catmaSutra cat art by paul koh: Eyes-wide-opened!

5/12/09

Eyes-wide-opened!

Eyes-wide-opened. Life is so personal and yet impersonal. Remembering the movie, "Accuracy of Death", it is indeed a wonder how death in general is "nothing special", and yet to the individual, it means everything or everything else. If you look at our history as a human race, and simply by the number of wars we have fought, the death toll must be a staggering number. Yet it means almost nothing to the living. We may watch some really bad news over the telly, but as long as it doesn't really affect us, life goes on as usual. It's as if nothing changes. Young people become old people, new generations replace old ones. Nothing lasts - it is just another drop in the puddle, another wave in the coming and going of the tide. Nothing really matters. So how to live?

Death is a good way to learn how to live. That should be the first rule, because it takes away most of our problems. Faced with death, everything else seems trivial, and the seemingly little things that we take for granted become important - the simple beauty of life becomes apparant. This is our the spirituality regardless of religious inclinations. To understand our own true nature is the road towards spirituality, and for that, nature is the best teacher (personally it's the cat, the sky and currently a lime plant haha ;)! The second rule, for me, is the practice - that's one of the hardest thing to do as we're caught up in so many things. So take time to stop (and that includes playing your PSP when you have nothing to do, or fiddling with that i-touch). Visit with nature. Have faith that you will find yourself, and you will.

We all walk two paths. One is based on physical reality and the day-to-day. The day-to-day has a big hold on us. It grinds us down with the same old things, make us weary, impatient, and will leave us complaining and frittering our days away. It becomes important then to break that hold in whatever ways you can think of!