AVANT SOUL

We pass through a series of gates to sometimes arrive where we have always been. Bodies may age, but there's an inner viewpoint which can maintain its freshness and exuberance even as it deepens from experience. Our bodies may change, but the inner viewpoint can stay youthful. Youth has enormous resilience and sometimes outrageous character. Would we truly ever want to lose enthusiastic and joyful participation?

So what's the secret of eternity?

To stay eternal, stretch. Stretch out from boundaries when possible. Pull past where you've been before (a pull is much more enticing than a push). God isn't rigid. Our response to Creation or to "life in the boonies" (or with the loonies) might be stiff and inflexible, but the Creator isn't limited by form or by manners, by the fact that the worlds of creation are constantly changing and testing our limits.

The secret of eternity? The simplest things are the hardest things.

The exuberance of youth, like laughter, is eternal. Youth defies political correctness and societal comforts. It giggles childishly at funerals; it spasms hysterically at the hospital or convalescent home. Not appropriate, but when has youth been concerned with being appropriate? Perhaps our grievances with the Creator, with God, are tantamount to the fact that God is too youthful. In utter, solemn seriousness, we wish that God would grow up and take our pain and sufferings more seriously.

A valuable insight involves understanding the nature of youth and old age. Yes, there's wisdom that comes with maturity, but being adult often loses the exuberance, the disarming drive of youth. Yes, there's energy with youth, and it often lacks the measured rhythms and seasoned savvy of older age. Wouldn't it be grand, if instead of "youth" and "old age" forming polarities at seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum, we could instead integrate essential qualities within each, to create new and vital characters? An accessible paradigm is only a fully realized, integrated character.

The simplest things are the hardest things ... To breathe, to remember that your life is connected by a series of breaths. To change how you feel and how you deal with inevitable change, breathe. Take this moment to breathe as deeply as you can. Then consider what gate it is you are supposed to go through today. The nature of gatekeepers is to guard gates. What is the nature of the gate — and what makes you think you want to go through this particular gate? The secret of eternity — the mantra, sound, or tone of being eternal — is to stretch. Remember to stay flexible — God ain't rigid.

Guarding is what gatekeepers do: It gives them respect, self-importance and power. When encountering rigid gatekeepers, attempt to find alternate routes. When you encounter your own limitations, or the inherent resistance of a gatekeeper, create an alternate elevator. This elevator can be in the literal sense, or it might be an "inner lift" which successfully takes you up-and-through that which only appears to be in your way.

Sometimes the gatekeeper is a bit stupid ("My, that person's dense!") and at other times the limitations are your own. The key is to give the gatekeeper a thoroughly valid reason for making certain you pass through his or her gate. Is this the gate you absolutely have to pass through? Or is there in fact an alternate route?

There appear to be times when you must "blast through the blockheads." Ask yourself: Is this loud explosion (push) really necessary? Use loud explosions sparingly, as they aren't subtle. To tiptoe around a blockhead might work as well and employ less efforts.

The secret concerns the fluidity of energy, not the inertia of having arrived. To stay in balance, ask yourself when to accelerate and when to hold back. You can spend an entire life battling gatekeepers and still not get through the gates. The fight can tend to take on more importance than adroitly navigating through, around, or past the obstacles.

"Fighting obstacles" can be polarizing. Being a hero doesn't work for everyone. Taking on the giants too easily becomes be the path of martyrdom. You could be creating a career of aesthetic detours. You could become so enmeshed in the battle that you lose your way. And at other times a hero travels where no one else has before.

Ask the following: Is what you're creating worth this giant pain? If not, adjust accordingly. So what is it about heroes and heroines that is archetypal? Most of us struggle to stay in balance and to make a difference on the planet. The hero or warrior undergoes inordinate challenges. These obstacles allow the warrior to emerge improved and reborn from having undergone the struggle.

The secret of life — and life in its utmost simplicity — is to establish that the struggles you are undergoing are the right struggles to forge you anew out of the cauldron (hot seat) of experience. Birth is violent and dangerous as often as it is smooth and flowing. Some women die in childbirth; some babies are not born whole; some births are agonizing and prolonged. The problem with inner character is in knowing what is to die as much as what is to be reborn.

Being forged, being forced to die in order to be reborn, rising out from the sacred fire, isn't painless. During grief, the throat closes — chokes up — and the person tends to hold the breath and shut down breathing. Moments of fear also cause one to forget one's breath. Sobbing or wrenching sorrow can cause the breath to come in gasps, in choked-up spasms.

