We all know cars need to have
their wheels aligned. If the thrust is out of balance, your safety and that of
others is affected. With four wheels properly adjusted, the car goes straight.
If a wheel is out of alignment, you’re wasting energy, wearing out tyres,
forcing the machinery and jeopardising your safety. Specifically, alignment
involves 3 basic adjustments: camber, caster and toe. There are over ten secondary adjustments as well. So we agree that basic car maintenance is good,
right?
Well,
how about Mind Alignment? Why don’t we have an “Inspection Service for
Mind Alignment” on TV or at health clinics, instead of just boob-tube
programmes, blood pressure cuffs and pharmacies dispensing drugs?
Reason Number
1: Because
in Self-Awareness State 2, our “normal, waking existence”, this is not known nor
is it accepted if it is heard about. The mind is in the state of identification
with its past conditioning, present impulses and future expectations – all products
of the defective human thinking process. In this state, we are like cars with
their wheels misaligned, and like a car, we have no consciousness of being
misaligned. Continuing the analogy, we are just driven along like cars and we
often have accidents, we get worn out like tyres, we waste fuel and energy and
we are definitely unsafe, both for ourselves and for others. Number 2:
It seems to be the nature of the world to maintain this state of un-awareness
in human beings. The ancients called it “Māyā”,
illusion, modern media call it “being entertained at all costs”, and the only
choice you have is which channel to watch at any given time. Number 3:
Let’s just call this world situation “what is” and accept it this way, suspecting
that if it weren’t for the resistance and the overcoming of all this
unconsciousness, our Self-Awareness wouldn’t be able to flower in any case. It
seems we have to fight against nature, struggle against lethargy, and make an
intentional effort to consciously align ourselves with the positive in order to
grow towards that, and unveil what we ignorantly believed to be true or real before
our eyes were opened. So that’s why many are called, but few actually enter the
realm of Self-Awareness State 3 and above. We are too busy believing we are
already something, when we’re not.
So we
are like cars requiring a wheel alignment, taken as an example of a complete
overhaul, which is probably truer. But what can we do?
First we
have to find a “service station” that does wheel alignments. It’s not easy.
Advertising today is rampant, and many places say they will fix you up and give
you the best solution for your money. For example, one place has an alignment
system that will give your wheels a special coating that will make them run
straighter, and a miniature photocamera is supposedly installed on the front of
the car to continually check the front wheel alignment. Another place offers a
tablet that you place inside the car to help keep it on track, with optional
choices for left, right, straight or 45º angle turns, etc., all controlled by
an on-board computer; it keeps your alignment in check at all times. Another
corporation offers a platform onto which you drive and do various tests to
register how faithfully your vehicle responds to the orders, and then you drive
off and try to remember what to do on the open road, but that’s tough, so giant
billboards have been installed around the land to keep reminding you what to do.
Then there’s another set-up that offers “wheel socialising”, and you sign up to
exchange your wheels with others to see if they run truer. Or yet another place
takes tiny samples of the rubber on your tyres and sends them to a lab for
analysis, and if things don’t look too good, they send you little bits of
processed rubber to stick back on your tyres in the hope that they will then be
better aligned. It sounds fantastical, but it is all based on the most advanced
vulcanisation technology available at present, and it’s a certified system, so
it must work. That’s what they say. And those are just a few of the choices in
spirituality, religion, politics, social groups and psychology.
So the
writer was recently inspired to explain this by a sight seen in the
shanty-town-like backstreets of the Casablanca Medina, where everything is
still done by hand. There was a rooster crowing and pecking on the pavement; cats
lying in the sun oblivious to everything, mothers and children in traditional
dress, hanging out clothes in the sun. There were carpenters’ booths,
plasterworkers’ huts, metalworkers, marble workers, potters, ironmongers, car
radiator fixers, motorbike repair shops, and of course little tea shops for men
only. This was near the fruit and vegetable stand section, with fish sellers,
bread sellers, sardine grillers, herb sellers, olives, root vegetables, legumes,
dried fruit and nuts and more. All in the shambles and ghetto-like area outside
the old Medina walls – streets slippery with orange peel, fish oil, grease,
crushed fruit, flotsam and jetsam, junk, garbage, vegetable refuse, bikes,
motorbikes, carts, women, men, children, cars, cats, water-sellers, and
everything all akimbo. There were wheelwrights and a few odd cars with their
wheels being aligned by hand. That was the inspiration. These real people with
real misaligned wheels on real cars were busy fixing them. And instead of
believing in modern technology, they were doing it by hand, eye and heart.
After
listening to all the advertising, maybe trying a few solutions, and finding
that your mind is still misaligned, you eventually find that the only Service
Station that does Mind Alignment for you is your own mind.
You
organise your own Service Station by laying out your tools on the appropriate
benches. You have the hammering bench, the bending bench and the
continuous-flow bench. You can walk around all these benches, look them over,
wondering if they are sufficient and good enough for the job, but since they
are organic and can adapt, you decide they’re the only tools you have and you
just have to go for it, come what may.
Instead
of installing an iPod with the top-40 songs for your garage sound system, you
only tune in to the best music available: the masters of wisdom, the practical
spiritual practitioners, the tried and tested authorities, and you try to
understand their melodies, harmonies and rhythms, which is not that easy, as
they use quite simple words to describe sometimes complex processes and we have
to learn how to listen before the meaning and inspiration actually sinks in.
You
begin to discover that what you needed was already there. You just have to
bring more awareness to your six senses and allow yourself to get aligned and
clean the mind, with thoughts like the following:
1) I was
conceived and born because the world needed a potential human soul to come into
existence at that time. I accept that responsibility, and work backwards to
find out why I was born and what I have to do to pay my fare and return any
outstanding debts to the universe.
2) I was
given a set of characteristics and qualities, which are my basic tools for
life. My time and place of birth is unique, and the situation of the universe
at that point in time was unique. Therefore I am unique – and since I don’t
know how long I’m going to be here, I take advantage of my uniqueness.
3) I was
given a whole set of features, weaknesses and strengths, from the collective
unconscious of humankind over the past 40,000 years. I have to learn how to deal
with all this.
3) I was
placed under all kinds of stresses and strains from birth onwards and made to
fit into a particular family or broken home, school, society, cultural milieu,
race, and condition of general human development or under-development. I have
to live with all this, deal with my conditioning, and work through it all.
4) I developed
a mask, a persona, or personality to fit in better or worse in my environment. I
have to find out what my personality or ego is like and learn to deal with it.
5) I seek
pleasure and avoid pain, cultivate my mind and give free reign to my thinking
and feeling processes. I have to start seeing reality as it is and
going against the natural flow that keeps me unconscious.
6) I get
discouraged because Life always kicks me in the face, and I’m not always
“happy”. I think others are to blame. I have to realise only I can learn how
to deal with all this.
7) I finally
discover that only I can align myself with the universe and I start to develop
a new attitude to Life. This is the beginning of my alignment with the universe.
My “ego” loses its attraction, and I have a funny feeling that maybe there is
something more than just an “I” that is always separate from others.
Take it from
there and develop all your potential. If the mind can ask for a reason, there
must be a reason for it all, despite the fact that a mind can convince itself
that there is no reason for anything – that’s the easy part! The hard part is
asking the mind to tell us the reason. It’s a lifelong process, and just like
car wheels always needing regular alignment, we have to get rightly aligned
with the Universe to live properly.
It’s not
the wrong time. It’s not the wrong place. We are all born at exactly the right
time in precisely the right place and with the appropriate circumstances. It’s
up to us to realise this and be present, and promote Self-Awareness.
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