Mental Divisions and Barriers
Yesterday we were reconnoitering a spot for the Pentecost scouts’ camp of our son. They got the o.k. from a farmer to do the camp on a beautiful place called Angel’s meadow, in a forest on a hill. Since they wanted to place the kitchen tent in the forest to protect it from bad weather, they had asked the local authority to whom the forest belongs. The map showed stripes of about 10-15 m width going through the forest, and each stripe belongs to another owner. The owner of the nearest stripe refused the kitchen tent, the second allowed it. Now we had to see where there was a convenient spot. In the thick forest you just discover here and there a plug – and finally, wet from the rain, we located a spot for the tent. You think you are in nature, but is is full of mentally fixed divisions.
The same theme in a different setting:
When I was yesterday deleting old e-mails, I re-found a link about a website on Indo-European languages, which an Indian friend had sent me some months ago (fascinating how this big language group of several hundred languages has similar roots – the wisdom teachings trace the origins far more back than contemporary science).
The author of the site is a 25 year old American lady, Jennifer, who is an English Language Assistant near Annecy, France. In her blog she mentioned that she was just about to leave, because she was jobless at the moment, wasn’t allowed to work, since she didn’t have the permission, and that (yesterday) she would return back to the States. Permissions fix barriers, something so common, that we don’t even think about it and take these mental conceptions for natural.
I dropped her a note in a post. I was astonished about the parallels between her situation and that of a friend in the US. Her situation is reversed to that of Jennifer, and she also left a comment in Jennifers blog. She is studying Linguistics and Creative Writing and working as an assistant at the University of St. Cloud (and she had been helping for a while translating the Lunar Messenger). She might have to leave the US because of having just a student permission. Again mentally fixed barriers of the legal regulations.
There is so much regulation in every part of life that you forget that life as a whole is a unity, that our concrete mind is crystalising and segmenting. On the spiritual path you learn to come out of this fragmentation and at the same time live in it and learn to handle it in an intelligent way, changing thus ways of behaving.
The concrete mind – a storehouse of knowledge, of analysing and dividing
