I wrote about Nature’s Support last spring but the topic has come around again from a different angle.
There is an idea in eastern philosophy known as the support of nature. As we stop resisting life and instead learn to work with what is arising, we cooperate with the flow of life in and around us. Our desires are then fulfilled more easily, we can work out problems faster, and what we need just shows up.
Keep in mind that everything that happens is being done. Our cooperation allows those who support us to support us more easily. If we’ve also begun to produce soma, we’re massively amplifying their ability to support us – and their enjoyment in doing so.
Being supported also means when difficult events arise, they can move through more smoothly and with less drama – depending also on how we’re reacting.
When we’re growing up, we’re taught principles to help support right action, like the Golden Rule. Yet we’re much more effective at such things if it is also our experience, if we know directly that hurting another hurts ourselves and vice versa.
In this way, it’s important to recognize the power of our attention and the need for a little vigilance. By the latter, I don’t mean control, just awareness.
Just as people are of mixed qualities, so too are the nature beings around us. Nature includes both creative forces and destructive forces. Life requires dissolution to clear out the old and make way for the new. But do we want that growing in our lives? Whatever we feed will increase.
As an illustration, we need people to take away our trash and recycling. But if they got carried away and hauled away our new stuff, we’d be less than pleased. We need the number of trash collectors in balance with the delivery people. 🙂
It is also good to recognize that the fields of support and action are not personal. Everything done is in the context of the whole. We’re in this together. Thus, drivers that are selfish may not be supported and can lead to corruption.
Thus our vigilance should be on noticing what is driving our action. How it feels. If control or resistance or dark emotions are coming up, we know we have something to heal. And we know results from those drivers will be much less satisfying or may backfire on us.
If we try to be vigilant with the mind, we’ll get into control and justification issues. We’ll be able to spout a tidy story for why it was right to abuse or betray others. It’s just business? Look behind the stories too. What is the emotional driver?
Spiritual communities can get into trouble here. Like following the rules even if it destroys someones life.
I’ve seen people teach meditation as an honest desire to help others and have a pure profession. But I’ve also seen it being corrupted by a desire for power, recognition, or even revenge. Similarly, service may be driven by guilt, obligation, or to feel above others.
Not that we should second-guess our motivations all the time. Just here and there notice the feel of what’s driving your action. Feel a little yucky? Healing time.
This is also not to suggest a desire for recognition or affirmation is bad. But it’s good to recognize such drivers so we can’t be so easily compromised by them.
This is where peers and close relationships can be helpful. Others are much more likely to see our stuff and offer us feedback on it. A healthy critique helps us stay on track. I have several friends who are happy to help out. (laughs)
Davidya
Last Updated on June 25, 2023 by Davidya
I know but little about astrology and nothing about Jyotish. But according to the western system I have Neptun in the ascendent.
I was born with a trident tattoed on my forehead.
So your advice could make me a bull in a china shop.
😉
Hi Herwig
Basically, western fixed the zodiac about 2,000 years ago. It’s now about 23+ degrees off the actual sky. (a sign is 30 deg) Jyotish matches the actual sky. In western I also have Neptune on the ascendant but not in jyotish.
Many men are bulls in a china shop, myself included. 🙂
throw Mars or Jupiter there and then we’re cooking with gas 🙂 Neptune there marks one as a mystic or an escapist, whatever end of the Neptunian spectrum one wants to play out.
Ishtar uses western but takes it into the akashic records. 🙂
This one is quite lovely 🙂
Thanks.
I find the whole subject of the Support of Nature a mine field. So the theory is people who have all their ducks in row in terms of their consciousness, their karma, their attitude, their interactions with Nature etc. will be successful. But we can all find examples of evil people becoming rich and good people living tragic lives. As Joseph asked the Christ, Rabbi, how can these things be?
I guess it could argued that perhaps the riches are a curse and the tragic lives weren’t such a bad thing. I mean being a white child raised in a middle class family in North America we weren’t rich by any means and there were many things that I never got that I wanted, but I always had food in my belly, clothes on my back a warm and comfortable place to sleep every night and loving parents, this has been true my whole life and it’s certainly miles ahead of being raised in the slums of Bombay. And what might seem a disaster can be a blessing. For instance when I lost a breast to cancer it ended up being one of the most uplifting times of my life. I discovered how strong I am, and I learned how much so many people loved me. But the whole thing still puzzles me.
