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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
9-Aug-2004-13:12:34 |
| Subject: |
What I love about Ramalila |
While preparing for a summer Road Trip, to take advantage of Reality As Defined By The French (that is, in August no one is in the office to work with anyway because they are all en vacances, so you might as well be en vacances yourself), I attempted a short, Castaneda-style Recapitulation. In the process of recapitulating many things, I made a list of the Internet sites I would miss while being on the road and thus out of touch, and those I would not miss at all.
I won't miss the News. There is little in it that inspires, and the Whole Purpose Of A Road Trip is to inspire. I won't miss the movie sites, because I'll be having too much fun with Life On The Road to want to waste any of it watching Life On A Movie Screen. I won't miss the humor sites, because Life On The Road is inherently funny.
And I won't miss any of the 'spiritual discussion' sites that I normally participate in. In recent weeks, I have come to the sad realization that I am out of place -- nigh unto turd-in-a-punchbowl out of place -- in all of them. These sites, for whatever reason, seem to be inhabited by people who believe that spiritual discussion has to take a certain form, and if it does *not* take that form, well...it just...uh...isn't spiritual. That form is "You state your beliefs and if they differ from mine I *have* to perceive that as a personal attack...and I must *respond* to that attack by *defending* my beliefs...therefore a good 'spiritual discussion' involves two or more people beating each other over the head with their respective ideas until one of them submits or is rendered unconscious."
Not my idea of fun. But it is theirs. Go figure.
So why do I not lump Ramalila into that category? It's not, after all, as if that has not become the modus operandi here from time to time. Most of us -- myself certainly included -- have fallen prey from time to time to this tendency to view 'spiritual discussion' as combat -- Truth vs. Falsity, Right vs. Wrong, Cool vs. Decidedly Uncool.
But it never lasts for long. THAT is what makes Ramalila cool. No matter how often or how intensely the folks here get involved in temporary spurts of beating each other over the head with their ideas, sooner or later a certain sense of "What the FUCK am I doing taking life so seriously?" takes over, and one after another each of the combatants drops his or her intellectual whiffle bats and gets back to the idea of 'spiritual discussion' as FUN. Y'know...trading ideas just for the sheer, unadulterated FUN of trading ideas.
I see this trend towards spiritual sanity as *very much* a result of having spent time around Rama. It was really HARD around Rama to believe that you had things together enough to have figured out something even resembling 'the truth' about 'reality.' Reality changed so often that trying to pin it down with some nebulous concept like 'the truth' was an exercise in futility, sorta like trying to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut that didn't even have a hole to aim for. So we all got *used* to being loose with our definitions of what 'reality' is and is not, out of necessity.
But an even more important 'side effect' of studying with the Rama guy was that for the most part he was trying to have FUN with the spiritual process, and he conveyed that noble approach to us, his students. Folks here, just as on other 'spiritual discussion' sites, occasionally get overly serious and resort to beating each other over the heads with their respective ideas, but it never *lasts* for long because, quite frankly, that approach is simply no FUN. And above all else, Rama taught us the value of having FUN.
So the bottom line for me is that while I'm on the road, the only Internet site I will miss from time to time is this one. It's NOT as if anything much is happening here right now -- no one seems to have much to say. But it's nice having one constant in this everchanging world, one place where -- over time -- FUN has a tendency to win out over seriousness, having a flexible approach to ideas about reality and to 'reality' itself has a tendency to win out over dogmatism and rigidity, and every so often you read something that makes you laugh out loud, at the person you *should* be laughing at -- yourself.
It's a nice place, Ramalila. It's been too long since I've realized that, and said that. Hopefully my attempt to put it into words will inspire others to do the same thing. Namaste and away...
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