Being Distracted to Death is a Way of Life

It seems that our attention is habitually fixed outwardly towards the things, people, events and relationships which seem to most immediately impact own own circle of influence. This means that we are, willy-nilly, bobbing corks floating on the roiling surface of a stormy ocean, at the whim of crashing tides and waves, their unpredictable troughs and peaks our only experience.
In other words, we are always in a state of alarm, defending ourselves from the unceasing onslaught of demands, summons and expectations of a life we have no way of putting the brakes on to.
We have to keep up with the Joneses or die! Well, we are going to die even if we don’t keep up with the cultural persuasions of the day.

What some of us have realized is that there is an alternative to the life we have apparently been given. Whilst we may not be able to change the outward circumstances of our lives we have a choice on how to respond to them, on how to experience them.
This means intentionally cultivating an inward attention.

When the All-Good, the Perfection beyond names, forms and functions, and the unceasing Joy that is native to our souls resides within, why do we then seek external fulfillment and comfort from the million and one distractions we fill our days and nights with?

This is the mystery of Maya, the veil of delusion which covers our inward eye from seeing the false narrative of separation and the false gospel of a self to save, promote or defend.

This requires developing cosmic bifocals!

This double seeing means the balancing of our physical sense perceptions which see apparent difference as meaningful, when the cosmic awareness of the seamless unity of all things, all the time, everywhere, witnesses it all bathed in love, surrounded, interpenetrated and suffused with undecaying love and a supernal light which lights all things as the essence of all. This is the dance of Shiva!

This is the eternal song of Beauty which Saint Theresa of Avila urges us to learn – “the song of God which rises within us” – “without which (learning of this song) we can never be completely real!”