The stuff that weighs us down….
Last weekend I went to see my beloved George Clooney give a superb performance in his new movie Up in the Air. Cool movie – go see it! Without giving away anything important I can tell you that George’s job entails constantly flying around the world firing people from their jobs. Apparently there are companies that do this – if the boss is too scared or timid or whatever himself he hires some one else to do his dirty work.
Anyway, as a side gig, George is a public speaker. You know the type – a motivational speaker who works the various conferences that are so popular these days. And George’s little twist comes in the form of a backpack. His talk is called “What’s in your backpack?” Basically he suggests the audience imagines themselves wearing a backpack and slowly filling it with all their ‘stuff’ – from clothes and ornaments and books to furniture, cars, houses. He asks them to add all the people in their lives. He implores them to feel the weight that they are lugging around, day after day. And suggests that they throw everything out. Empty the backpack.
And then last night – in that strange serendipidous fashion in which a specific message is repeated from a completely unrelated source – I happened to catch a talk given on TV by a truly lovely spiritual teacher by the name of Prem Rawat (also known as Maharaji). He began by saying that we are all on a voyage – that our body is our vehicle for this voyage – and he asked what was the point of this voyage. What is the point of this life we are all so busy living? The point, he says, is to experience ‘the ulitimate’. What is the ulitmate? That, he says, cannot be described – but suffice to say that the same force that moves the universe exists inside of ourselves – right here in our vehicle – and the point of the voyage is to discover and experience that force.
And he spoke of how we all carry so many things with us on our voyage. So much heavy stuff that weighs us down. We carry our anger and our sadness. We carry resentment and envy. All heavy stuff. And confusion. He said confusion is SO heavy it pretty much prevents us from going anywhere. Why carry all this on our voyage?
Now that we know that the purpose of the voyage is to discover and experience the universal force, we can put our confusion down and pick up clarity. Feel clarity – how little it weighs he says. And pick up joy. Feel the weight of joy. It is so light that it makes YOU feel light.
So let us all continue on our voyage of discovery accompanied by clarity and joy, and let’s see how light we feel.
And not forgetting George – poor George who, having emptied his backpack, was left with nothing – perhaps some one can tell him what he should be putting into his backpack once everything else has been emptied out?
(You can visit Maharaji’s website by clicking here)