I’ve had a lot of what people might call “manifestations” populate my life, but what has differed from many of the books out there is that the experience has been very much one of being so immersed in the Silence and the Flow that there seemed very little distinction between “my desire” and the “flow of the Universe.” In the TM tradition and the Ishaya path that has been my spiritual home, this is often referred to as Rtam Bhara Prajna- “that level of Consciousness that supports Divine Truth” or something of the like. There is such a sense of working with the flow of the river of life as opposed to grabbing for the sides of the river and getting knocked about by the rocks on the shoreline. Not everything might go “your way”, but increasing the individual life stream flows with the Way 🙂
Hi Gina
Yes, the field of action is unfathomable, mainly because it is so vast and complex and intertwined. But also because it plays out in the context of the whole, not the individual. Yet at the same time the basic principles are straightforward.
The perennial question – why do bad things happen to good people? Their history. We’ve all been around the block many times and have blundered and done terrible things. At some point, those things come home to roost. The opportunity can arise when we’re in a good place, just as purification can happen when we’re in peace.
I say this from personal experience. I’m aware of a number of prior lives and the impact they’ve had on this one. In many cases people are not aware. This is intentional so we can learn the lesson in itself.
The most important thing is how we respond to what is arising. This is because it affects not only our experience of life but determines if we’re able to resolve what is arising or if we cycle it back to come around yet again. It sounds very much like your example was of the first type.
On the question about why bad people gain wealth, power etc. This relates to several things. Karma is specific to areas of life, so we can build up good money karma and difficult relationship karma, for example. Some people choose a life of just spending past “credits” but use them up rather than using them to build more.
It also relates to the whole. When the group consciousness has stuff it needs to work out, people are brought forward who can embody what needs to be seen and processed. For example, the EU, UK, and US are all in difficult cycles at the moment that are influencing voting, etc.
We can’t judge a person merely by their surface actions. Yet it is good to engage with people who are going to be supportive of our life.
All of this is essentially working out the past. Natures support is about the present. Getting into the flow of current life so we can be more productive, etc. This takes some practice for most people as we can have ideas about what we’re “supposed to” be doing with our life that are wrong. The need of the time also changes, making it a bit of a moving target. 🙂
We can have periods of life where working out karma is more dominant. Then the key is finding how to be in that most smoothly. Other times, life seems to be more about flow and natures support is more obvious.
Nature is always supporting us. But if we can discover how it wants to support us we can work with it rather than against it more. This makes life smoother. But unresolved karma comes with a shadow that obscures. This makes the process of discovery a lifetime of learning. 🙂
This is beautiful, and makes things so much clearer. Thank you.
You’re welcome. I got some other off-line related questions and suggestions so I’ll do an article on the topic.
Hi David,
Re: “the field of action is unfathomable, mainly because it is so vast and complex and intertwined” and the perennial – why bad things happen to good people.
(Laughs, scratches head) Tom Campbell was recently asked to address the same subject in a recent web gathering (it’s here if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktjkvSGGTWw at 36min in, but be warned it’s not a short answer).
The takeaway is, he seems to strongly indicate that not everything is karmic or planned and that because reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic that always randomness has a large part to play due to the myriad variables at work, not least of all is the unpredictability of free will.
He’s said in other videos that souls can, for example, have lives that don’t go at all to plan, have their incarnation pass prematurely and be genuinely frustrated in the afterlife, as too may those souls be, whom we are intertwined and have planned with. The only consolation being, we get yet another life to proceed onto and try again.
(For curiosity, here’s another spiritually controversial video, short this time, where he addresses if there’s ever a point where we(soul) no longer need another life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BYJIpKfnTg)
Personally, I guess my mind is doing the ‘mystic-claims Venn diagram ‘he said, she said’ mind-pacification thing’ again – which can only end up as more beliefs and concepts anyway.
You’ve said before (and I should start to heed! Laughs), that different people, teachers or otherwise, speak from different perspectives and that’s where seeming contradictions and confusion ensues.
Whether why bad things happen to good people is purely down to their soul’s history or is down to complete randomness, or a mixture of the two, I’m guessing the conclusion, irrespective for our part, is the same as it was on https://davidya.ca/2018/12/03/spinning-or-seeing/.
And that is, to be vigilant to how we’re operating, to how we’re responding to what happens and resolve the energetic charges that are arising. When it’s time to act, act appropriately, surrendering the actions performed and what cannot be acted on, or be changed, to nature. 🙂
Of course, the point of convergence is where Campbell says there are no bad experiences/events per se, only valuable lessons. Which, if I’m thinking aloud, too must pertain to the soul(s) whom may have prematurely lost an incarnation or be frustrated in someway with the way a life went.
