Being who we really are

Being who we really are

In Byron Bay, wherever there are seekers, what is heard most about is being who we really are, the desire for enlightenment, to be free.

Free of what is rarely articulated. What do I want to be free of? The desire for a new car? For a new and cuter girlfriend? For a new drug experience?

A new guru? Or do we simply want to have a different version of who we are, one that does not get angry, jealous, one that does not feel doubt, or fear?

But do we really want this? And is there any point of being free of all these desires that in one way or another keep us involved in this earthly plane?

Is there something wrong with this earthly plane? Is the beach that much of an awful place? The rainforest? The coffee shops?

Do we really want or need to be free of the desire to have someone to be intimate with, to curl up in bed with, to share breakfast with, to make love with?

To have a new house, a new car, a fancy pair of shoes, an ipod, or even a new pair of socks? Or is this desire to be free of all this merely an escape from these things, and our entanglements with them?

Osho was perhaps the first great master to hammer on the point that it has been mainly the cowards who have retreated into monasteries, denied the body, the earth, and these are the people who have been poisoning the minds of the planet, and actually responsible for the ecological catastrophe that the planet is enduring.

For me his overriding message was HAVE THE GUTS TO WAKE UP!

What is it we are prepared to do for our release, our freedom? Am I, are you prepared to let go of all your frustrations, of all your failings? Am I, are you prepared to drop being frustrated, to drop this addiction to not being who I/you dream of being?

Or are we simply in love with not being accountable, of being too small, too fucked up, our minds too much of a walking cacophony of beginning violinists?

How long are we going to stay arrogant enough to ignore the flowers showering on us from existence, here of all places? To feel the magnificence of what is, rather than be locked onto what isn’t, what we are missing.

The story is that Osho chose not to set up his ashram in Goa because it would be too comfortable, and who is going to meditate, to do the work, create the Buddhafield, when it is so easy to just lie on the beach and space out. He created it in a stinky disgusting Indian city so that those who were there were able to focus on the “work”.

So from that we can deduce that, at least according to Osho’s view, that living in a place so beautiful as Byron, so much a paradise, it is harder to maintain the vigilance that seems to be required to achieve that which is apparently already the case. Maybe, maybe not.

Either way this is where we have chosen to be, where existence has so lovingly deposited us at this point in time, and so here is where we are gong to have to stand up.

Unless of course you feel the need to have a bit more pollution in the air, a few million idiots surrounding you to push you into your centre because otherwise life is too awful. But we even make those places comfortable.

The basic question remains though. Am I ready, do I have the guts? Do you? To stand up and say “I know” even when you don’t feel you are without flaw or failing.