falling off the wagon

I have fallen off of the proverbial wagon. Not the diet one, I broke that one a long time ago. I have fallen off of the spiritual wagon.

At times our actions are guided by our emotions, at others, by our intellect and sometimes, by our ego. Metaphysics tell you that listening to your ego is the equivalent of a capital sin and my faux-pas was a biggie. My ego ran away from me and turned into a monster and left behind a mount of guilt and endless self-analysis that only stopped when I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard… well you know what I mean.

Your ego tries to convince you that you are special that you are better than others; that you are right and they are wrong. When in reality, we know that we are all one and as every other teacher that I have studied from tells us, there is the divine in all of us and we are all a part of a greater whole.

Well, in a colossal act of self-destruction, I let my ego take charge, for just an afternoon mind you, and now I feel horrible, betrayed and dirty.

What did you do that was so horrible? You may ask.

Well if you promise to keep it to yourself, I will tell you.

I stood in judgment of another person.

Oh stop it with the melodrama! It may not be horrible to you but once you do it, you take your self out of the stream of well being and well, you are left bereft of comfort and understanding, because you have denied it to yourself by denying it to others.

This isn’t an exercise in writing, this is more of a coming to terms with this action, so bear with me, I apologize in advance if the writing is a little convoluted, as it is, I am parked directly on Chaos Drive and it is going to take some fancy maneuvering to get out of this situation.

So what is so horrible about what I did?

I stood outside of a situation, I took a very few and weak facts about someone and I came to a conclusion about them and I stood in judgment and condemned their actions and their decisions. Then I recruited others to my idea and began the hateful act of murdering someone with words.

I don’t know why this person did what they did; I don’t know if this person is perhaps ignorant and did only what they knew was best. But I knew better, I knew better than to try to judge someone without walking a mile in their shoes, and even then, who am I to judge someone else.

This is not the path that I have chosen.

It was an unconscious decision really when I began to toddle along the spiritual path. It began with a book and with the constant and nagging feeling that there was more to life than what I could see. There was always a feeling of not belonging to the human race as if I knew that all that we saw with our own eyes was, not real.

Little by little, I began rebelling against many years of programmed thoughts and began asking not so much as to why, but why not and all the other questions that come to be once you get past the why. And I began to realize that there were others who were in this same path, and there was no unifying trait to all of us looking for more, except that we knew in our hearts that there is more.

I won’t try to tell you everything that encompasses living a spiritual path, even if I told you, your own path may be different and I could not dictate that, nor its contents. But I do know that there are certain truths that help me live a happier life.

I know first and foremost that we are all having an experience and that certain people choose for their experience to be a certain way or another. I also know that there is no such thing as right or wrong, that only we make something so. I know that everyone has free will to be and act and walk through this path experiencing whatever it is they want for themselves.

And I don’t know this because I read it in a book, I know it because I feel it in my bones, like I know that the ocean is large and that the sun is hot. I know it in my heart; I know it in my soul. So after more than twenty years of studying this spiritual path, you may be wondering what may have possessed me to walk away from everything that I stood for and believe in and act this way.

You are still not going to tell anyone, right?? OK, I will tell you. It was my ego; it was my desire to be special and to be better than someone else. It was my need to proof that I was right and the other person wrong.

And so I faltered and I flayed this person, I took my time and dissected this person’s character with all of my spiritual expertise and became the very thing that I had accused this person of. Mind you this person never knew what I had said, and I said it to someone inconsequential and there would be no repercussions from having said it. But I knew, I knew that even if I never tell someone that I have ill feelings for them, they will feel it, their instinct will warn them. The current that animates life itself runs through us and that at that level, there are no secrets from each other.

At first the realization wasn’t immediate; I started having a bit of indigestion. I began by getting irritated with things that don’t usually irritate me and by being impatient and ill tempered and then in a conversation that had nothing to do with the subject. It came to me. I was out of integrity and I felt disgusted with myself. I tried to rationalize, my ego is quick, but I knew, I already knew what I had done and I was so beside myself, I could not walk past a mirror for fear that person, the one who had said all those things, may be looking out at me.

I meditated on it, I prayed and then I also reached out, and although I did not get a clear answer, I knew that I had to tell you. I knew that I had to share with you, the words were bubbling over and spilling out of me and I knew that I had to sit here and tell you all about it.

Will you grant me the compassion that I failed to give that person? Will you look at me with understanding and tell me that I only made a mistake? Will I make it better because I have apologized to that person and cleaned up my mess?

Those of us that make a conscious decision to live life in awareness know that people make mistakes, know that situations sometimes can be tricky and that regardless of good intentions, sometimes, you make a decision that does not come from your highest thoughts. It is in our power and our capability to comfort those who have made the mistake and enlightened them to the fact that even despite the pebble in the way, the lesson they walk away with can be enormous.

I see the lesson. I acknowledge my error and I take responsibility for the situation and for the words that came out of my mouth and for the whole conversation that took place. I walk away totally convinced of the power of my own words against others being only against me and I pray for the wisdom to operate from that place of divinity inside all of us.

I do have the hope of another day, of a new beginning and a new opportunity to create myself anew.

Come morning, come sun, bring me another day.

Until tomorrow, Good night!