EverydayBliss: Transcending the Mundane

One of my favorite tulips -- Angeliques. They darken as they age,
becoming their most beautiful the moment
right before they are spent.

Listening to right now: Bhagavan Das (as produced by Mike D of The Beastie Boys)

Today's Happiness Formula: Dinner tonight with friends at a jazz club. Yum! Live music.

Slowly you will become a master of your own bliss,
a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always
at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire
your every breath and movement.
What is a great spiritual practitioner?
A person who lives always in the presence of his or her own true self,
someone who has found and who uses continually the springs
and sources of profound inspiration.
As the modern English writer Lewis Thompson wrote:
"Christ, supreme poet, lived truth so passionately that every
gesture of his, at once pure Act and perfect Symbol,
embodies the transcendent."
To embody the transcendent is why we are here.

--From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche

I love that last line, because I think, too often, people trying to be "spiritual" make the mistake of thinking they must "transcend" their bodies, this life. They think they must "rise above" their emotions, become "empty."

And that misses the point, doesn't it?

We are here to have physical, sensual experiences, and it is through those experiences that we can taste the bliss, taste the transcendence.

Embody the transcendence. Through our bodies. In our bodies.

This is why yoga works for me. It is in the moving, feeling my body work, feeling my voice vibrate in my chest, feeling the breath filling my veins...it is through these feelings that I come to know who I really am.

This is why being out in nature works for most of us. All of our senses open up and receive sensation, awakening our sentient self -- "sentient" from the Latin for "sensing." (Somehow we have made that word have more to do with our brain's capacity for perceiving and translating than our body's capacity for feeling.)

And to come out of a certain kind of closet -- this is also why Mass can work for me. The smell of the incense, the sound of bells, the feel of the Eucharist on my tongue, the physical act of sitting and standing and kneeling. (And then the priest speaks and it's ruined for me again, until another time when I feel the urge...)

We embody the transcendent and then we will know our bliss -- always.

So simple yet so difficult.

It comes down to a choice.

There are two core beliefs, between which we must choose, and our choice determines our life. Think of this as your life thesis.

"Life's a bitch and then you die."

OR

"Life is joy and then you die."

The first one is the accepted. People don't even think about it when they say it.

The second one -- people would say, "What about sickness? What about hunger? What about all the destruction?"

There is that. But this is about perspective. This is about seeing the bigger picture.

Bad stuff happens but if you believe that that is what is temporary -- rather than believing that it is the joy that is temporary -- then that will be your truth.

You can choose to be the poet of your life. It is not reserved for special people, for saints, for mystics.

Or perhaps it is -- because maybe, just maybe, we are all already saints and mystics.

We just haven't noticed yet.