Returning to the battle ground

The Bhagavad Gita starts, with the warrior Arjuna symbolically throwing down his weapons and refusing to fight (in the game of life)

After Krishna who like Christ or Buddha represents the higher self of Buddha Nature, tells Arjuna about the game of life and how to play it, through various descriptions of the Yogas of being, doing and awareness.

The book finishes with Arjuna picking up his weapons again to join the battle (life).

And it’s a shame as most of us would love to stay and the feet of a great teacher inner or outer, but great teachers seem to want us to put into action what they teach us more than have us hang around with them all of the time.

For example Paul Staments on the Joe Rogan show who is a pioneer in the use of mushrooms and who uses magic mushrooms as his path, made an interesting statement.

He said he only took psychedelic mushrooms once a year explaining it in this way “if you pick up a phone and get a message to do something, don’t stay on the phone, go and take action.” He went onto say “so many people try and stay on the phone or keep picking up the phone without taking action.”

Whether this connection is through an enlightened master, plant medicine, higher self etc it would be so nice just to sit in that presence and have them figure it all out for us but that doesn’t to me at least seem the case.

I remember praying to my teacher to take me back to the Himalayas to sit at the feet of an enlightened master. I prayed like this for about a year untill he showed up again in my dream and told me that when I loved someone, I was in that divine presence, that giving was receiving and that the Himalayas weren’t needed for that.

I feel like this this morning, after a week in blissful stillness, clarity and focus I feel that inner draw back into the world to take part in the battle again for a while. A part of me is falling asleep to the absolute clarity I’ve had and a part of me is watching that happening, without aversion.

I hear that many of the great Himalayan masters I’ve been reading about during this retreat, who live usually at altitudes above 10,000 feet, don’t sleep as they say that sleep isn’t needed when the consciousness is completely free of all stress of the world.

But as their disciples come down from these high altitude caves, to serve humanity and live in cities and even slightly populated areas, they report seeing their consciousness change and become heavier, but still they come.

I was invited 15 years ago to live in the mountains of India with yogis and even with a truly awakened Buddhist master in Thailand, but somehow I knew that the world offered a great chance of spiritual awakening because of the triggers and problems that we inevitably have to deal with.