I Know a Couple of Secrets That Would Make Your Life Better.       

You wanna know’m?                                        

Pay me!!

This dumb shit is as old as the scribes and Pharisees.  The truth is (and I give it to you for nothing, because it is worth nothing if I give it, but only worth something if you receive it, which might have something to do with why it is called “the received word,” and not “the delivered, dictated, or SOLD word”) most people who are possessed of any real knowledge are not looking to sell it to you.  In fact, the very act of putting a price tag on truth nearly guarantees that the peddler has none to sell you, and very little if any true awareness of his/her own.

I had considered Transcendental Meditation for a brief while.  It felt to me like something proactive to do, something besides just sit there.  Nothing wrong with just sitting per se, one of my most favorite things.  Most fair weather mystics will sit and search in more or less equal measure on the path to transcendence, which comes eventually whether they chose to do either, or neither, but only makes you feel like you’ve earned your enlightenment in any egoistic sense if you get up off your ass.  The funny thing here is that if you need to feel as if you’ve earned your enlightenment, you are still more or less wholly ego-influenced, which means you haven’t been enlightened at all.  Ya gotta laugh at this shit!  Anyway, the sitting, as I expressed, particularly if you sit in anticipation of revelation, can, in the least case, strain patience, or, in more acute manifestations become boring to the point of madness where one gets up and runs screaming into the arms of the for-profit gurus simply to break up the monotony, which is more or less what I did on any number of occasions.  Frightened by visions of having sat there forever and breathing my last unenlightened breath to the sound of The Master’s derisive laughter, I undertook to “learn” something.

She had come highly recommended, this acolyte of Swami Somethingorother.  And she espoused the virtues of TM in a whispered drone which, after about ten minutes at a stretch, felt to me as though someone had attached the hose of an energy vacuum to my solar plexus and had begun to suck every measurable iota of life force from my body.  It was all I could do, as she prattled on in the rarified language of TM theory, to suppress the yawns that followed one upon another, or to keep from falling asleep as I was looking directly at her and she at me.  Of course, when I was at last permitted to close my eyes in the attempt of the first meditation, sleep was most eagerly waiting at the exhaled end of the first full breath.  This should have been a red flag.  So should have been the thousand dollars that she, as spokesperson for the greater TM corporate machine, charged me for the privilege.  So should have been the incident where, in my initiation ceremony (I guess that’s what you’d call it.  They do a little ritual, after the cash has changed hands of course, wherein they give you the personal sound that you will intone as you meditate.) she did a bow to a makeshift alter with her eyes closed and smacked her forehead on the tabletop.  I could have stopped her.  But by the time I’d realized that her head on a collision course with the table was not a planned part of the act it was too late.  Also, I had no compulsion to be vigilant of any such a thing.  My assumption, however erroneous, was that however many years of TM training had qualified her to dispense the teaching to someone else at a premium would also have furnished her with clairvoyance (clear sight) enough to see the table top rapidly approaching even with her eyes closed.  I’m being more than a little derisive and I should not be, as human as the tendency is.  It is, in the least case, ungracious, and I know better.  It may be that I possess more efficient tools to rise above my tendency toward ridicule than she possessed tools to rise above her tendency towards awareness peddling as a means of paying the bills and/or as a means of letting herself believe she was aware.  We were both just being human, fair weather mystics in training, and still are.  Notwithstanding, all such signs should have warned me that this was just another packaged potentiality of transcendence with a price tag.  But madness will cause one to overlook a lot.  Perhaps, for all that seemed to me so inauthentic, it still, in the moment, felt better than sitting.

But then, a week later, I was speaking, or listening to my benevolent educator on the phone one morning.  It was the only time in this particular busy day that we would have the opportunity to speak.  As I listened, I was finishing off a pot of oatmeal.  Apparently, the sound of the spoon scraping the bottom of the pot annoyed her, for after enduring the annoyance for a minute or two she broke for the first time in my awareness from that dulcet drone into a full-voiced, angry admonition of my bad etiquette.  I never called her wrong.  While I had, in fact, been listening, perhaps my phone manners did indeed leave something to be desired.  I thought only that twenty years (which she claimed) of TM training and meditation should have rendered her rather more unflappable, and I told her so.  If she was any sort of a mystic worth her salt that transcended the fair weather variety, she would not have been bothered in the least.  I wonder if she ever actually took that teaching from me and applied it.  I didn’t charge her anything for it…

The extreme majority of us here on the Earth Plane, regardless of what we might wish others to believe, in service to whatever agenda of our own (regardless of whether or not we are even aware we have one) are generally nowhere in the vicinity of what might truly be said to be a oneness with God.  This particular verification of that truth cost me two and a half weeks and a thousand bucks.  An infinitesimally insignificant waste of time and money, neither of which are real or relevant when measured on the scale of eternity.