In an earthy sense, it’s still a hard pill to swallow, given the spectrum of suffering out there, but this precept keeps falling into the intersection of the ‘spiritual-insight’ Venn diagram…so gotta accept that one (shrugs). 🙂
Hi Phil
Interesting. Keep in mind Tom Campbell is a physicist so he’s observed physical laws of probability, etc. That is perfectly valid on that level. Yet at a deeper level there is a guiding hand that’s motivating that probability.
When the deeper flows become evident, the sense of randomness fades. But that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to believe all is perfect.
I would not say it’s deterministic exactly because there is choice- choice in choosing the “fate” we plan and in how we respond to that unfolding. We can say the choices of the past lead to the determinism of the present. Ditto for the present and the future.
It’s not been the experience here but I’ve heard it said that we sometimes underestimate the thickness of the veils after we enter our lives and thus don’t respond how we might have expected prior. In other words, we don’t necessarily act according to plan. This reminds me some of being a parent. You can give your kids advice but what they do with it…
It’s been the experience that we can only stray so far off the path of our life. We can travel on the paved surface, on the gravel shoulder, or along the ditch. But we’re still roughly moving in the right direction with variable levels of smoothness. We can stall out but usually something pushes things along, perhaps painfully. Choice within a destiny we might say.
That said, it would not surprise me if there are scenarios where the plan fails more thoroughly. Or where something was planned with someone else who fails to show (make the move, etc that would have made it happen). And yet I’ve also noticed that you can heal one end of a relationship and leave it to them to work out their part.
Some do come into a life for a specific experience and then leave. This means they may have a short life on purpose. There are many, many options.
My experience of frustration in the afterlife is more around not completing stuff we came for. A friend, for example, had anger issues to sort out with her mother as the trigger. She made progress but didn’t resolve it. That was difficult for her afterward. But she then went on to help others with their anger issues (from the “other side”), helping both them and herself to learn it more deeply.
There are others who don’t cooperate this way, kind of like people who refuse to cooperate with the community in which they live, causing trouble for those around them and themselves. Same thing is true in the afterlife, although I’d say the vast majority see the value of being on the program. 🙂
And again, all of this is unfolding in the larger context of the whole. From a perceptive of an infinite now, everything is happening all at once so there is no choice or fate. It’s more like a passing thought.
There is no “bad” really – that is how we’ve subjectively judged something. Kind of like the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a signal somethings wrong. If we allow it, it’s job is done. Suffering is in how we respond and is thus optional.
I agree theres a lot of suffering. A big part of that is a need for education – how to be in life more nicely. The better we can do with that, the better we model it, the higher group consciousness rises and the fewer people suffer.
I watched part of the second video. Amusing. And yeah, put a bunch of “done” together to mirror each other and they’ll figure it out eventually. 🙂
I don’t consider any of this “mystic” any more than a visit to France is mystical. But yeah, you don’t want to take anything at face value. What i describe here is just one perspective. It’s also one thats evolved a lot over the years as older articles here can attest to. 🙂
Thanks David,
“Pain is a signal somethings wrong. If we allow it, it’s job is done. Suffering is in how we respond and is thus optional.” I know this is a continuation of the theme we have discussed a lot lately, but seeing it written even a slightly different way is really valuable. Thanks.
There’s some sort of an equation in there somewhere. Something like:
Pain or emotional charge = signal alert to something wrong
Suffering = Resistance to said pain
Allowance of pain = Pain completion
Pain Completion = suffering neutralised.
Something wrong = righted
Maths or computer coding wasn’t my strong suit (laughs).
Yeah I know (laughs), I used “mystic” for want of a better term.
I guess it all seems mystical to those without such refined perception and experiences – like France would seem mystical if you had no memory of being there and thus no experience or reference for any real concept of France.
All of a sudden the travel reports of a France visitor would be “mystic” and wondrous, especially if your only reference point is England (Laughs). 🙂
Hi Phil
Well -I’d define it a little differently. Pain and suffering are not tied together unless we make it so.
Suffering is caused by resistance. It may be resistance to pain or emotions or ideas, etc. Suffering is also caused by the reverse – grasping. Attachment.
Pain completion doesn’t necessarily end suffering at all. For example, we can continue in a drama about what “happened to me.” We can fall into fear of future experiences of pain. Etc.
