Staying Focused on What’s In Here versus Out There
Health is Nondenominational and Nonpartisan
It is hard these days to keep away from the 24/7 assault on our lives, with the news media, social media, politicians, businesses, and many other organizations vying for our attention, votes, and money. They each make their cries louder and louder in competing with all the others. Everything is a headline. And (they want us to believe) everything is life or death! For much of my life I was opinionated and partisan about all these issues. Now, in my life yet to live years, where my health, vitality and joy are my priorities, I no longer am.
The only thing that really is life and death, or health and illness, or anything that makes a difference to the quality of our lives is not what’s happening out there. It’s what’s happening in here—inside our minds and bodies. All the answers to life’s big issues, whether they are physical, mental, or spiritual, are the province of what happens inside us. The health and integration of our inner worlds, both mental and spiritual—along with our physical self—is the true Rosetta Stone that we all have in common, no matter what our religious and political paths are.
For me, this universal aspect of myself has become magnified and focussed the more I look after my health and what really matters to me in life. It gives me a stronger core of selfhood that helps me withstand (with temporary lapses for sure) the 24/7 assault of what I’ve started labeling “the diversions.” For, in truth, none of the diversions are as important or as dire as their advocates say they are. They are all part of a moving chain of human and planetary existence and history, and they will all continue to morph and become what they will, or not. Their outcome doesn’t really affect my life nearly as much as my personal experience of my world does.
Experiencing My Universal Self
We were created by a force that has only the names we give it but is ultimately unknowable except by direct experience. It has presented itself to me, and I have chosen to experience it as health and inner well-being. I believe that 90% of each of us exists mostly outside of our awareness. In sleep this is 100%. Yet it all keeps humming along, keeping us alive—the healing, processing, housekeeping, and myriad other dynamics modern medical science is just beginning to understand. It has been working this way for as long as life has existed, on its own, without our help or interference. This is the true miracle of existence, and what I now experience more and more.
That 90% is where my universal self exists, outside of my conscious awareness. It operates on its own rhythm and dynamics. It is highly integrated: body, mind, and spirit. It doesn’t have a first name or a last one. It is always active, always moving. “I” am an organism that the universe created to be as genuine and healthy as possible and to play a part in the eternal mystery of evolution. I am mortal. When we talk of being a part of the infinite, this is the part of us that is eternally connected to the universe.
My conscious mind, the other 10%, is greedy. It wants to take all the credit for everything that is me, without acknowledging this universal self. It wants to ignore that it is completely dependent on my universal self for its existence. It wants to ignore what causes me to fall ill. It wants me to ignore that I am mortal and one day won’t exist in this form. It wants to ignore the simple wonder of the experience of being alive in all its splendor. It wants to stay hooked on screens, news, opinions, music, personalities, and “gods” (whether they be celebrity, political or religious); to keep believing the world out there matters more than the world in here. It wants to stay hooked on a world that could be or should be rather than a world that is, with me and my experience of life at its center.
Acknowledging that my universal self is actually driving the bus, not my 10% ego self, has been a big part of my journey. It hasn’t come without effort. Health and peace exist in my universal self with dynamics that I am newly discovering every day through practice, study, and experimentation.
Take a minute to try this exercise: Turn off all distractions (your TV, phone, even music), take a few deep breaths, and still your mind. Now listen. What do you hear? What do you feel? This could be your first step toward health and peace.
