Matthew McKay's Blog

From the first day of life there is one plan for us -- to learn.  We learn from breaking; from feeling lost, untethered to the "whole."

The dark comes, early or late.  We learn from walking in it, knowing the morning will not come again in this life.  The plan was to learn by breaking -- the pain held, carried this long way by some ferocious miracle.

Hell was invented by priests to earn power over the flock.  The devil is no more real than dragons or gargoyles.  Yet while Dante's mythical inferno was scaring Christians back to church, the spiritual disease that makes hell on earth was a runaway plague in Europe.  That disease is the belief in good and evil.  It is the dense and heavy fabric of judgment, separating souls from each other.  And locking them in a prison of anger, contempt, and violence.  Judgment dehumanizes; strips souls of beauty and worth.  Right-wrong, worthy-unworthy -- each judgment is a brick in the walls of our own self-made Hades.

Accessing deep wisdom, gathered over many lifetimes, is a spiritual skill.  It involves listening to atman -- the part of our soul that remains in the spirit world during each incarnation.  Each choice -- even early in life -- is made either by listening or not listening.

Listening starts with waiting, and not acting.  Waiting for the impulse -- whatever it is -- to pass.  Waiting to see what lies behind each drive -- the fear or the desire.  At the moment of impulse, we access atman by entering the quiet place, the wise place.  Letting the feeling rise and fall.  Listening for the whisper of what we have always known.

Aloneness has a Janus character. One face seems grounded and content; the other full of fear, watching the specter of an empty universe. Being alone -- strong and content -- depends on being able to hear the oceanic connection to "the whole."  When we hear only silence, or the thrumming of an inchoate world, the aloneness is empty and frightening.

It's as if we were out to sea, trying to catch the sounds of a ship-to-shore radio.  At times voices can be heard, and we know we are somehow connected.  Then we get nothing but squeals and static.  In truth we choose what we listen to.

There are three kinds of desire: Authentic desire is any wish or seeking that is in alignment with spiritual values -- particularly connectedness and universal consciousness. Authentic desire leads the soul toward the work it came here to do.

Venial desire is the pursuit of simple pleasures -- without significant negative consequences.  It's enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment, a sweet indulgence in what our senses give us.

Compensatory desire seeks experiences that mask, numb, suppress, or control pain.  It often takes the form of addiction or compulsion.  Its role in suppression makes it reinforcing and hard to give up.  This desire seeks without concern for outcomes.-- the damage to body, spirit, and relationships.

Identifying the type of desire is critical to mindful decision making.

A personal god is a concept, a human invention. Consciousness is god. All of it. Consciousness creates  conditions to provide for its own learning and growth. It creates each universe so that universe can, in turn, shape and advance consciousness.

The highest spiritual purpose is not insight, not letting go of the body or things of this world.  It is not piercing the amnesia inherent in each return to physical life.  It is, rather, the awareness of the spiritual choices built into each moment.  The choice to listen, to have compassion, to attend, to be open, to know and feel the pain, to do what connects, to say the deepest truth, to do good. Mindfulness, at the most practical level, is about paying attention to now so the spiritual choice can be recognized, and sometimes taken.

In the place we gather after each life, no one is missing.  Through the long night of an incarnation, we look for each other.  We enter and leave each other's lives in ways that were foreseen and arranged.

When the play is finished, we go home.  We take what we have learned back to "the whole," back to the light.  We greet the one who was our brother in one life, and a father, daughter, friend in others.  We greet a lover who left early, and in another play survived us.

When the play is finished, we enter the circle of those who taught us, learned from us, fought for us, killed us.

Pain is a path to truth.  It refracts light to reveal things not otherwise seen.  Pain reveals the invisible ties, the vast network of energy that connects everything.  In the heart of pain and loss is love.  By running from pain, we run from love.  By avoiding pain, we lose the pathways to connection.  In the heart of pain is a moment when the universe -- and our place within it -- finally becomes visible.

Beauty has one purpose: to dissolve whatever holds us separate -- from each other, from every fractured rock that makes the earth, from every star in the sky. Beauty is the breath that joins us. Beauty is the dream -- in this dark sleep -- of a place where every rock, every planet, every star, every soul collides to make the next, more true and perfect version of itself.