The Elephant In The Living Room Is Standing On My Foot

The Elephant in the Living Room is standing on my foot

by robert cinque

Posted on January 9, 2011

Who am I to criticize Life?  By what standard could I possible measure or evaluate the universe, that tiny speck of infinite existence?

By what criteria do I criticize Life?  This seems like a ridiculous question, given that I am always critical and act as if I know best, of course I would criticize Life, it’s what got me into this messy world of pain and suffering in the first place, right?  I have a right to be critical, don’t I?

Yes, but its far better to open up and face a much more important question:  What is my relationship to Life?  How do I feel about being here?  Do I trust it, or am I suspicious, bitter, and withdrawn?

In my casual ego mind, I am emotionally withdrawn, absent, shut down, bewildered, and confused.  I endlessly complain about my plight in this world and am ungrateful.  The ugly truth is that I routinely default on myself and others and on Life itself.  Life doesn’t betray me, I betray it.  I entertain thoughts dripping in self pity and abandonment, I rape Life with these thoughts, then blame the bitch.  Life gets raped and blamed for it.  Now, I am choking to death, but by my own hand.  This is good news because if it’s my hand, then  I can remove it myself, don’t need anything or anyone else to do it for me. 

That is the first Office of Authentic Spiritual Practice.

The second Office is when I sit down and shut the fuck up in the Face of the Cosmic Enormity of Life, and recognize Its’ Innocent, Fierce, Infinite, egoless Nature, my truest self.  I stop disassociating emotionally into my fantasies of separateness from this Great Lover and vomit out all the repression, the avoidance, the trauma of imagined disease and get into Bed.

The Brilliant, Unbroken, seamless Presence of Life circulating through all creation, the Current that oscillates between the cycles of birth and death, through infinite stretches of fathomless space, that one, that Very One, is the Only Existing Reality and I am completely, always, already inherently one with It, just like a whirpool in a River. It could not possibly be any other way.  There is only One Life living all things and I’m it.  You, too.  When we meet on that level, big things happen, because ego, the dramatization of betrayal and abandonment has been made obsolete by Noticing and Being Intimate with the Great Wonder.

When the whirlpool sees the River and its place in it, it swoons and falls intoxicated into bed like a lover, ready, willing, able, open, fully engaged, deeply pleasurized, intensely passionate.

 He and She become Me and back again. What?

To contemplate That for 1/1000 of a second is enough to completely blow your mind forever.  You and toast suddenly have a lot in common.  You are overwhelmed with brilliant Light.  Your ideas about yourself start to shimmer and evaporate and you can’t remember who you used to be.  Or why.  Your humor and freedom are restored, you realize that you are not just breathing, you are being breathed by a great Power, big difference. You offend others with truly funny jokes about really painful subjects.  You realize that you don’t know jack shit after all and its all very amusing, what’s for lunch?

Now, you are aware of the Elephant on your foot.  It hurts.  God becomes man, even you and me. The infinite Life consents to be you and me and everything else, fully surrendered to us all, and I miss it.  The Word becomes flesh.  The infinity of Life fractalizes into mortal human beings who are all going to die.  Everything you ever loved is going to disappear. 

Still, the Current of Life and Matter are lovers.  Consciousness adores Matter.  Matter swoons in the Presence of Life, is organized into complex forms which struggle to keep up with the Rampant Imagination of Free Intelligence, the Ocean in which we swim.

Its impossible to be infinite and mortal at the same time, but here you are anyway. 

Its impossible for anything to exist, too.  Existence either had to either always be here or it had to come into existence from nowhere, both complete impossibilities.  But here we are anyway.

Knee buckling, jaw dropping, staggering Awe constantly stares us in the face, in fact, it is our face. It’s so Obvious, we miss it, and create hell on earth.  Now, since hell is well established and we are no longer in charge of ourselves, we need saviours and tyrants to rescue us.  We empower them by our default on ourselves.  We volunteer for suffering by worshipping our maps, condemning other’s maps, and ignoring the Territory

Authentic spiritual practice begins with this:  Recognizing my emotional recoil from the Incandescent Event of Existence and overcoming it by being responsible for it.  Spiritual practice has exactly nothing to do with beliefs, it has everything to do with the moral obligation to face the truth, to face Reality, to tell the truth about my lies, to own my own refusal to be that which I so obviously am:  the full bodied, red blooded incarnation of Infinite Life.    

This is an ordeal, coming to terms with the simultaneity of my infinite and mortal nature.  It’s an impossible, contradictory situation, but here I am anyway.  When I make friends with it and stop making it into a problem, my eyesight clears up, the Obvious is now Noticed, this is simply the Way God Is.  Coming to terms means staring into the Paradox long enough for the light and heat to burn through the rational and metaphysical assumptions I constantly plaster onto Life, ideas like “consciousness comes from random neurons firing in the brain” (scientific materialism) and “the stain of Original Sin separates Man from God”.  These completely unfounded and theoretical assumptions  reduce life to the level of a concentration camp. 

We are not isolated individuals, we share a dynamic unity with literally everything.  Scientism, the religion of science, as well as religious fundamentalism are maps masquerading as Territory.  It doesn’t matter if the whole world worships at their feet, all maps are only the menu, not the Meal.. 

My ideas about life are not equivalents to Life Itself.  No map ever could be equal to the territory it describes.  In addition, the maps I make are almost entirely based on the finite perspective of the whirlpool, and not the River Itself. 

The “perspective” of the River is intuitively felt in the whirlpool’s center as the Radiant Core of Existence, the Infinitely Intense Current of the Heart, to which every sub-atomic particle, every galactic infinity, is intimately connected.  This is not figuratively true, but literally.  There are no separate islands in all the universes, not one.

When human culture is based on the Recognition and Appreciation and Exploration of this Wonder, this Impossible Treasure, when we as individuals and nations overcome our recoil, our lack of confidence in Life, in Actual God, we will return to the disposition of the Radiant Core and humanity will become  the birthplace of Real Life,  not materialistic, industrialized consumerism and disaster capitalism, not fundamentalism and fascism.  Tyrants will be laughed off the planet, having no exploitable hosts to dominate. Priests will go broke for lack of work.  The searing Obviousness of Utter Unity with all Life will overwhelm the petty differences within the human family and profound gratitude for and empathy with all others will be the dominant social meme planet wide.  This will come about when Reality is met on it’s own terms and is no longer held hostage in the dungeons of ego mind.   That will be accomplished when we have had quite enough of self strangulation, capitulation to lies, collusion with sabateurs, empowerment of tyrants, belief in false gods and completely wake up to the liberating Facts of Life:  we share the nature of That which originated us, which isFree, Self Existing, and Radiant, Intelligent Light. We are not orphans born in sin.  We are inherently blissful incarnations of love and truth (Reality) radiant fractals of eternal Light, now as always. Go figure.

This cause for great celebration.  The recognition of this Fact by all of humanity will unleash the most powerful forces ever seen on planet Earth.  This is the only revolution that works, identifying what is fundamentally True and living in alignment with It.  I’m not talking about my version of the truth, or yours, but Truth Itself, the Living Reality of Conscious Light.  When I am clear about That and my actual relationship with It, everything else falls into place.