Moksha Manifesto

I believe in God. I believe there is an all-pervading energy that interweaves on various levels of consciousness to manifest this reality. I believe that God is Life, that I am, and you are, that same energy – not separate from but inextricably, integrally and completely the same. The challenge is the veil, or Maya. We live under the illusion that we are separate from God, from each other. We operate under the assumption that certain words, actions, experiences are good, and others are clearly bad. Perhaps more accurately, we believe that good and bad are opposing, contradictory forces, when it is only our perception of separateness that supports this notion.

I believe in free will. I believe that my individual life is important and that what I choose to do or not do is significant to my own consciousness and the collective consciousness. I believe that I create my own reality – joy as well as pain – and that becoming conscious is what life is all about. It is called Moksha, liberation from Maya. It could be said that without Maya, the illusion, we could not achieve Moksha. We actually choose to incarnate into these bodies to begin, continue and complete this process – moving from unawareness to awareness.

I believe we are all in recovery from something. I believe a long history of ancestors and other karmic connections to the past, of which we are largely unaware, profoundly impacts us. I believe that this long history, though painful at times, is necessary to embrace. We have all experienced hope and disappointment, and confusion trying to make sense of it all. We are all grieving, mourning what we have lost, directly and indirectly. We are grieving personally, and we are grieving for all people, searching as we are. It is because of this grieving that we are also healing constantly and our enlightenment is absolutely inevitable.

I believe enlightenment is possible, dreams are powerful and true love is a real, living thing. I believe the only person we need to love is ourselves because in truly doing so we will always love and have compassion for all life, but that sometimes it is easier to learn to love yourself by opening yourself to loving someone else. I believe ritual and tradition are important, as are evolution and revolution. It is valuable to have practices that ground us, to build foundation on the lessons of the past. It is imperative to break the mold, not for its own sake, but in order to expand our awareness into pure consciousness. Both approaches are necessary.

I believe these things and yet I do not believe that anything is absolute. I believe that even my attempt to articulate these things takes away from their meaning. I believe that it is necessary to try. Life is in constant fluctuation. It feels sometimes like being lost at sea. The words are an anchor I cast but they cannot stop the movement – sometimes it is calm, others it is choppy. Enlightenment is a process that is catalyzed by trauma – pain, hurt, anger – if the stone was not filed down by the rush of the water it would never become so smooth. We need the friction to grow. We try to capture it only to realize we can never hold on to it.