THE FREEDOM ON NOW Part 3 from Fetters to Freedom!

The Jewel Tree.

 For Meditation meditator places on the Jewel Tree growing in the middle of the water all of those Mentors that lift his sense to the blessed. The meditator not only has the Jewel Tree before him/her all of the people in the world seeking freedom from their suffering are on the lower plane before the Meditator.

With the practice of “Tonglin” the meditator takes there suffering and pain, their prayers for relief to the mentors evidenced by the Jewels asking for their delivery and seeks relief for them as he/she mediates.

In Part 3 I discuss fetters and freedom. I have posted Part 3 in my Archive. Click on THE FREEDOM ON NOW Part 3. So you can go there and read it. It is best read before continuing with these comments about it.

In life, in an effort to do what it seems we should, we fetter ourselves and deny ourselves much freedom. In the first two stages, the Early Years and the Middle Years, we are driven to learn, become and acquire. We have no time to do anything else.

I used to wonder and worry about this many times in my Middle Years. I wondered why I am failing to be my model and mentor St Francis of Assisi. Frances the son of a rich merchant, coddled and blessed by his family’s love and wealth, gave it all up to go into the woods where his sense of things would not be distracted. He went into the woods to find his God. He did!

I emulated this as a young man and came back to it when called on by a Buddhist writer to find a spiritual mentor to concentrate your mind as you meditate.

Take a picture or some representation to remind yourself of your mentor as you meditate he said.  Stick to a familiar was the message to the Western reader, like, Jesus, Allah, Moses etc.  As a JewBu, no longer a Catholic I selected Francis, recognizing the rich Christian tradition I took into Judaism and later when I added Buddhism to my mix.

St. Francis did what I wanted to do and am doing now in my senior years, the last of the three periods of life. I am now doing a little more than emulating Francis. I am also finding great satisfaction and fulfillment doing what I believe all of my life was prep for. I am accepting my Dementia and trying to do some good with it. It is this that has me writing right NOW.

To discuss this more would be redundant I have said it all already.

I point it out nonetheless. The concept behind it fits so well with where I am now in my senior years.

I didn’t give everything up like Francis, I did lose it all anyway. Instead of doing it I accept that “My Plan” did it for me. I now can either accept it or defy it. My entire background in life leads me to accept the horrible disease I have and the loss it entails. My acceptance is done with the prayer to my higher power. It is the same prayer and the same higher power I first encountered in AA 37 years ago. In prayer I evoke that power to:

Give me the Serenity to accept what I cannot change,

The Courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Uniquely enough this “Serenity Prayer” is attributed to Francis. As it did with him in the woods, as it did for me in AA, it is my prayer that it now does it for me in Dementia.

It makes me awestruck to see the synchronicity of all of this. What I mean is synchrony of where I was when I wondered that I had not done all I should at the time. I wondered this in my late middle years. At this time I had acquired the knowledge that allowed me to sit back and let “My Plan” dictate where and when I would do what needs yet to be done with my life.

The beauty of it, as with all the rest of this Plan, there is no way I would have chosen this route I am now on any more than choosing to have to face Alcoholism in my life. There was however purpose in that which is found now using what I had to learn to survive as I joined AA to learning to survive as Dementia decided to join me in this life.

I was always mystically inclined from the time I first had thoughts about God, Creation and my life in consequence to it all. I sought the sacred, to be able to touch it, to be able even to see God. I studied the Catholic Mystics. I then became involved in the Charismatic Movement. In the midst of this is studied and practice some of the Occult, chasing ghost among other things.

Years passed and finally in my early ‘50’s studying the Church Fathers of Christianity I discovered Jewish and Gnostic writers of the same period. Judaism made the most sense to me whereupon I became a Jew.

I found the emptiness start to fill in with Judaism. I realized the beauty of Jewish Mysticism, not through the Kabbalah which I tried to understand, but rather in reading Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber, both contemporary Jewish Philosophers.

It was there with both Heschel and Buber that I began to better understand the sacred awakening I first experienced in my AA experience where I turned my life and my will over to my Higher Power. Doing so it was “I” who evoked “Thou”, the classic encounter described by Buber in his book of the same name.

It was in this change that I went through that I was transformed when I confronted progressive dementia damage occurring to the organ in my body that I valued most. It was damaging my brain which is my working connection to intellect.

Now, 6 years later, 37 years after first encountering my higher power in AA, then having the same encounter multitudinously after that leading to Dementia, I was ready for it.

What was I ready for? What I consider that last tool of life. When used it bootstraps you right into transcendence while still living in material time/space limited consequence.    

It is this experience extended over my lifetime of many experiences that make sense of why I have been here, the purpose of it, the periodic blindness of “what it is all about” and the ability to embrace it seeing finally what it is about.

My illness is the force that has cast me into the Woods of St. Francis. Losing everything forcefully invoked my giving it all up. Unlike St Francis it did not decide that, it happened on its own. I did then make the decision to accept the yoke placed on and make the best of it. This decision has put me in contact with that transcendence of which I am part and am now in the process of returning to it.