What Does Your Mind Weigh?

Message from my dream this morning--  the only true ownership is self-ownership.  Meaning, own thyself.  Not the air, or the water, or the incorporated labor.  Work is abundant.  It grows from the stone, out of nothing.  Tweaking the twig and replanting brings forth more life.

We can be sustainable.  We can help secure the conditions conducive to life.  Doing so sustains us all. 

But what does it mean, really-- this self-ownership?

I think it means that no one can own another.  Slavery is a no-no.  A big bad.  Cocka-poopoo.

And just as that is so, one cannot own the things that are sacred.  The elements of the source that sustains us all.  The land, the wind.  The life force that turns seed into oak tree, plain into canyon.

The river cuts its way through it, finding its path around obstacles.  So does our consciousness.

For me, spirituality is the source through which we are all understood, along with everything. 

But I fear I'm not making myself clear.  Please know that I am trying.

Religion is one thing; spirituality quite another.  Religion is like a menu at a diner-- follow instructions and you'll be nourished, albeit with a greasy hangover.  It says that if you read what is written and follow the way of the word, there is salvation.  There is promise and hope for something much better than the reality that we encounter with our senses. 

But much of what religion promises cannot be delivered.  At least, as far as we know.  There's been thousands of years of religion and attempts to communicate beyond what we experience as a collective reality, and far too little has been passed back,  through the keyhole, to prove or explain or plainly justify the rules and regulations that have been written down in an attempt to capture the lightning in a bottle.

Our reality is a lie.  It's an estimate at best.  We've measured from here to the stars and back and down into the bloodstream and beyond the chemistry and the molecules and the atoms and the imagined building blocks of the building blocks.  And still we have no answers.  Only more questions. 

Questions are the fuel of the imagination.  They get us out of bed in the morning.  It is this practice of judgement, not the actual ruling, that is important.  As was said in Angels In America about justice-- and now I am paraphrasing, because I don't have a photographic memory-- the process of law is what is justice, not the verdict.  The verdict may feel like salvation, but it too can be questioned again, under the right circumstances.  We question and ponder, and that reshapes and hones reality and law and is the basic process of our justice system.  And it is what is wrong-- very wrong-- about many religions.

Religions stake a claim to some holy sanctity, some static entity, of eternal truth.  They build their rituals around this claim, purporting to have found the answers to what is right and what is wrong, and simply cleaning up all the messy grey areas and printing it up in black and white.  But true divinity does not solidify.  It is always in motion.  Alive.  Breathing.  Blooming.

This is what spirituality is, for me.  The acknowledgement of a greater than thou.  A simple greater than.  There is more, abundantly, in perpetuity, and it grows freely out of nothing.

At least, that was what has been on my mind today.  And several other days in my life.  What is the mass of the mind?  And is it heavier with though or without?

Questions are greater than answers.

Today, I weighed myself.  I looked down and saw a number.  I realized that I was much more than that number, that my ultimate self was actually much lighter than the number.  I am on a journey, and I believe that my mind and body are on that journey with me.  But I am not the number.  I am oh so much more than that number.