Consumers and Communers
Put simply: you are not here to shop.
The sooner you recognize this fundamental truth, the sooner you can stop being miserable.
Young people are mostly cute, and sometimes annoying.
The most troubling part of working with someone going through their “terrible twos” or someone in their teenage years is that they think the point of life is to serve what they want.
The worst part is not that they cry or throw tantrums, though they do that too. No, the worst part is you can see how much pain they are in all the time, trying to bend the world to their desire.
It’s like they make a bargain…. If I get frustrated enough and throw enough of a fit, then life will have to give me what I want. And it’s sad, enough people do get what they want that others think generating upset is the way to do it.
We gotta make sustainability hip. You see, consumers are operating on a system dependent on non-renewable resources. It’s a give-and-take mentality, and underneath that is always the assumption that someone must eventually be deprived. “Eventually, the available love, presence, and whatever else I need will run out,” we think, so we must consume all we can now. It is very insecure.
The communer, though, is operating in a totally renewable fashion this being understands that their purpose here is not to consume value, but to generate it.
We all actually have this understanding already , but it resides at a deep level of the mind, below conscious awareness. It’s like there’s an ongoing tally showing what you have taken, and what you have given to the world.
For every gift, the heart softens a bit, and one experiences deeper ease. For every act of taking, the heart constricts, and one experiences deeper discomfort.
Don’t mistake me here - when I say “ease”, and “discomfort”, I’m not talking about “success”. There are lots of people making their way just fine in the world, apparently, who are not at all concerned with generating value.
Some of them even appear to be genuinely happy.
They, though, are missing the blessing of the mystic’s heart.
Many mystics have cursed their master’s names for awakening them to deeper feeling. You can only really engage in conventional worldly success if you’ve got good and hefty armour. Disarm the heart just a little bit, and you will begin to grow sick with every act of taking.
Have no illusions about it, this disarming is confusing and painful. To feel deep sadness and not know why, to know that there’s something deeply wrong with how things have always been done, but not be quite able to put your finger on it, this throws the heart into turmoil.
But the same mystics who have pushed their masters away because of the pain, have also sung them praise-songs of gratitude. They sing these songs because their heart has been awakened to the Real.
The soul slumbers and sleeps, waiting for a touch of sunlight, and this is the awakening Grace of the Teacher. Your teacher doesn’t need to be a person. They can be a dog or a flower, a river, or snatched piece of music on the wind.
What makes them a Teacher is that they awaken you.
When this grace touches the heart, the soul sees it’s own face. It’s like the inherited knowledge of countless lives is granted to one - she sees what she has always known, and yet somehow forgot that she knew.
The soul recognizes herself as pure giving. Well, this is almost the right term. “Giving” seems to imply that theres some opposite, or that someone will be deprived. The truth is that Giving is also a Gift for the Giver.
So perhaps we should call it “communing”. When you eat a meal from a mind in harmony with LIFE, you are not taking, you are sharing.
If you look at all the ills in the world to day, it comes down to a lack of sharing.
Someone is depressed, because they wish they could share their heart with another
Someone is at war, because they cannot share their resources.
Someone is anxious, because they don’t know if other’s will share their burden.
We each live as lonely islands, and fail to recognize that it is we who made the boundaries.
Don’t go on some self-deprivation trip because you are trying to learn to be a “giver”. That’s just another way to try to make yourself special and different. You get farther away from what you want that way.
Live a normal life, but everything you do, do it to serve. Never compromise your values - you can’t think and say you are serving, while using a product that harms another creature or the earth, it won’t work. But just go along, don’t refuse the coffee someone offers you - accept it as a way to offer them your presence. You can offer them the gift of seeing themselves give. The gift of a tiny moment of connectedness in a lonely lonely world.
You can commune with the coffee - accept its gifts of aroma and savor, sweetness and bitterness. Pull good food straight out of the dirt, accept its vitality into your own life - this is not taking, it is communing.
And go ahead and give. You can give your listening, you can give someone a ride. You can give the special wisdom only you have. You can give away that which you want most deeply. You can give your very life.
You don’t know it yet, but this is actually what you’ve been shopping for.
You’ve gotten so used to the taste of aspartame, when someone offers you honey, you are not sure its right. Something is too rich, to earthy, to “natural” about it. But give it a minute. Detox yourself from that which tastes sweet but offers no nourishment. Let the richness of communing’s honey work on you.
Open yourself to the riches of the world. That means joy sometimes, and sometimes that means pain, but it means that you will finally feel real. You were not made to keep seeking, constantly on the prowl. You were made to recognize that you are complete, and to affirm your completeness by offering it totally to Life.
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