Being a Superconductor: Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part III
It turns out that when things get really, really cold, strange and wonderful things start to happen. Take superconductors, which allow electricity to pass through them with zero resistance, opening up all kinds of incredible possibilities for powering our world with only a fraction of the current power we use. I saw an astonishing demonstration of superconductors on Nova the other day. They used a standard copper wire and pumped a mere four watts of electricity through it to light a string of incandescent bulbs. As you might imagine it produced a pretty weak light, tiny and barely visible. That’s because when the electricity flows through the copper wire, it encounters resistance, bouncing along and smacking into the electrons and various impurities in the wire. Yet when they attached the light bulbs to a superconducting wire the same four watts produce a brilliant light. In the same way, we are either copper wires or superconductors when we look to understand the true nature of life and the universe. Our thoughts and emotions are the distortion mechanism. When we try to understand the world around us and the nature of God and the universe, we are the resistance. The impurities of our ego, our fears and rage and sadness, distort the clear light of understanding and so we produce a weak light. We are angry, violent, depressed, selfish, unable to empathize with the people suffering all around us. Yet, if we can clear our lives of clutter and meaningless things, we can be more like the superconductor, letting more and more of the clear light through, unchanged, undistorted, fully realized.
Eckhart Tolle, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, tells us that if you have a religious belief structure, you don’t need to go outside of it to understand the true nature of God. The real message is there for you, it’s just that it’s been obscured and corroded with meaningless matter that accretes around that divine message over time. It’s like rust building up on metal. Eventually you can no longer see the metal, just as you can no longer see the true message of the divine through the maze of mistaken interpretations layered on that original message by unenlightened personalities. The message can not get through. Eventually that corrosion destroys the original metal and the religion passes away into history, because it can no longer help people even at a basic level. By that point, it’s a good thing, because the religion has become something that hurts more than it helps. To get at that true meaning you have to become like the superconductor, finding and destroying all resistance in yourself. It’s no coincidence that the words Eckhart Tolle heard just before he became enlightened were “resist nothing.” When you provide no resistance, the clear light of the void shines through you and out into the world. But when you use your mind to distort and interpret and label everything, the message begins to break down. Eventually you are like a person lost in a fun house, with nothing but your own disfigured image reflected back at you infinitely.
We become what we put into the world. Sometimes when the ego gets truly out of control it begins to warp the divine message so that no light gets through at all and the entire message is lost. This is why a Taliban soldier could shoot that young girl Malala in the head and feel that he was doing God’s work. His rage and suffering warped God’s message into something that demanded the death of a little girl and provided every logical explanation as to why. This is the extreme version of what happens when our egos interrupt the divine flow, but we live in a world where even minor impurities of the mind have gotten out of control and do just as much damage, every single second of every day. Our minds get in our way.
The mind is both a beautiful and a terrible thing. It serves only two purposes. It solves problems and it creates problems when it runs out of problems to solve. It literally has no other purpose and yet you’ve probably come to think of your mind as absolutely essential to everything you do. There was a time when people lived without their minds chattering at them all the time. There were gaps in their thoughts. The incessant radio broadcast in our head turned off from time to time. An Englishman once described the Indians who would come to his way-station in the woods. When the various officials they were coming to see were not available, they would sit calmly, staring ahead, whereas the English would fidget, pace, and demand to know when the people would return. These restless minds have come to dominate the Earth. It’s now nearly impossible to imagine your mind shutting off. You’ve lived with it constantly chattering at you for as long as you remember. You think this is normal. You’ve come to associate your thoughts with who you really are, and yet this is not the case. Your mind is like that copper wire, constantly getting in your way, creating resistance without you knowing it. When you live in a world of noise you come to believe that the noise is the only thing that matters. By clearing our minds, by finding time away from the noise, slowly and with persistence and dedication to the sacred arts, like yoga, or meditation or simply staying present in all you do, even standing in a crowded subway or washing your hands, you are able to create gaps in those thoughts and it is through those gaps that the divine flows through. Eventually, if we are disciplined in our pursuit of understanding we can become a superconductor, with the divine flowing through unimpeded and radiating out into the world for all to enjoy.
There was a time when people lived closer the divine on a day to day basis. We no longer live in that world. We no longer live in a world of simplicity. Things are complicated, coming at us from every direction constantly, forcing us to react. There were a number of cultures, now largely or completely destroyed, that felt the power of the divine every day in their lives. Unfortunately, the power of the ego is so strong, that it only takes a few minds out of control to rampage over the Earth and wipe out everything that gets in their way. The personalities of these simpler cultures were such that they did not often have advanced weapons or organized armies. Attack and defense are constructs of the mind. They saw no need for either. Unfortunately that meant that when the crazy people came to attack them, hearing only the constant chattering of their minds, instead of the words of God, these people had no defense. And now, because of evolution, most of those more innocent minds are lost. Today, nearly every person alive on this planet is a product of those minds gone out of control and so we have to work much harder to be that superconductor, much harder to see and understand, to turn off our minds, relax and float downstream.
And yet, the past was not always idealyic. The mind enabled us to have more safety and security in some ways. The vicissitudes of the seasons and the natural world often left people with nothing to eat and that lead to suffering. If you follow the buffalo and a hard winter kills the buffalo, people starve. So a new type of person emerged, one that could fight and kill, and stock and defend, control and force. I don’t advocate a return to olden times where we all wear leather clothes and climb the kudzu vines that wrap the Sears tower. We can never go backwards. The past is gone. Today we are moving to a new consciousness, one where we can develop technologically, and yet our minds will be more in balance with our spirits. This is a new world. There are pitfalls. We may not get there. It’s quite possible for us to destroy ourselves and never reach the new world. But we can get there and we can do that by creating small gaps in the constant steam of our thoughts. Over time as these gaps become larger and larger and we can begin to see through the illusion of our own desires and fears. And that’s when our mind becomes a compliment to our spirit. It works with us to clear aside problems that impede our energy, rather than working to crush and destroy anyone who gets in our way. When each of us tends our own garden, slowly the world is set to rights and harmony begins to spread, garden by garden. It starts with you. It can only start with you. And it starts with a single act. Step outside of yourself and you will begin to see yourself better and better. Eventually, you will become a Buddha too, someone who can teach the world and guide others to your light, but only if you let it flow through you without resistance.
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