Stacking Up Through TM Practice!
Every day I'm bombarded with ads and emails and videos appealing to a potential greatness that could be mine. This beer will make me the most interesting man in the world. This lotion reverses time. This watch asserts my relevance and power without words. Google and Facebook know my interests by a robot who scans texts, emails and posts. My credit card company knows my buying trends and sells my "activity" to others wanting my business. There is nowhere to hide from this approximation of myself, this consumer entity identified with "me." My shadow, it seems, has a life of it's own.
If I were to review all of my posts and pictures, all my "likes" and "dislikes", all my reviews and opinions, there is still some quality that differentiates me from my shadow. My shadows' "post-facto" reflection partially describes me, but it isn't "me." So what is?
If we look for the location of the self, where is this me located? If we interviewed the 10,000+ voices that orchestrate the self, each one has a specific role, yet no one voice claims running "me", or could say definitively where "I" exist. This ubiquitous entity I know as myself moves unfettered through space and time. "I" cannot put a handle or location on it, yet its' existence is integral in each and every expression of "me." You could point toward my "skin bag" as "me", but that isn't even the whole story!
Even though that thing called self isn't anywhere, it's also everywhere! How confusing to the relative, judging, evaluating, analyzing mind! So, thanks to language, and Helen Keller's articulation of what it was like without a language to describe the self's experience, we have a tool that describes the material phantom we know as ourselves. And this pointing is the best we have at our disposal to know who we are. It distinguishes our fluid and dynamic interior life from an exterior one. It articulates wet from dry, hard from soft, happiness from sadness and everything inbetween.
So how do we know who we really are? That knowledge lives in the expression of our purpose, our stand for ourselves and others, which can include everything known and unknown in this world. A powerful relationship to our word means that when we say "chair", chair falls out of our mouth, so to speak! A most powerful practice is cultivating one's relationship to one's word. Actively creating the occurring self, as Heidegger says, through language, happens in real time, in the occurring world.
We humans also embody the Infinite, the Timeless Container of All Things. Big Mind. The Absolute. The Great Father. Mother Nature. As a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, the daily practice is an easy and effortless way to integrate the absolute into the relative through a simple technique that does not require believing anything. In other words, TM is not a religion, and does not interfere with the practitioner's beliefs.
Through the practice of TM, one's natural state of bliss and joy imbues confidence and peace into everyday actions. By experiencing the alert, resting state of transcendence, one's self expression experiences alignment with the natural order of things. It is as if one's molecules are organized in a most efficient way without doing much, if anything at all!
I highly recommend learning TM if you haven't already. You and your shadow will be glad you did!