CURIOSITY CAN ALSO LAND US ON PLANET REALITY
Who am I?...what is this?
We’re not talking about the recent landing of the space-ship “Curiosity” on Mars here! (Although we offer our congratulations all around, and salute spirits’ amazing expressions in science, time and space!) The kind of “curiosity” we’re talking about here is the kind that always moves toward love. The kind of curiosity that lands us smack dab in the thick of Reality. The kind of curiosity that is the nature and spirit of Life itself. Indeed, curiosity – our innate urge to explore and know our self as we are – is in our DNA. And to truly inherit our spiritual being, we need curiosity like we need air, water, food and stimulation to sustain our body and mind.
Did we say “love”? Indeed, love is our nature. We are love. Not the idea of love.
And it’s in the nature of this love, the nature of life, to express itself in everything happening here and now – just for the unconfined joy of it! Because it can.
What makes us not so curious?
Of course, we’re all one thing happening because we can. Or more precisely, because we are. So in a way of speaking, we are that which is happening here and now. Only that. And it follows that whatever happens is fine. As Nisargadatta says: “Nothing is wrong”.
That said, we get to thinking we’re something and somebody else. That inborn curiosity gets bred out of us as children by our social, cultural and psychological assumptions about what’s real and important. We take on an entire man-made conceptual perspective, and that mostly functions to cause us to live in an alienated and isolated way – light years from our nature.
Living with curiosity.
It’s tricky at first, but we begin to get the hang of living curiously when we get glimpses of reality. Fortunately for us, reality never goes away, although, for a time, it may seem to. But sooner or later, we all have to step back through the door we entered –or thought we entered the moment we took on the minds’ manufactured identity. We then may be graced to see this invented persona supported and maintained by a named and labeled universe of our contrivance. And if we’re willing to look closely, lovingly, curiously, we may find our personal world is totally invented. We’ll call these inventions “opinions.”
Opinion lacks curiosity.
To drop opinion, we have to simply see it when we see it -acknowledge that what we are fundamentally, actually, is not an opinion…not a set of complex ideas about who or what we are and this is. And we can start with an open curiosity about the possibility that we really, really, don’t know much about much. The seeing is all.
Of course, this seeing can be real hard or real easy – it depends on how attached we are to our suffering and our fleeting and apparent pleasures with their in-built disappointments and disasters. We can take the long hard road which most of us know well, or it may happen that we take a kind of short cut, sooner, and we get seriously curious.
The road to get there is here.
We stop searching our mind for answers to the questions it keeps on inventing. We stop talking that talk and walking that walk, and we step off the circular road to nowhere. Or course, it seems we don’t so much “step” off as we get pushed off! We just go limp…don’t pretend any more. We cease to believe the chattering mind, and let go of its’ opinions a little.
We allow for real possibilities when we relax our grip on knowing. And drop some of the load we’re clutching called “Me” – some of the one who’s trying to be the person their mind thinks they are.
A voyage to deep inner-space.
We start when we stop. We start before our usual and habitual rush to judgment; before we overlay our precious opinions on things and events. We stop, look and listen to that insight that whispers to us “perhaps it might be useful to be really curious now?” Now, not later. When we see the urgency of this, we launch our own personal (and not so personal) inner-exploration without any motive or expectation other than curiosity. That is, we allow our self to simply be; to not always struggle. To cease to take constant pains to be the guy who’s right all the time, or anytime, for that matter. In truth, to cease constantly becoming “me” and to realize our Being now.
Curiosity may be the vehicle to transport us to this Reality we never actually left – except in our mind.
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