Thursday, March 05, 2009
This story was extracted from Richard Bach (author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull), in his book "Illusions".
"Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, 'I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'
"The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'
"But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
"And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!' And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.' But they cried the more, 'Savior!' all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a Savior."
It’s obvious that Mr. Bach was making reference to Jesus, but the bare context of the story could easily apply to any of the great spiritual teachers of the past. That being said, let’s turn our focus from the principle character to the principal messages; Freedom and Letting Go.
The object of mindfulness meditation is not to cultivate an altered state of consciousness, but to let go of our attachment to and identification with our mental and emotional states that lead to unconscious living. It doesn’t take much time in our formal mindfulness meditation practice to realize that we are not our thoughts, and we are not our emotions; instead, we are the awareness in which they arise and subside. In a way, it’s like identifying with being the sky, instead of with the clouds and storms that pass through it.
It’s from this perspective that we can begin to enjoy freedom; freedom from our own habitual and reactive patterns of thoughts, emotions, and subsequent reactions. We are freed from being subservient to our mental and emotional experiences of anger, stress, pain, fear, jealousy, envy, hatred, and any other states that we are normally enslaved by. Mindfulness meditation cultivates a quality of space between you and your habitual reactions to situations, and affords you the ability to observe them as awareness itself instead of becoming entangled in them. With time, mindful living becomes a new way of life which gives you the freedom to just be, and go with the flow in peace, happiness, and unharmed.