The Meaning of Life

I realize I’m a little late to the game, but I just got into some Ram Dass teachings. That dude is hilarious! I recently listened to a recording of him telling the story of the Ramayana which is delightfully involved and convoluted. My favorite part however, was about Hanuman, the monkey god.

Hanuman gets up to all kinds of antics in this story; destroying sacred orchards, gorging on fruits and crushing boulders, tearing the fabric of reality with his very joy, and of course, endless devotion to Rama.

There’s a point in the story where Rama offers to reward Hanuman by merging him with his own being. This is, of course, an offer to reach pure oneness with consciouness; a.k.a. enlightenment. Who would turn that down?! Well, Hanuman of course.

And why does he turn it down? Because he so loves the supreme bliss of loving Rama - versus being Rama - that he never wants to leave that state. All of who he is, all of his powers and joy and delight and majesty comes from his love for Rama. And so they strike a compromise and Rama promises to always hold him close, so that he can be both near Rama and continue his path of devoted love. What a guy!

This put me in mind of a sermon I had preached just the day before on karma, choices, and the meaning of life. Now this is a teaching that can get lengthy so I’ll cut to the chase.

All karma, as defined by the Buddha, is simply thought. Truly that’s it. He helpfully elaborates a tiny bit to say that skillful karma comes from skillful thought, and unskillful karma comes from unskillful thought.

Jesus addresses this too in his own teachings on enlightenment which he refers to as the Kingdom of God. The mistranslation is that ‘good’ people will get into the KoG and ‘bad’ people won’t. But a wise friend pointed out to me that Jesus never uses those words; good and bad. In Greek those words are simply ripe and unripe.

Now you’ll notice that neither the Buddha nor Jesus have a value judgement on where someone is in their path, their karma. There’s no good or bad to an unripe fruit. It’s simply a matter of timing, a neutral statement of fact.

We mere mortals on the other hand love to judge karma, especially someone else’s bad karma. We love to watch the egotistical be brought low, the impatient be made to wait, the greedy ones lose everything. Or at least I do. And I love to do a little a spiritual bypass and ascribe all those sufferings to karma. Specifically, someone else’s bad karma that they obviously deserve.

But this punitive model is more cultural than spiritual, evidenced by our obsession with imprisoning (mostly black) people in this country. On a purely spiritual level, we all get to have the full range of human experience without any judgment or punishment.

You get to be greedy and see what that’s like. You get to be impatient and experience the results. You get to be egotistical and taste that poisonous power. Neither Jesus, nor Buddha, nor Spirit Herself has any opinion on all this. Which brings me to the crux of karma; choice.

You get to have these things because your supreme birthright is choice, and the consequences that come from it. This is the meaning of life.

In other words, every soul gets to create for themselves a path of choice that will lead them eventually through all the karmas so they can learn one supreme lesson; we have choice and our choices have outcomes. Skillful ripe choices have skillful ripe outcomes, and vice versa, and it’s up to us to make that connection taking whatever amount of time we need.

We have choice because we are so powerful and blessed, illuminated and beloved, made of pure Spirit. We get to have all our choices; skillful and unskillful, ripe and unripe. That path of enlightenment on the way to the Kingdom of God, then, is about making that clear connection between choice and outcome.

This is where Hanuman comes in. He makes the highly unusual yet suprememly skillful choice to stay slightly separate from Rama - from Spirit - in order to anchor firmly into that practice of eternal devotion and love. If you’re in a body reading this, in a way you’ve made that choice too. And what a beautiful karma that is to have.

I could continue on 18 diferent tangents here, and I’m sure I will in future teachings, but for now just know that you too are on the Hanuman path, moving irresistably towards Spirit, full of the great karma of choice and love. May your ripeness grow, your skillfulness bless all those around you, and your soul be delighted forever.