Sometimes we get tired of having to deal with so many facets of our attention. We can get fatigued from what appears to be the unrelenting seriousness of it all. It helps to bear in mind that God has a sense of humor. For example, you.

In laughter, the breath is like a balloon of happiness set free, chortling with actual snorts and even heartfelt whoops at the release of seriousness. Sometimes the laughs arise from the chest, pealing like bells kept long secluded in the company of solemn adults, a church or a university library where the laughter should ring to chapel ceilings, to wooden beams of structures, then deemed too boisterous, too inappropriate for this supposed sanctuary for learning.

Laughter frees the breath; it's liberating. Reminding us of the awful absurdity of existence, laughter invites us to be freed from conventions, life's ongoing dance between vitality and decay, between youthful nose-thumbing and adult mores. Youth instinctively senses that the seeming mockery of laughter is one of the more sane responses, since laughter involves breath. Laughter is a mock-turtle soup making levity at the very hot broth some of humankind swims in. Or is it most of humanity?

Life reminds us that we die. This is ultimately boring or liberating. Our response to death separates mindless chatter from more profound thoughts — from banality and poetry to headlines and haiku. Most simply, our response to mortality separates boldness from the blather.

Boldness can last, while blather is readily forgotten. With war, crowded conditions, and administrative, double-sided politicians, it seems as if many countries of the world are like pontificating sea turtles treading water in the bouillon of their endangered, unfortunate conditions. Laughter's ability to see humor in the most grim of situations brings war relief! Got any grated Parmesan cheese for that mock-turtle soup, or croutons? It's difficult to see humor in suicide bombers. They certainly will get their car insurance canceled.

We're continually asked to honor death to bring appreciation for life. This, too, can either be desensitizing, or help to set you free. It's a "Janus face," a double-coin between tragedy and comedy. Janus is a daily currency between spiritual expansion and run-of-the-mill mediocrity. We're continually looking two ways between what we're holding on to as well as what we're free to let go.

Are your feet laughing? So few of us take time to be silly. I don't know that solemnity is the right response when we're surrounded by so many incompetent people.

When security can be equated with how many gates you have on your property (or gatekeepers working for you), it's challenging to keep your personal poetry going. Yet safety is moment-to moment. No one, whether a princess or pauper, a shaman or showgirl, a pope or real estate developer, is spared from tragedy, from the knife blade of change.

Death roller blades. Death cuts a swath through arrogance that might allow you to think that our mini-creations supersede something far more ancient. There's something already in place before you were born. You mutter into the din of billions who have complained before you. There were worlds and universes that did very well before you appeared on the scene, and intricate whirlpools of consciousness as deep as the oceans before you ever dipped your toe into the water.

Laugh and breathe — you've got a better idea? Laughs occur with the support of breath. And negativity tends to take your breath away! Together they make a "fine gumbo" at the tragedy of the human race consuming the very ground it stands on. We poison ground with gossip; we pollute a well of understanding which supports our overworked positions.

"Earthly news" and "mock seriousness" pulls the rug from beneath our feet. High-minded seriousness distracts us from an existential purpose for being here. To make a difference amongst mindlessness — to solely maintain a sense of humor! Are we to become as deadly serious and heavy-handed as the myopia of world leaders who happen to be deadly? Yes, we must honor boundaries, but we breathe the same air and drink from the same waters.

The oceans know no boundaries of countries, and though countries mark offshore boundaries for fishing, the fish freely swim within the fluidity of the waters. We declare no-fly zones and try to carve into air above the land lines of our borders, yet the birds courageously migrate within the fluidity of air. So it is with consciousness: Nations and religions can try to legislate and regulate it within their law books and moral codes, yet essential thought and awareness travels outside and beyond the regimented confines of vocabulary and area codes. Whether you realize it or not, we share the same protoplasmic elixirs in the mindstream of God.

It's folly to become as stiff or as rigid as the "corpse consciousness" of most of the globe's major governments. The only thing possibly more intolerable than an Israeli without a sense of humor is a Palestinian without a sense of humor. Both tend to have lost tenderness with the eternal. Both seem to have lost their senses. They've lost their sense of humor – and that God gets the last laugh!

Where has all the humor gone? We share this globe with people who simply have forgotten to breath, or to laugh. It's a paradox to maintain your lightness in the mock-turtle soup of feigned (or imagined) sincerity. Above all, breathe.