I was just about to leave the Yoga Center today when I got to talking with one of the regulars who had just finished a class. It was an excellent conversation spanning such topics as why cooking makes people not want to go home, all the way to what doing and being truely mean, what God is, and what really happeneds when you die. Basically the kind of interaction that is the meat and potatoes (s’cuse the expression) which nourish my soul.
What I really discovered through our conversation was the relationship between “getting God”, Lokiya and societal norms. You know, regular tea-after-class kind of talk. People seriously wonder where I work to be having these peculiar revelations, but the space totally invokes depth. I love it
So the relationship. Most humans have this “longing to belong” experience. Some people end up in a tight knit workplace atmosphere, some hang with an activist group they identify with, or maybe join a gang, some become fanatically religious… all to find a home for their soul. I am more on the religious side of things.
I did not, however, get fully into any particular religion, basically because I was only looking for what I call “the God feeling” and no religion / spiritual group satified it for long. To make a very long story short (as my yogi tea buddy can attest to), I found god in a church when I was a kid, and from that point on I thought I would have to go somewhere similar to get the god feeling again. When it came down to it, many years later, I realized that I didn’t need any one particular religions dogma to give me God, God was inside me.
Moving on, that’s what Lokiya is all about, and from what I have learned so far, is one of the differences between Lokiya and Abilokiya (tanslated as worldly and above worldly) - thinking that some external thing can give you a feeling. (Wow! The more I think about this, the more it makes sense) So I traveled around from religion to religion looking for God. I would find it, and then something adverse would freak me out and the god feeling would go away. Abilokiya says that if something could really give you a feeling then it would continue doing so whether in adverse or pleasantly distracting circumstances. Yup, sure enough: adverse circumstances = no god feeling .: place not= to god feeling. So then I find out, after many iterations of the same story, that the god feeling comes from inside me and I can create it anywhere. Therefor thinking something can give me God is a very worldly way of experiencing life (check, right on track.)
Now how does this relate to societal norms? WELL. Society says that if you want something, you can buy it, or get it from somewhere. People want a home, they buy one. Pre-made. They don’t have to build it or anything. People want food, they can live in a 29 story condominium with no balcony and get food from Isreal at the supermarket down the street - organic! With all this buying and getting, we have perhaps been lead to believe that we can get God too. So we got to some place, pay our dues and think that we’ve got God. In my experience, that’s the kind of feeling that dissapears in adverse situations, or when life is going really well.
Abilokiya is about process, not product. Its not about the getting, its about the how. I realize that I get my God feeling when I am serving my soul. NO one can take that away, because no one else gives it to me.
I suppose this is why it is hard to remember where the God feeling comes from in a society where everything else seems to come from somewhere else.