1st March 2006
Better late than never.
I wrote this on Tuesday 25th December but decided not to post it for some obscure reason.
Girls and yogis can, and often do, change their mind.
Toon town
Driving in to yoga practice at 5.30am this morning, heading towards a magnificent neon pink sunrise, I drifted into contemplation about my personal place in the universe – potentially big kind of thoughts.
A funny, (but almost tragic) analogy came to mind.
I envisaged our normal state of consciousness as similar to that of cartoon characters in Toon Town (a cartoon world). Each of us is like one of those little cartoon characters with wide open eyes, racing around the gaudy cartoon world that someone else has created for us, madly living out crazy lives on a shallow two dimensional story board and completely unaware of the larger context within which it is placed. We have no inkling of the extraordinary universe in which our 2D Toonworld exists.
But that universe is watching us, laughing at our antics.
Now, let’s suppose, for a moment that a wonderful, edgy thing happens.
One character slips through a crack in the cartoon story board, a portal out of there, and drops into the real world where live people are going about their business in the Disney animation studio (remember “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”).
Can you just imagine this little cartoon character suddenly confronted with the real world of people?
In that one instant, his understanding of the world he has always inhabited no longer makes sense, it was all wrong. The rug has been pulled out from under his feet and suddenly he has no ground to stand on. At first there’s utter confusion, devastation, a mental revolution is occurring. His place in the world, everything he believed in, his entire identity and egocentric consciousness is blown apart.
Our little cartoon character now discovers that someone actually drew him, placed him in Toon Town and brought him to life there along with all the other crazy characters. He had never thought to question where he came from. Yet here he now stands in front of his creator, the artist, a flesh and blood person with no black pen outline; no primary colours.
Slowly the pieces start to fall into place and he begins to see the Truth of his existence. He looks around at the magnitude and beauty of the multi-dimensional “real” world, then back at the silly cartoon world from which he came. Now that he’s experienced the Truth, his mind is altered forever. He’s different from the characters in Toon Town now. He KNOWS.
It’s an amusing analogy for how I feel these days, aware of the Truth that underpins our 2D animated lives. The activities we fill our days with, trying to gratify the ego’s need to BE somebody, results in a mass busyness and a blindness that prevents most of us from even considering that there is something much more extraordinary at work beyond our daily existence, let alone searching it out.
Discovering that we are not what we thought ourselves to be, that the universe and our being is multi dimensional beyond our current comprehension, and that we can slip through the portable hole located in our heart for an interlude with our creator… this discovery is the lightning bolt of enlightenment.
But to quote the title of Jack Kornfield’s recent book, “after enlightenment, then the laundry”.
And so daily life goes on, but the magical gift of the continuing spiritual journey is that it is self perpetuating, you can’t turn back, and new revelations are waiting to be found at every turn.
I’ve been blessed with and humbled by the greatest of secrets.
And like the cartoon character after his epiphany, I’ve gradually made peace with living in this 2 dimensional Toonworld, interacting with all the characters here who are not quite ready to have their comfortable idea of the world shattered to pieces by the blinding light of enlightenment. The tightly boxed envelope that limits the mind’s potential to receive this understanding has to be teased open, it has to become more elastic so that it can expand outwards until it’s big enough to receive and hold the magnificence.
On the outside, I just go about my Toontown day like everyone else, but on the inside, every moment is informed by an expanded, higher, understanding of our multi dimensional universe and a magnificent, kaleidoscopic vision and experience of it.
We are that which we seek.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Better late than never.
I wrote this on Tuesday 25th December but decided not to post it for some obscure reason.
Girls and yogis can, and often do, change their mind.
Toon town
Driving in to yoga practice at 5.30am this morning, heading towards a magnificent neon pink sunrise, I drifted into contemplation about my personal place in the universe – potentially big kind of thoughts.
A funny, (but almost tragic) analogy came to mind.
I envisaged our normal state of consciousness as similar to that of cartoon characters in Toon Town (a cartoon world). Each of us is like one of those little cartoon characters with wide open eyes, racing around the gaudy cartoon world that someone else has created for us, madly living out crazy lives on a shallow two dimensional story board and completely unaware of the larger context within which it is placed. We have no inkling of the extraordinary universe in which our 2D Toonworld exists.
But that universe is watching us, laughing at our antics.
Now, let’s suppose, for a moment that a wonderful, edgy thing happens.
One character slips through a crack in the cartoon story board, a portal out of there, and drops into the real world where live people are going about their business in the Disney animation studio (remember “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”).
Can you just imagine this little cartoon character suddenly confronted with the real world of people?
In that one instant, his understanding of the world he has always inhabited no longer makes sense, it was all wrong. The rug has been pulled out from under his feet and suddenly he has no ground to stand on. At first there’s utter confusion, devastation, a mental revolution is occurring. His place in the world, everything he believed in, his entire identity and egocentric consciousness is blown apart.
Our little cartoon character now discovers that someone actually drew him, placed him in Toon Town and brought him to life there along with all the other crazy characters. He had never thought to question where he came from. Yet here he now stands in front of his creator, the artist, a flesh and blood person with no black pen outline; no primary colours.
Slowly the pieces start to fall into place and he begins to see the Truth of his existence. He looks around at the magnitude and beauty of the multi-dimensional “real” world, then back at the silly cartoon world from which he came. Now that he’s experienced the Truth, his mind is altered forever. He’s different from the characters in Toon Town now. He KNOWS.
It’s an amusing analogy for how I feel these days, aware of the Truth that underpins our 2D animated lives. The activities we fill our days with, trying to gratify the ego’s need to BE somebody, results in a mass busyness and a blindness that prevents most of us from even considering that there is something much more extraordinary at work beyond our daily existence, let alone searching it out.
Discovering that we are not what we thought ourselves to be, that the universe and our being is multi dimensional beyond our current comprehension, and that we can slip through the portable hole located in our heart for an interlude with our creator… this discovery is the lightning bolt of enlightenment.
But to quote the title of Jack Kornfield’s recent book, “after enlightenment, then the laundry”.
And so daily life goes on, but the magical gift of the continuing spiritual journey is that it is self perpetuating, you can’t turn back, and new revelations are waiting to be found at every turn.
I’ve been blessed with and humbled by the greatest of secrets.
And like the cartoon character after his epiphany, I’ve gradually made peace with living in this 2 dimensional Toonworld, interacting with all the characters here who are not quite ready to have their comfortable idea of the world shattered to pieces by the blinding light of enlightenment. The tightly boxed envelope that limits the mind’s potential to receive this understanding has to be teased open, it has to become more elastic so that it can expand outwards until it’s big enough to receive and hold the magnificence.
On the outside, I just go about my Toontown day like everyone else, but on the inside, every moment is informed by an expanded, higher, understanding of our multi dimensional universe and a magnificent, kaleidoscopic vision and experience of it.
We are that which we seek.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
