New Moon/Eclipse Musing

Woke up this morning to a new day. A new week. A week from today,  I'll be back on the road again for a little while. This fact is concocting a blend of anxieties and emotions of being away from "home"  again, since "laying roots" has been my goal for the last year...

I'm not a religious person, not in the sense of believing in one God or a single Creator who is responsible for phenomenons that befuddle the human mind. However,  the ebb and flow of my forty year-old life has  brought me to a place of conscious serendipity, of somewhat waking up to  the illusion of my misconstrued perception of reality when things  become too much to handle. I'm now able to experience glimpses of  sentient connection, and grasp the understanding that the very law of  nature is to transcend faith, to see how we are all the same, despite  our individual suffering, on our own pursuit of happiness. The path is  laid out for us, even though we might think we are the master of our  fate.

"Love & Happiness" has been the running topic in our  little bungalow in the outskirts of Chiang Mai these past days... Is  "Happiness" a moral obligation? Is it something we owe to ourselves,  something we need to do for others, something we step into, something we  can acquire... or is it merely a 'state of being' governed by the  environment we are in?

The study of Yoga or any spiritual truth  is to "transcend" from the duality of the material world (of separation,  of pain, of ego) to "enlightenment", or the understanding our purpose  (Who am I? Why am I here? Why do I suffer?), in this little blip of a lifetime. Our pain leaves us vulnerable, our ego contracts us, our habits and patterns of being "I" only make us see differences instead of  same-ness.

Ram Dass said that we are in this incarnation to see that  there is no incarnation, and when we are "awake" with this knowing we  can return to live our incarnation, namely, our life. In order to be set  free, we need to move from duality (separation), to the dissolution of  boundaries (non-duality), and finally take ourselves back being these  "forms" in the formless universe (duality again). Then we can start to truly, truthfully, fully, completely, utterly, live in our living spirits.

For the star gazers out there, this is a big week on a vibrational level with Maha Shivaratri (the day Lord Shiva married Goddess Parvati, celebrating the perfect union of the creator, the creation and the primordial creativity that binds all beings); there is  also a new moon on the rise coupled with a total solar eclipse (signifying transformation, the closing of the old and the birthing of  the new) shaking things up in the cosmos...

Perhaps this week is  the time we try a little harder to keep moving into the flow of life  and love. Not the lazy, passive, conditional type of love. Not the impulsive, egoistic, reckless type of love, but the fearless Love that moves us through boundaries, a love that is not self-serving, a love that is committed to confronting our own reflection in the mirror without grimacing or having to look away. A love that strives for the truth.