You're Not A Wave

The emphasis on personal salvation and getting to get your ego in heaven after death ends up concretizing self and ego in a way that is really counterproductive to spirituality.

I learned this story from gay spiritual writer Jay Michaelson.

A short story of Ram Dass. There are two waves drifting along in the ocean, one a bit bigger than the other. The bigger wave suddenly becomes very sad and upset. The smaller wave asks what's wrong. "You don't want to know," the bigger wave says. "What is it?" the small wave asks. "No - really - it's too terrible. If you knew what I knew, you'd never be happy." The small wave persists. Finally the big wave explains: "You can't see it, but I can see that, not too far from here, all of the waves are crashing on the shore. We are going to disappear." The small wave says," I can make you happy with just six words, but you have to listen very carefully to them." The big wave doesn't believe it -- what does the small wave know that he doesn't -- but he's desperate. After a while of doubting and mocking the small wave, the big wave finally gives in, and asks the small wave to tell him. And so the small wave says: "You're not a wave, you're water."

Another image for greater life is the rose bush. Each of us is a rose. The rose grows and blossoms and then fades and dies in its season. But the bush lives on. To focus on trying to keep the individual flower forever is missing the greater life of the bush.

In an interview on Beliefnet, Deepak Chopra says:

The fear of death comes from limited awareness. As long as you think of your real self as the person you are, then of course you're going to be fearful of death. But what is a person? A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness. You know, the two-year-old dies before the three-year-old shows up, the three-year-old dies before the teenager shows up.

So the real you is neither the perceiver, nor the object of perception, but the real you is that formless spirit that is constantly evolving and sometimes even taking quantum leaps of evolution and expressing itself as both the perceiver and the object of perception. And if you can shift your internal reference point from your skin-encapsulated ego to that larger domain of awareness, then you will find that it's your ticket to freedom—that you do not need to fear death because you're already dying every moment to the past.

The fear of death is the fear of the unknown, and yet, the fact is, we live and breathe and move in the unknown all the time. The unknown is from this moment onwards—you're already living there. You have the pretend game that you're living in the known, but the known doesn't exist anymore, it's already gone. Everything you know is about the past. So you have to both intellectually and experientially be willing to embrace uncertainly, ambiguity, and step into the unknown. The known is a prison of past conditioning. The unknown is always a fresh field of possibilities.

Would you equate this constant evolving and recycling with reincarnation?

You can say that, but you know, there's only one "I" in the end pretending to be all these different "I"s so I really don't even believe there's such a thing as a person; there's only the infinite pretending to be a person, as a temporary pattern of behavior. So what does reincarnate is the wisps of memory and threads of desire, born of past experience.

My friend and T.M. adept, Tom Gass, sent me this wonderful quotation from Vasitha's Yoga, a classical Hindu text based on the Mahabarata.

The mind is like a vast ocean with infinite variety of creatures within it, on the surface of which ripples and waves of different sizes rise and fall. The small wave thinks it is small; the big one that it is big. The one that is broken by the the wind thinks it has been destroyed. One thinks it is cold, another that it is warm. But all the waves are but the water of the ocean. It is indeed true to say that there are no waves in the ocean; the ocean alone exists. Yes, it is also true that there are waves!

Toby Johnson, PhD is author of eight books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality. In addition to the novels featured elsewhere in this web site, Johnson is author of IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD and THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET (Revised edition): AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL.

Johnson's Lammy Award winning book GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness was published in 2000.

His newest book is GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe.

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