[This article was first shared in 2016, within a private group of spiritual practitioners. It has been edited and shared here publicly.]
Let me tell you a small personal story.
In December, I returned my previously leased car (a 2012 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid sedan) and got myself a 2016 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid sedan, loaded with latest safety features and accessories. It has a most-interesting blue color, drives amazingly quiet and is supposed to give an estimated 42 MPG on highway.
The more I drive this car, the more I like it, and the more special I feel for having been able to get this car on a lease. So far so good.
And then this special feeling slowly morphed into a sense of pride, and a sense of the car being special, and further sense of me being special. My head set back, the jaw lifted, a smirk appeared on the lips every time I sat in the car and it auto-adjusted to my preferences, and ruled the road. On occasion I’d even look at other vehicles driving on the road and note that they weren’t as good. And some of them were downright clunkers.
(NOTE: All this shit happens as long as we are in the head, by the way, and that is unavoidable as long as we feed self-image. Imagine if I could have afforded to get a really high-end luxury vehicle … gosh! The havoc I’d have meted out upon the world!).
In any case, along came the first snow shower. And slowly but surely salt from the road, and grime from the road started getting stuck to the body of the new car, onto its shiny chrome wheels, and onto the battery of sensors that make this car know a heck of a lot about the road.
A few hours on the winter road, there was nothing about the exterior of the car, that said “this is a brand new car!”
In fact, I noticed, that my car, this pride of a couple of weeks in my life, was virtually indistinguishable from a clunker on the road.
This punctured my pride, and the air of mental bloviation slowly but surely leaked out, and the ego shrunk back.
Rising Awareness simply gave the knowing … about how Nature is so amazingly beautiful and supportive of the spiritual journey.
Snow falls equally on cars in the same region where it is snowing.
Riding on the road in snow, slush and salt and grime get stuck to one car, in more or less the same way, as it does to another car.
Rain shower when it falls, gives all cars on the road a good cleaning, with little difference.
And in this way, I was reminded by Nature, that Nature is a living continuum, and that what disrupts it, is the human self-image, that creates separation and problems by getting out of the natural flow of the continuum. By standing apart from Nature and its flow, the human with the self-image suffers.
Nature truly doesn’t discriminate. And at the same time when we notice keenly, Nature actually always reflects back to us the light of Reality.
Nature shines as that mirror, showing us the way home. All. The. Time.
Love
Sundar.
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