Language, language!
Our attention is mostly drawn to bridges leading to potential gain, or safety from potential worldly loss. Outer bridges, all; these exist in the changeable world, and the proverbial ones we’re ostensibly going to burn are relationships with people, especially bosses. That’s the larger construct.
No one, however, really speaks of our inner bridges. Ever heard someone say: “Don’t burn your bridges to your Self!”? Rare. Yogis know. This is actually the real, larger, I construct, the most significant one.
Oxymorons too?
The outer world as we know it is in a constant state of flux! Everything’s changing all the time, and we’re often forced to ride that see-saw. Every interaction we have alters the individuals involved; and even if imperceptible some at the time, we stand changed. Some bridges are strengthened, new ones made, some burn, some disappear. The same way our brains create new neural pathways, born of enjoyment or dire necessity, irrespective.
Older bridges that harbour derailing habits prove tough customers to burn. And habits are “seriously rigid, illusory phenomenon”! Argh!
Yet some could be harboured, for a while at least. Every small wave erodes rock; rain and snow play their part if the waters opt to recede; and once fearsome jagged rocks lie as gurgling pebbles where waters with lands meet.
Rivers carve, with unbridled ease, meandering paths over and within mountains. Go caving and contemplate upon the mysterious labyrinths deep inside the recesses of the earth; our minds, really. Everything is temporary, change governs all. (With the one exception of diamonds, for they supposedly are forever; outlasting marriages and generations! One hard rock to crack, that! Ha! But I digress.)
Let’s talk about the insides and outsides, depending upon where we look at that from. Critical.
Think Matryoshka dolls with window panes. The middle one of five.
Matryoshka dolls are built around a small innermost body, each external one hollow, to accommodate the inner one. We’ll consider a five-body doll, the innermost of which has four others around it (viewed largely and erroneously by the world as one outer doll containing four others within). Five’s our point of reference to understand the composite structure of our bodies.
The outer three are under constant change; our physical body (the outermost, impacted by food), our energy body within that (inhaling, exhaling), and our mind within that (volatile, tugged at and influenced by the body, energy, emotion, ego, history, and more).
Each outer body is sustained by its inner one. Makes sense; the physical body is sustained on energy, which itself is sustained by the mind, even so fluctuating; which is why the mind’s descendants are in flux. But the bodies inside are different. Yog enthusiasts would understand this.
We need have our minds look the other direction, inward, where lies wisdom, a really intuitive phenomenon. Wisdom too informs the mind, but about truth (what is real), and the untruth (what is illusion). It is here that the vacillating mind (influenced by the transient) finds a modicum of stillness (influenced by the eternal). We do pray for peace of mind, don’t we? Quite the oxymoron there. The mind, of its own accord, cannot be still. It can only experience stillness under the influence and guidance of wisdom.
Wisdom looks inwards to a body of joy, where we, The Spirit, lie reposed; equanimous, unaffected by the waxing and waning ways of the outer world. Bliss.
Bliss is our unchangeable, constant state. It is you, it is I. And we don’t need a bridge to get to where we already are. Our ego doesn’t allow us to remember that though. Because in that lies its own death.
Irrespective of anything external, we are always with our Self. Everywhere, every moment, all the time. That Spirit (soul, energy, divine, cosmic Self, or other word) that we are is omni-present. We are always present. You are. I am.
Everyone, everything, eventually ceases to be. Our relationships end; whether we leave the other or the other way around, by decision or death; the You that you are, the I that I am, always remains.
Do what you will to your bridges; wherever you are whilst reading this, you’re already there! Feel you; you’re already present. Yes? Doesn’t matter what we claim to be; doctor, lawyer, parent, child, anything; those roles are transient. That we exist, that we are, is permanent. More, we own all there is; we say: “my body’s broken, my mind’s going crazy”; well, we cannot be those. “My fridge is broken” does not mean I am broken.
Are we looking to keep bridges that connect us to the temporary, transient and impermanent?
Even in the transient world, we’re not really connected completely to the illusion we call reality. We’re far removed there too. I’ll leave you with a story from a long time ago.
The hard truth?
A buddy and I were chatting about old times and old friends whilst en route to a club to grab a few cold ones. He asked if I was in touch with a common friend who’d been overseas a long while. I realised he didn’t know that our mutual friend had died about five years back (then), and when I told him, he was overcome with grief and sorrow. I pulled over; both silent in the car, as I grieved once again.
There’s the mind for us. We grieve knowledge of a phenomenon, not quite the actual phenomenon itself. My buddy’s just-acquired knowledge about our friends’s death caused grief; his actual death five years prior didn’t. Lack of that knowledge precluded him from grieving. He grieved today, now, as it were, for an occurrence half a decade prior. As did I, again, having brought the past to life. We raised our glasses to our friend that whole evening.
We’re really not aware of anything even in this illusion, are we? What bridges are we talking about if we do not have a clue as to the truth? Wisdom knows different. And we need realise different, for we actually are equanimous, we reside within the body of bliss. Sit here and let go the rest.
Raise a few cold ones to burnt bridges and decorative gourds, shall we Carrie? Right, said Fred.
Love and respect.
Lion~
