Monday, October 18, 2010

The Bodhisattva Project

**Anyone who has a problem with listening to someone rave on and on about their own enlightenment, please duck out now.  Between you and me, I do NOT blame you.**

Some of these truths will sound terribly self-evident, but I need those of you who remain after my heavy encouragement to depart to understand something.  Maybe you know me already and don't need to be told this. Maybe you don't know me in any way but the persona I've cultivated on facebook or any of the other online personality mills out there.  But here is the fundamental truth about me:  I am incredibly insecure and totally lacking in the mysterious substance called Common Sense.  I have to have a major epiphany in order to understand things that most other people take for granted.

For instance:
1.  Nobody will ever have the ability to love me better than I do, because nobody can read my mind about what I want romanticallly -- and even if they could, they can only do so much.*
2.  The body demands, and no matter how often you scramble to comply, it is never enough.  NEVER.  Consider your own addiction(s) and see if I'm wrong.
3.  There is God in each of us.  The key is learning to see it, even in those you feel less than worthy of your attention.

See?  This stuff sounds SO obvious, but I can't even tell you what a revelation it is.  I mean, I've heard these platitudes all my life, but I've never actually embraced them before now.  It was a sudden change in perspective, and it's set me free of all the baggage and stress I'd been carrying.  Most of the stress, after all, was in my futile efforts to satisfy the urges of my body and still please everyone else while hoping someone, anyone would take the time to notice ME and give ME what I always wanted, without me having to go through the trouble of telling them what that was.

Like any real recovery, it's not an overnight process.  I still stumble, and I still feel the siren's call to rejoin my old, addictive-personality habits.  They're deeply-ingrained, and it would be so easy to go back.  But it's just not me anymore.  It's not good for me to seek perfection from myself and everyone around me when perfection is a moving target at best, and plain impossible on any given day.  All I can do right now is put the God inside me back in charge of the machine through which I'm experiencing this world, and govern the machine with discipline and complete love.  I know the kind of love and affection I want, and if given in reasonable doses, I think it could change my life.

So, then, what is this Bodhisattva thing about?  According to Theravada Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person on the path to enlightenment, bound for it, but not quite there.  That's where I am.  I finally see the potential miracle of releasing the selfishness of my flesh, but I'm still restrained by the flesh from achieving that miracle.  This is going to be the most exciting period of my life.

I'll keep you updated, and I'll be sure to give disclaimers at the beginning of each of these posts so if you're really not in the mood to hear about my silly revelations, you can skip it.

*I am very well-loved by my husband, but that's not what I'm talking about.  Even with his devotion to me, he can't be expected to understand the specific romantic impulses that flood my feminine brain.