How To Tell When We're Approaching Sainthood

Among my favorite spiritual practices is asking myself strange questions.  A recent one was: “What is the world’s most powerful mantra?”  You know, that bumper-sticker phrase some people repeat continually and silently throughout the day as a means of shaping their consciousness in helpful ways. 

My answer of the moment is:

Whatever I think... is a choice.

Why so powerful?  Try it.  It’s hard to install that idea in the driver’s seat of our mind minute after minute without upsetting our ferocious addiction to holding other people and outside circumstances responsible for our well-being. 

Imagine!  My outrage at your toenail polish is entirely self-created.  Who knew?

On the grounds of a retreat center was a lion made of stone.  Retreat participants were asked to meditate on the lion while keeping in their mind the thought that everything they see is beautiful.  After, as a group, they discussed their experience.  Then they were asked to meditate on the lion while keeping in their mind the thought that everything they see is ugly.  That experience was then discussed.  Finally, the participants were asked to meditate on the lion while simply noticing, without judgment, the characteristics of the statue: size, shape, texture, color and so forth.

Give it a try, using any object that’s handy.  How we define our world creates our world.

We humans are so amusing.  And because I’m an American, I particularly cherish the quirks of my home culture.  Is there a quicker way to irk any one of us champions of liberty than to suggest we’re mindless puppets?

Yet whenever I spend two seconds paying attention to what passes for discourse in the nation’s media, the predominant message I hear is blame: If it weren’t for “them,” we’d all have rosy futures and toilet-trained puppies.  (Which translates into: I’m helpless; those morons “make” me angry; as does that hairball in my soup.)

I find it a beautiful, if painful, mirror: reminding me what a tremendous commitment it is to assume responsibility for myself––my beliefs, my words, my feelings, my actions.  I.e., my happiness and whatever stands in the way of it.

I’ll take all that mantra I can get. 

Among its rewards is that I now have a better idea how I’ll know when I’m approaching sainthood.  Whenever I find myself outraged at your toenail polish (or anything else), I’ll laugh for choosing to live on a level of consciousness where such nonsense––anything but love––is real. 

Perhaps that’s why some say it takes a million incarnations to know God.

Comments

[susan dollenmaier]

I needed to read this this morning. I have been especially disturbed lately by the media discord as we approach the mid terms. It's all so unnecessarily nasty and childish; so unhelpful;
so patently pointless. There is so much to celebrate! Yes! I will choose those thoughts today.

[Georgi Streetman]

this is really good, Steve. How can I get that bumper sticker? Serious. With your third eye glass logo on it?
In coaching young students you've given me a perfect formula to use with compassion when helping them see through their drama with 'kick her out of showchoir, she sings flat'...'I can't stand that guy, kick him out', etc.

[Brad Nichols]

This is right on!
The trick is to keep practicing it until it becomes so real for you that you don't even notice you're doing it. And as you know, that's pretty difficult when you're trapped in the "human condition!"
But I think you're right, when you can start laughing at yourself, you're getting closer. And it's fun (and funny) laughing at yourself! I do it all the time...

[Renate Callahan]

Ever since I came to Vermont I can feel my heart and mind growing - every day and I cherish and marvel at it. Reading your essays, Steve, have no small part in this. Thank you!

That being said, this particular essay reminds me powerfully of a widowed aunt I once had (who has long since passed on) and her self-torturous outlook on life and people and the world and how they were all out to hurt her specifically. I suppose you could say she meditated on life with the object that all she saw was ugly and, boy, wasn't that God's honest truth for her?
No matter what one did for her or with her she would find 'the hairball in the soup' and then dwell on that instead of say, cherishing that she was even given a bowl of soup to begin with.

Even after many years it still makes me so sad to think of all that
misspent time and, YES, it is another reason that my choice is to think good thoughts and be kind in whatever way I may achieve in a day.
Thank you again for reminding us to make a choice.