BYC Newsletter #38

Dear students of yoga and those who search for wisdom's way

Have you ever bought something to assemble and they sent you the wrong directions, or maybe just one page missing, or some of the required tools have been left out. “Something is wrong,” our inner voice keeps complaining, but our trusting self believes in the map until at some point the directions are examined in the clear light of our frustration. “We don’t have the right schematic!”

Looking back over my life, when I came to the age of reason I was nagged with the unsettling feeling that things didn’t fit. What I felt to be true inside didn’t jive with what I was supposed to believe or feel. Something about existence was not right. I didn’t fit! But how long does it take before it dawns up us—those of us who feel that things are not fitting—that we may have the wrong map, or if not wrong, at least an incomplete map. Something has been left out.

The maps we are using are not updated to keep up with the changing existence we are experience both collectively and individually. Ironically, we work very hard to keep updated on our computers and road maps. We are driven to keep abreast of changing technology and fashion and sport the lasted new thing. But when it comes to maps for the soul’s expansion and well being—which is the awareness that I am okay—we are sadly behind, and this creates the existential anguish of feeling deep beneath our helpless thoughts that we don’t fit and are lost.

So what are the obstacles that keep us from updating this existential map, these directions to our “promised land?” When we look deeply, we find it is our very deep and strongly held beliefs in our old maps. “We have to have a map,” we complain, holding out the only map we’ve got, which is all crumpled and full of crossed out line that track all the dead end roads we have traveled.

Whenever we enter into an expansion in our life, we can be sure that we have just discovered either an updated old map or a new map entirely. Using religious terms, we usually call these new maps a conversion or being reborn. But whatever you call it, the experience of being freed from a contraction or interior prison is the same.
And we can also be certain that eventually that new map -- after every road on it is explored – will become an old map, and we will once again feel the angst of being contracted and not fitting.

There is something in us that loves and hates maps. Our soul dreams we can be done with them altogether—and then we will be free.At some point on our journey of self-discovery, we reach a level where we ask for a map that will show us how to be free of maps. A map that diagrams existence for us, whether it comes from popular culture or religion or some sub-culture, demands conformity. Our experience of reality is given to us by some “authority” and it is through that intermediary that our experience gets its meaning.

Yoga, this 5000 year-old map for self-discovery, is one edition of a timeless wisdom tradition that gives us directions to the interior place that has many names. The one road on the Yoga map that is consistent with the great wisdom maps of the sages and mystics is the royal highway of meditation. Every one who goes to the seat of existence and lives there takes the path of meditation. We can have brief tastes of the inner kingdom, but we can’t stay unless we travel this path.

It is only through meditation that one discovers that subjective existence has no objective map. “I am that I am,” says the soul that drops the map and discovers the freedom of the uncharted Self within.

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
6/13/07
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