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[Look, Ma, I'm Enlightened! - continued]
There is no one correct way of looking at life "after" enlightenment. We are not obliged to be or not be anything, as long as in our hearts and minds we are whole.
What does it mean, to be whole? It means that we must be willing to conceive of, to contain within ourselves, whatever is "other than" any limited idea. It means knowing that when we emphasize a positive, we are at the same time creating a negative. When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the ignorance that is other than the knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it.
If we deny doing so, that is a contraction of awareness; we become dense, we become mass-level entities, we are incarnated in physical bodies. And we cannot control what we have denied creating, it is forced into our attention whether we like it or not, and so we live in a world of sin and ignorance.
However, if we remain constantly open and unresisting to such negatives, we are not compelled to dwell on them: If we allow that ugliness is always within us, then we are free to create beauty. If we know that stupidity is always within us, then we are free to emphasize this intelligence.
Love is the highest and holiest action because it always contains that which is not love within itself, it always and ever moves to include the unloving.
How often we try to figure out a cause-and-effect sequence in our experiences, when what is happening is merely a swing of alternating conditions. We may choose a negative task, like monastic discipline, and then feel rewarded. Or conversely, we may pursue a seductive pleasure, and then feel cheated. We never stand back to see that we are just swinging like pendulums.
And many of us insist on thinking of ourselves as only kind, good, and wise: we try to be pendulums that swing only to one side.
The remedy for this confusion is to be loving, to experience life without mental resistance, until we rise above mass and energy to the space level. On that level, where love is constant and our awareness is open, we will more easily comprehend the miracle of containing contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes. We will be free to experience what we choose, because we will not deny that we always contain everything other than our choice. Karma is not "paying for" exactly what you did in the past. It's just that, as you raise your vibration level, you may encounter the kind of experiences you withdrew from in the past, or you may run into anything other than what you are insisting on now. If you try to close your mind, you will drop back to a lower vibration. But if you look calmly at undesired events, absorb them mentally, and love yourself for disliking them, you will keep going higher. You might say that for a while you must take your bum trip with your high.
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Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment Contents
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