18th December. Christmas shopping and volunteering
Going to the shops today to get presents that people have demanded gifts for Christmas, happily this shopping trip handedly coincides with the Volunteer Centre Christmas party. I have sent Santa a long list of wants, and a short list of needs.
Spoke to a few people there who agreed with me that the face of volunteering is changing rapidly.
Only a few years ago, volunteers were 100% people who wanted to ‘get their hands dirty’, now at least 75% of them want to use it (a) as a qualification (b) something to add to their cv (c) improve their office skills (d) improve their ability to speak and understand English. This is especially true of East Europeans. There is some disquiet about the drop in numbers of people who want to volunteer for purely altruistic purposes.
But hey, if I were a ’stranger in a strange land’, I’d be grateful that there were opportunities for me to ‘fit in’
21st December. Christmas V Spiritual practice
The nearer Christmas comes, the more happier, fed-up, excited, depressed I get by turns.
The conventional religiosity of it just winds me up. Why can’t people be honest, I end up thinking, it’s nothing to do with Jesus Christ, it’s the birth of the roman god, Sol Invicta, and the birth of Mithras, with some Kabbalistic angels thrown in. Don’t get me started on angels; they really are just the ‘chav’s of the heavenly realms.
And when I hear those sickly carols, I just want to throw the radio and TV out the window. The mindfulness that I have been trying to achieve all year has gone. Yes, I know that anger is the best way to accumulate a lot of negative karma.
I am going to a ‘come as the person you were in your last life’ party tonight.
22nd December. Party
I was really looking forward to the ‘catpywiyll’ party. I had made meticulous preparations to discover who I was. I did a three and three quarter hour ‘Light-Body/Merkabar intensive visualisation, a Buddhist Green Tara mantra session, asked my spirit guides to help, and calculated and recalculated my horoscope four times to find the exact position of the Moon (the house the Moon is in indicates the status of your most recent past life), and also calculated it by rectification.
When I got there I found most people had turned up as Moses, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Obi Wan Kenobi, so I went home in disgust.
Christmas V Spiritual practice Part II
Christmas can really play havoc with your spiritual practice, months of discipline and meditation can be destroyed by just one too many mince pies and the last half glass of wine, just to finish off the bottle!
Having practiced various spiritual disciplines for some years, I am now wondering just how much enlightenment and self-realisation I actually need to cope with everyday life. I regularly meditate and do other spiritual work (absent and world healing etc), but my question of the day is, just how enlightened and self-realised do I have to be to cope with the world. To achieve these totally, how much more difficult would my life become.
So I am going to take a few days off, I am presently quite content with the state of my life, and don’t feel the need to be a ‘God botherer’ for awhile, and I daresay even God will be pleased not to have his Christmas dinner interrupted.
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