My tagline. What does it mean? Some have asked.
Descent from heaven, ascent from hell, why?
I’m talking about a state of being.
Peace.
Absolute peace. As close as we can scale Nirvana in our own life.
A state of absolute equilibrium. Nearly impossible to attain but something to strive for.
In our modern times we are battling and fighting and contending with constant distractions. Walk out your front door and you are bombarded.
Hell, forget walking out the front door…you are bombarded the minute you wake up.
Stress, anger, fear, despair, worry, boredom, hate, on the “negative” side (hell?); excitement, joy, happiness, love, lust, physical and emotional pleasure, gluttony, on the “positive” side (heaven?).
When summed up and condensed into one day out of our life, all this input, all these sensations, are addicting and they disturb the equilibrium of peace. I believe it’s much more difficult to attain (and maintain) a state of existence where you are an equal distance from hell as you are from heaven now than it was 200 or 300 or 500 years ago simply due to the presence of all the bullshit we fill our lives with.
And it’s addictive as hell. We have learned to crave all this and we seek to flee the state of Peace because culture has taught us that Peace is boring. Boring is a bad word for 21st century man and woman. OK, sitting in an office and waiting for an appointment can be boring; sitting in traffic for an hour is boring; a shitty movie can be boring. In this case boring is describing the attribute of a specific object, a moment. That’s fair…but to describe your existence as boring simply because you are currently experiencing a lack of heaven or lack of hell just tells me that you’ve bought into the lie.
Look around…watch how everyone clamors for more excitement and drama in their life. And they go about cultivating this consciously and subconsciously. In the choices they make, the people they choose, the situations they enable…we are addicted to heaven and hell because we are ultimately unable to accept and live in that region directly in the middle between the two.
This symbol is called an “enso”…Japanese for “circle.”
It is used in the study and practice of Zen and there are countless interpretations and uses of the symbol as an indication of our present state of being. It can never be perfect just as we can never find that perfectly equal distance between heaven and hell but it is a yardstick upon which we can lay our spiritual state and measure the unmeasurable.
There are versions where the circle is closed but I feel it should be open…for we are at one with our environment and our world. We are constantly discerning the mass of input which floods into our existence through the opening in the circle which is our conscious mind; the “awake” inner being which receives the stream of outside “data” and interprets and judges and accepts or rejects it all.
Like us, the circle can never be perfect. It can approach perfection but flaws intrinsic to our nature such ego, pride, laziness…always will doom the circle’s perfect roundness.
Ascent from hell, descent from heaven. Where are you?