Beyond ILLUSION to making things happen

Beyond Illusion to Making Things Happen
Master Dyhan Vimal


“Why is it that most of the goals we set don't seem to materialize? Somewhere along the way it goes wrong and we don’t achieve them. How can Mastery help us achieve what we want or achieve that which we set out to do?”

The first thing that has to be understood and explored is the way we set goals. Many people assume that what they want, or what they wish to have, is their goal. Their goals are that which they actually believe they can't have, or that which they have accepted as being beyond their grasp. They will desire something, or make it a goal only when they see that it is beyond their capacity to grasp it. And many of them have confused themselves with the things that they want and the things that they can do; this is the reason why they want it.

When something is within our grasp we don't really wish for it, because we believe we can have it or we simply go out and get it. So, most of the time, we set our goals for things which we fundamentally believe we can't have and this is where the illusion starts; inevitably leading to frustration and failure. The illusion or lie starts when we confuse ourselves with that which we wish and hope for and that which is our goal. The fact is that we are hoping for it to happen, it's not a goal we work towards; it is like buying a lottery ticket and hoping to strike millions - this is not a goal.

Let’s say someone sets a goal or wishes to be a millionaire; anything less than being a millionaire is unacceptable to him and he sets a time period for achieving it. Let's examine why he set this goal, or what has triggered him to set this goal. It could be that because when he achieves his goal some of his life problems will be solved, or he believes that this is the ideal way to live. Often these types of goals will be born as a wish which we hope will solve our problems; based on this wish we move around, hoping our goals will happen.

If you observe, you will see that most people set a goal and completely do nothing about it and wait for it to happen. Then that same person will ask “Why are my goals not happening?” Living a life based on hopes and wishes will eventually lead to a state where you believe that no matter what you do, that which is going to happen will happen. You create the idea that life is fated and when this belief sets in nothing in your life changes. Then, in order to explain your life's situation you adopt philosophies like: “life is difficult” or “one cannot easily get what one wants,” or “man proposes, God disposes” and so on ... This is how the circle of illusion starts, and this has to be broken.


next blog “How can this illusion be broken?”

Shadows

Name the Pain,” theologian Matthew Fox says.

By naming our demons we diminish their power over us. We reform them from demons back to diamons. Daimons were the origin of demons. They were divine spirits, demi-gods, intermediaries who passed notes back and forth between gods and humans. The Latin translation of daimons is soul. As such, they can be either creative or destructive, depending entirely on whether we receive them or reject them. By negating them, we turn them into angry spooks, consigning them to what poet John Milton called Panadaemonium, the capital of hell, and an apt decription of what happens in the human psyche when our guides are driven underground, when a force as powerful as the shadow is scorned.

Since shadow is largely what is unloved in us, and in some cases with good reason, reintegrating these parts will mean attempting to love them as if they are strangers who might be gods-but it’s still critical to keep our wits about us. Loving our own cruelty, rage, or vengefulness or narcissism is different from identifying with it or giving it license. Treating the devil with respect is not the same as worshipping the devil. Dealing with the shadow demands the ability to deal with paradox. Shadow must be love and transformed. It is intolerable and it is in us.

Novelist Isabel Allende says “A scary cellar accts as a stimulus to the imagination,” which is why she hides, in her own basement, “sinister surprises” for her grandchildren: a plastic skeleton, treasure maps, trunks filled with pirate disguises. Myth is also full of dualistic nature of the diamonic:

Pluto the Roman name for Hades, god of the Underworld, is also the god of Wealth.

We need to acquaint ourselves with our shadows and past in which it leaves it’s tracks, however, in order to become aware of as much of our experience as we can, to have as much information as possible to draw on for our own journey. We need to go bodily down through activities such a journaling, active imagination, bodywork and have spend some time just mucking around and getting to know the place. We really are meant to stick our noses in our deep strata. Annie Dillard once wrote. “When you move in, you try to learn the neighborhood.”

Danger lies not in the shadow itself but in the panic; in the acute anxiety that grips some people when confronted by some of the material there; in the fear of losing their footing in the conscious world because of what they find in the unconscious; in the fright of what they truly feel.

Above all, says Thomas Merton, take it easy. “The shadow is a frightening reality, and anyone who talks blithely about integrating it as if you could chum up to the shadow the way you learn a foreign language, doesn’t know the darkness that always qualifies a shadow.”

Not all suffering, to be sure is redeemed with gifts and talents-some times people grow up in sick families are just crippled by it – but the cold truth about turning a wound into a gift, if that is its nature, is that first you must FEEL it. You’ve got to be willing to go back and re-encounter the grief of it, starting with the brute fact that you got a bum deal, that justice is beside the point, and no one is going to make it up to you. The past cannot be changes only our attitude to it can be.

The past shapes us, but by following the deep calling to heal ourselves and throw off old curses, we may be able to reshape our response to the past and perhaps even the way  in which we remember it. Sometime we are called to move backward so we can move forward with a greater sense of ourselves, and with a greater confidence.

Next Shadowing in SPORTS

Future of Sport

The Future of Sport

          I am working on a documentary and writing a book about sport where I begin by taking my audience on a journey to the ancient world where athletic contests were offerings to the gods – and in some cases, notably the Mayas, it was the athletes themselves who were the offerings!  Sport was more than entertainment, an afternoon at the ball game, it was an individual and group religious experience.  Sport had divine purpose whether as a rite to win celestial favor, to placate an angry deity, or to honor departed heroes.

          Michael Novak, author of The Joy of Sports, insists this purpose still exists today:  “...sports flow outward from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious:  an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection.”

          Furthermore, Novak and others argue this function of sport is eternal whether we acknowledge this or not.  Writes Andrew Cooper, “Sports satisfy our deep hunger to connect with a realm of mythic meaning...to see the transpersonal forces that work within and upon human nature enacted in dramatic form, and to experience the social cohesion that these forms make possible.  Whether or not we so name them, these are religious functions.”

          Sport’s spiritual function works on both the level of the athlete and the audience; in fact, each is often dependent on the other.  A winning performance by an athlete can stir a crowd into exhilaration, and they, in turn, can compel an athlete to new heights.  A few years ago a B.C. Lions ad campaign “Cheering works” alludeded to the popular notion of “home team advantage” whereby athletes are inspired by positive audience reaction and collective enthusiasm.  Perhaps it’s not an accident, then, that the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek, meaning “to be inspired or possessed by a god.”

          This religious aspect of sport, however, has once again been sublimated by a secular culture:  “Our society so thoroughly secularizes sport that we can barely recognize, let alone express, what it makes us feel,” laments Cooper.  Recognition of the sacred has been reduced to popular idioms such as “team worship,” “sports icon” and, yes, “The Zone.”

          Owning the Zone, traces the secularization of sport and asks the question, Did we go wrong and, if so, where?  The implications of this question are far-reaching for they threaten to touch upon the malaise that is modern sport.  Contract disputes and players’ strikes, diva behaviour among star athletes, crass commercialization, soaring ticket prices that make professional sports inaccessible to much of the masses, these and other problems might be attributed to some extent to the loss of sport’s sacred place.

          We also ask the question, What does the secularization of sport mean for athletes and what implications, if any, does it have on their ability to enter The Zone?