We can also experience pain without suffering at all. This is a characteristic of witnessing, for example.
(laughs) Yes, it’s all relative. When I first traveled to France, I was surprised by many things. Mainly it was the small unexpected details, like traffic flow, or the way people carried loaves of bread, or the expense of fresh fruit…
Oh heck! Thought I had me a formula for perhaps the most difficult aspect of existence (Laughs. Not as though something so complex can have such a simple prescription or antidote!)
Joking aside, I, currently, don’t have enough clarity to accurately discriminate fully, in my own experience, between pain and suffering.
In your example, “…we can continue in a drama about what “happened to me.” We can fall into fear of future experiences of pain. Etc.” – Wouldn’t both the drama about what happened and also too the fear of future experiences of pain, be in themselves driven by charges, by pains? Fear of future pain would, perhaps, be simply a pain in the present, and be thus asking for resolution. Are not attachments and aversions in themselves driven by charges/a pain?
A further query, though it’s clearer (I think) than my above confusion – more of a devil’s advocate argument (well, he does live in my mind, rent free!), would be:
If pain can truly be experienced without suffering, then does the ‘pain’ cease to be actually pain, and is it not therefore more a recontextualised sensation?
Having not experienced pain in a state of witnessing, I have no personal reference for this and am just curious. This is perhaps more linguistic pedantry in that perhaps we culturally define a sensation as actually being ‘pain’ or ‘painfull’ by its very potency for imparting suffering.
I know you hear many post self-realisation say that there’s no-one there who can suffer what we would call ‘pain’. Perhaps as there’s no-one or function to resist that ‘pain’ in the same way as there’s no-one or inclination to grasp at ‘pleasure’.
Of course, I don’t know. Seeking itself is kind of a suffering. They do say the path can be difficult, especially when an ego like mine keeps ‘trying’ to let go and surrender into it. Ha. :-/
Hi Phil
hmmm. Fear of future pain is not pain, it is suffering caused by fear. If we relieve the fear, the suffering ends. The actual pain was in the past. It is being remembered with a charge, a reaction, a resistance. Again, when that charge (fear in this case) is resolved, the memory is still there but is now more neutral. It doesn’t cause a visceral reaction.
Pain is in the present, a signal something is wrong. If you break your arm, for example, there will be pain. If you resist the pain, it will persist. If you allow the pain, the signal is received and the pain eases way off. There still may be a dull throbbing but the “shouting” ends.
In some ways, the dynamics of the 2 are similar. Both are resolved through allowing. But pain is now, suffering is related to past and future and it is resistance and grasping at what is not present. Yoga talks about this too:
https://davidya.ca/2014/05/14/the-end-of-suffering/
Many people are not conscious they are suffering. It is so normal, we tune it out so we’re not overwhelmed by it. But at some point, it gradually becomes more conscious. We start to see the issues and release them as they arise in our experience.
Pain isn’t recontextualized – that’s mind. Pain may be likened to a sensation but we also have emotional pain, like grief. That works very much the same way. When it’s experienced without resistance, it is simply pure pain.
Sorry – thats renunciate approach BS. As Rick Archer brings up with statements like that, if I step on your toe, you still experience it. There isn’t an absence of a person, there is absence of identification with a person. The person is no longer the center.
We move out of suffering (gradually) but pain remains. If your partner dies post-self Realization, you will still experience honest grief. But it will be full and rich and will complete. If enough unpacking has happened, it will be without suffering. It will not cast a shadow long term.
People can certainly go through a phase of “no ego” and “no person” but that should end as it integrates. If they continue to deny their humanity, they create a massive blind spot and can cause themselves and others problems.
This may be a suitable approach for someone who has renounced the world and lives in a cave somewhere. But for most of us, we’re very much in the world and have to use the person to interact in it.
(laughs) Yes, seeking is suffering as it’s a grasping for what is desired. Yet it can be a necessary step to motivate things to prepare the ground.
I recall recognizing how convoluted the ego was, even using memories of spiritual experiences to get into conflict with “Self” as a distraction from seeing. Happily, one doesn’t have to figure it out. Just deepen into silence and eventually it gets loud enough to overshadow any attempts of the ego. 🙂
Thanks David,
That’s worth a couple of reads and some reflection on prizing the 2 apart. Yeah, it’s especially emotional pain, like grief, being present without suffering that I’m failing to distinguish, owing to the nature of loss and change.
Simply because I’ve never experienced pain and suffering apart, but rather in some defuse mesh, smeared across years rather than the pure pain of honest grief allowed to complete fully over a short time, without residue.
