My new literary effort, The Responsive Universe – Meditations and Daily Life Practices is now available for purchase. Within these pages are nine Mandalas or chapters that illustrate a new and authentic step forward on the path to self-discovery and enlightenment. Over the course of the next week I will be giving an intimate look at each chapter as well as a small excerpt from the new book. We have just looked at the Fifth Mandala.
We continue with the Sixth Mandala…
Understanding the past and dealing with loss are huge subjects. Entire books have been written about them. I am merely touching on certain areas I feel are important to me. It is up to you to think with an open mind and decipher your own riddles. Only you can truly help yourself. A psychologist can help give you perspectives on certain issues, but only you can make lasting decisions that create positive actions. One good exercise I recommend is writing down your feelings. Starting a journal or writing poems are often useful tools in expressing intimate feelings about your past with which you toil. We are able to sort things out if we can see them on paper. Writing about problems can bring resolution to them. It can start a flow of spontaneous insights that can relieve pain and stress, and also pave a path to greater understanding. Writing this book, for example, has been a way that I can better understand myself and society. I write what I feel, and reread it later, adding new thoughts as I go. Eventually, writing creates a positive outlet that releases deep emotions and sheds light on the path to Enlightenment.
Sixth Mandala excerpt Recovering from loss caused me to question everything I knew about life, and particularly caused me to question my faith in God and religion. I could not reconcile how my perfect and healthy son could cross from life to death in an instant with no reasonable explanation around which I could wrap my troubled mind. With no reasonable explanation, I blamed myself. I blamed God. I questioned myself. I questioned God. But on that autumn day when the skies seemed to finally clear and the fog in my mind lifted, I realized that the chaos I felt in my heart was so complex and so visceral because matters of life and death are never simple. Recall in the Third Mandala that the mystery of the Big Bang is that some unknown phenomenon sparked the imbalance that allowed for the possibility of life on earth. For years, this mystery has spun scientific and philosophical debates on the ultimate paradox of life – from nothing came everything. The fallacy in my thinking was in attempting to find an explanation for why my son died before he even fully lived. The Third Mandala showed us that there is no real truth in paradox. Sure, our lives seem governed by them – life and death, night and day, and good and evil – but the real truth of paradoxes is not that they lie at polar opposites, but that they rotate in a seemingly endless cycle of rebirth, seasons and cause and effect. The truth of life and death for me was that I hurt so badly because I lost a love, but love was the very thing that was going to heal me. Love could make me suffer and soar all in a cycle of loss and gain and immense sadness and joy.
The key to moving forward was realizing it is all a revolving cycle of energy. The Big Bang theory shows us that the Universe is immense and ever-expanding and that regardless of who or what set the cycle of life into motion, we are all linked to this web of energy in which matter is neither created nor destroyed. The Third Mandala put a spin on that age-old paradox that everything sprang from nothing. There is no nothing – there is only everything – and the closest we can come to nothing, to a pre-Big Bang state of non-existence, to the number zero, is to strip away ego and attachments and feel in balance with the cosmos and the revolving mandalas, not the paradoxes, which govern life.
John C. Bader
www.responsiveuniverse.com
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