Last Updated on August 5, 2015
Those who have attended one of the many talks, workshops, and retreats I have held internationally will have been exposed to an exploration of what is Real. Some people get it right away, and life is never the same from that moment forward. Other folks perhaps get it to a degree, yet their basic assumptions about reality persist, and the extraordinary fruits of having a felt in-the-body sense of what is Real are not realised and tasted. In this article I will share the basics of what is Real and what is not.
Imagine you have taken a walk out into nature, into a native forest, for instance. Consider the diversity of Life present in that forest. Consider the incredible complexity and yet, paradoxically, the ease and simplicity with which these many manifestations of Life are being what they are. Ask yourself this: “Who is maintaining the perpetuity of this forest?” “Who is maintaining the continuity of Life as expressed by the vast array of diversity within this forest?”
Life is.
The nature of Life is that it is self-arising, self-maintaining, self-organising, self-sustaining, self-perfecting. Much to the dismay of ordinary Man and his/her arrogance toward Life, nature does not need Man in order to maintain it and keep it going. On the contrary, Man (and again, perhaps much to ordinary Man’s surprise) needs nature in order to survive. As sheltered and blocked off from Nature as we may think we are, everything about Man’s world is dependent on the co-operation of Nature. There is such a vast array of intelligence manifesting itself through the many expressive forms of nature, and we easily overlook the fact that if any aspect of this balance were to shift, Man might perish.
So what is Real and what is not?
Consider your motorcar. We have service stations for repairing cars, right? Consider your house. If it is a relatively old house, the chances are it has been painted a few times, and numerous other repairs may have been done on it from time to time. Now, if we were to leave your house as it is, consider what condition it might be in 50 years from now? Or 100 years, or consider the house in 2000 years from now. Is it likely there will be anything at all remaining from your house that would still be able to clearly identify it as a house? Not likely.
Returning to the beautiful forest, and I am not suggesting your house doesn’t have its own beauty. With all factors remaining equal, if you were to return to this forest in 2000 years do you think it would have changed much, overall? Would the forest still look, smell, and feel like a forest? It sure would.
Is it the exact same trees and plants around you as those that were there 2000 years prior? Not likely. Perhaps a few ancient trees would have lived that long, but most of the plants will be new or different. Yet despite the fact that each apparent plant has changed during that 2000 years, the forest is still a forest, relatively the same throughout time—that is, compared to changes that would come to something like your house or your car.
The fundamental difference—which is by now becoming apparent—between your car or your house and a native natural forest is that the forest is self-arising, self-sustaining, self-organising, self-perfecting. Your car is not. Your house is not. This is the fundamental difference, at the most apparent and obvious level, between that which is Real and that which is not. Reality is made up of an intricate, intelligent, and unified whole, that has these qualities of what is Real.
The world of Man, however, is made up of many, and often-times disjointed, disintegrated (and disintegrating), things. These things are falling apart in every given moment, and they depend on Man’s power, creativity, and energy to sustain them. Man is, in effect, using his/her life-force to build and maintain that which is not real. At some point these so-called creations will perish. They will verily vanish forever.
The forest, in one form or another, will live on.
Some people argue that a single tree does not last forever. Yet the tree has built into it the capacity to self-create, self-arise, self-maintain what we refer to as tree. Sure, one particular manifestation of that tree may eventually fall over and rot away into the soil, yet that tree will have given rise to many more trees that carry the same intelligence (manifest in one form as the same DNA), and those trees will be made up of the same basic stuff (atoms and molecules, et cetera) as before. What is more, the tree is not a thing separate and apart from the environment around it. That entire environment is self-arising, self-sustaining, and so on. Your car does not have this capacity. You do, but your car does not. Your clothes do not. Your make-up, your job, your money, your bank accounts, your college/university degrees, and pretty much everything else you may have come to love and identify with (and no doubt worked hard for) do not have this quality. They are, in effect, not real. A non-reality created and perpetuated by the mind of Man.
So there you have it. A brief look at how you can now inform yourself, moment to moment, about what in your world is for Real, and what is not.
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