It’s starting to become clearer, well, in as much as conceptual understanding with this can.
(Laughs. A LOT) “Sorry – thats renunciate approach BS. As Rick Archer brings up with statements like that, if I step on your toe, you still experience it.” I know right!!!
I have never understood that, from even just a position of logic. Even a state of “no ego/no person” has to experienced by an apparently individuated facet.
My inner cynic (he lives across the hall from the devil’s advocate) has always wondered that if there is actually ‘no person’, as opposed to no identification with a person, then who the hell is saying “there is no person”??!! Furthermore who is it then that is going around the world, giving interviews, satsangs, retreats, teaching ‘no persons’ that there is “no person” and making earnings from such ventures?!! Presumably such people have bank accounts. They don’t tell their bank “there is no person to whom this bank account can belong.” There’s still a dream person in a dream bank.
I don’t mean to pick on the ‘no person’ teachers. They could though be tied up in knots with some ‘old school’ dharma combat. Be that as it may, they are an important catalyst for many and clearly have a part to play in shifting the whole. 🙂
But yeah, that’s why the humanity/world denial teachings don’t work. Even if there’s renunciation of the world, there’s still the ‘renouncer in a cave’ experience. You said it David, BS. (Laughs) Right, I’m returning inner-cynic back to his mind-apartment, before he goes on any further… 🙂
Hi Phil
That becomes more familiar with witnessing, when one is less in the experience and is able to simply observe it. Then the difference between pain and suffering becomes much more clear.
When the identification with the ego falls away, it can be experienced as an ego death. Some people stay with that experience and some renunciate teachings have been more broadly applied. But for the average person, we soon recognize that the ego is still there, it’s just no longer at the center, no longer who we are.
Related to this, when presence is very dominant, it can overshadow the sense of person. They’d experience presence (or whatever word) acting and speaking through them. It’s not the person driving the bus and never was.
Not to mention philosophical approaches that can lead to cognitive bias. Kind of like the Buddhist referring to no-self when they clearly experience a cosmic Self.
But still, to say there is no person is like saying there is no big toe because I don’t see it inside my shoe. 🙂
I fully appreciate this is my take based on my own experience. But I think it’s valuable even from the standpoint of humility. It’s very rare that enlightenment fully cleans house. Even the most awake usually have some stuff they’re still working on.
Something that Phil said make me think of my own situation “incarnation pass prematurely” My husband an I find ourselves in just the opposite position. We were scheduled to pass on about six years ago. But we moved to a different part of the earth where our Jyotish was much improved and we didn’t die. But it left us in a bit of a conundrum, ” Okay we’re still alive…Now what do we do?” Needless to say it has been interesting and we now feel that we’ve started all over again. Life has become a new adventure.
Oh interesting. I’ve explored that but not in that way. A chart rectification certainly changed the “expiry date.” Some say we have several possible exit points. I’ve also heard it said we can complete our karma and choose to stay on to work on more. But the latter would mean new rules of the game.
Thank you – good discussion. Yes, one thing that informs our understanding of so-called random events is the growing experience of ourselves as Infinite.
We may have committed a sin a thousand years ago, a blink of an eye ago, and, “gotten away with it”, and without knowing ourselves as Infinite, it comes back around.
Not for any nefarious reason, simply to hold our lives as accountable as any other life. Everyone plays by exactly the same rules. Our Divine Mother [our Source] only transmits Love, Truth, and Purity. The rest is a misunderstanding. 🙂
Yep, the rules of the game board. But as we recognize ourselves as the player and not the game piece, the dynamics change. And then we recognize ourselves as the gamekeeper itself. And so on 🙂
I feel this spring equinox is especially powerful and blissful. I felt the rising energy right a few days before the spring equinox and now it is showering rain of bliss from the top of the head. It is very intense when I hear the birds singing 🙂
Beautiful, Jean
Yes, the equinox was accompanied by a super full moon in Uttara Phalguni, the nakashatra of spiritual love.
Here, we changed from winter to late spring in 2 days. 🙂
Oh interesting, thank you.
I never thought that one can feel such closeness to Mother Nature.
When you become nature itself and you are the birds singing, the sun shining, the rain falling, it is a profound intimacy.
.
I am a rock, I am a duck,
I am a bird and a plane,
I am the skies and the ocean,
The clouds and the rain…
🙂
Yes the veil of separation is thinning 🙂
Beautiful, thanks David.