. And as we always do, this final step is your opportunity to synergize these acquired skills with each other and integrate them as a part of your being.
But before you start, there’s a catalyst to help you in this process.
Love Knows No Bounds
Many people find “compassion” confusing but ultimately it is love, love without bounds. And there’s a beautiful Buddhist story that demonstrates it:
One rainy night, a poor samurai came to a Buddhist shrine. There, he met the master and one of his disciples. The disciple said, “You look tired. How can we help you?” The samurai replied, “My mother is sick and the treatment is very expensive. I am already out of money, so can you please help me?”
The disciple looked at the master, then immediately went inside and got a pouch of coins and handed it over to the poor samurai. At this, he said, “Dear, this is all we have since we live a simple life and depend on alms and donations for sustenance. Hope this can help you.” The samurai was grateful, but the sadness was still evident in the eyes. It was clear that he needed much more money, and this in turn made the master sad.
As the samurai was exiting, suddenly the master said, “Wait! I remember something that can help you,” and rushed towards the praying place. Soon, he came back with a precious Chakra made of gold and gave it to the samurai, saying, “Child, I hope your mother gets well soon. Let us know if we can help you any other way.” The samurai broke into tears and left with the promise of revisiting them.
After the samurai had left, the disciple looked at his master with anger. He said, “How could you give our Lord’s golden Chakra to him? Do you not respect him? Were all your lessons false?”
To this, the master replied, “You missed the lesson if you still value that statue of Buddha made of stone above an alive Buddha who needed our help tonight?”
Finally, the disciple had learned the lesson but at the cost of disrespecting his master. Ashamed, he fell to the master’s feet.
When such love takes over our mind, every interaction becomes worship. You don’t seek God anymore as God is everywhere for the eyes that can see. Our words might invoke the skeptic in you, and fair enough. So, let’s go further, straight to the stars!
We’re All Made of Stars
It all started with a bang, the Big Bang, at least that’s what one of the most accepted origin theories of our universe claims. A highly dense and hot mass blew apart and threw out a gazillion tons of matter and energy. As things expanded and cooled down, our universe started taking shape, with planets, stars, and other celestial bodies beings formed. One of those billions of things was our planet Earth revolving around the Sun.
On Earth, millions of years passed, and then slowly life started taking form, from plants to dinosaurs, and eventually came the humans! And with us came all the curiosity, the dreams, and the power to do. We formed countless concepts, like family, religion, countries, education, financial system, and so on. Now, in this quick glance at the timeline of our universe, consider how small the probability of us being alive with all our games is? Probably so small that we cannot even think about the number.
In a way, the odds of our lives falling out of order are too high compared to an “ideal” life. In science, the term for this is entropy, which is a measure of disorder in a system. And the third law of thermodynamics states that entropy in a system only increases with time. We see entropy at play everywhere, from humans aging to metal rusting. Everything decays because there are only a few “right” combinations of all the atoms and molecules in everything, and a slight change with time throws them off into a “wrong” state, the state of decay. And yet, we exist, with all our dreams & quirks, and our ups & downs!
And this brings us back to compassion – a compassion that transcends the love limited to just humans and embraces the whole universe as one. The same elements that make the bright stars in our night sky also make us. In a way, we are made of stars. And as the stars have the power to shine, we have the power to create and experience. We can witness this spectacular universe, its wind, water, other life forms, love, and our fellow stars themselves. We are the universe experiencing itself, all alive in this miracle of life!
Dissolve, and You Have Found Yourself
When our compassion encompasses the whole universe, it reveals the true nature of meditation. We saw earlier in Level 2 how meditation is a surrender to self, the opposite of focus, expanding our awareness to accept everything that is there. But when we merge that meditation with everything being made of stars, a shift takes place.
A surrender to self is now a surrender to everything. We embrace everything without effort because that is the only way. And this embrace makes the flower of our consciousness bloom. With every in-breath, life enters us, and with every out-breath, we enter life. Our resistance fades away and we experience the universe, without any expectation or attachment.
The whole circle of life is revealed to us with life entering us with all the plants and animals we eat, and us passing it on to the plants and animals as our bodies cease to exist. As the cycle goes on, our successors will eat us through the plants and animals we live in but this imagination is somehow not gore anymore. We transcend time and the sense of self with it. At this moment, a shift in awareness takes place where we lose the ego, the sense of self, and here on life is all that’s left.
As our awareness blooms with this meditation, the fragrance of compassion flows itself. We lose ourselves, just to find ourselves, the self that is in you, in me, in everything around, manifesting itself in different forms.
As we surrender to self, the drop becomes the ocean…