Who's Driving the Car?

During a recent meditation an amusing image surfaced in my awareness I wanted to share. What popped into my mind was related to the different stages of the journey of awakening, the passengers that we acquire over time, and the people we meet along the way. Suddenly I had this image of clowns surrounding a car and trying to get into it. And then I received a couple of comments through this blog that reminded me of the clowns we can meet along the way.

I have come to believe that those we meet along the way that lash out in hate are simply tempting us to not love them. I’m grateful that I’ve recognized that regardless of the actions everyone is deserving of love. I might not like your actions but I will always love you. If you lash out at me in anger I will respond from a place of love, and through this response I will retain my truth and be in the best position to support you as you make your journey through life.

How Many Clowns Are In Your Car?

The amusement of the chaos of clowns conjured a smile at the time but there’s actually a serious realization to be had. We start our journey in a state of sleep. I’ve often felt as though life is a road trip through space and time. We need to start from a place of forgetting so that we can experience everything anew.

The master of our journey is that part of us that is an individualized aspect of God. It’s often called Spirit and it knows that the destination of our spiritual journey is ultimately to gain a harmonious awareness of our entire nature. In other words, our journey is about integration with every aspect of our experience to the point of peaceful, compassionate, and loving wholeness.

Our Spirit guides the driver, our mind, through the softly spoken voice of intuition. The unaware driver though is often too overwhelmed with the noise from the engine and those noisy passenger-clowns to really hear that inner voice. And this is understandable from a certain perspective. The driver not only represents our analytical and discerning mind but is also responsible for planning and logic. It considers the information and knowledge it has. In our state of sleep the driver doesn’t hear the gentle inner voice of intuition and as such doesn’t really know where the most meaningful destination is. The mind can see the road, the scenery and the other cars on the road. It misreads signs and often gets lost. However, the mind that is asleep thinks it is the master and knows it wants to get to the destination as quickly as possible and to have as much fun as is conceivable.

You could say that our car is our body, the engine our emotions, and that ideally the driver is our objective, analytical mind (sometimes referred to as our ego). Our master, or subjective mind, is our Spirit.

In this state of sleep our mind receives directions from the emotions that rise out of our subconscious nature. And so blindly obeying our fears our sleep-state led us unknowingly into difficult circumstances. But at some point our Spirit begins to awaken. Perhaps done with the incessant feeling of being a victim raging against the truth of love within we decided we are done.

As we begin to awaken we start to realize that we have the capacity to put our fears behind us, to control the circumstances of our lives. We start to realize that we could be our own masters. Our Spirit started to give directions to our mind. But to continue this process of awakening we have to give up blaming others. At some point we start to take personal responsibility for what moves through our consciousness and experience, because we realize that the mind is the creative factor.

Those clowns around us that lash out in hatred (our neighbours), or those clowns within that try to convince us that we are less than we are (our passengers), represent the false beliefs we have picked up on the journey. We let the clowns in our car because we do not fully understand the experiences in the world. And the thing is we’ve had some of these clowns as passengers from our earliest years. These passenger-clowns represent hidden fears that get in between us and that part of us that is Eternal Presence. We may manage to quieten these clowns but they do become active.

Sometimes we even allow them to jump into the driver’s seat. The person sharing their comments with me in response to an earlier blog would love for me to validate their perspective of the world. But I cannot do that. If I did I would be letting them drive my car. In fact, contradicting the directions of the Master is a favourite trick of a clown.

However, it is essential to remember that our passengers are a part of who we are. By seeing the truth of ourselves in spite of their promptings we can transform them into something greater. My passenger-clowns may squirt water on my face from time to time and blind me to the road but that water will eventually evaporate.

More interestingly is that our old thought-habit patterns, the clown-antics of the past, have a tendency to reflect our fears on to the people around us. When we are asleep or newly awakened we might find ourselves desiring to harm, or hide from, our neighbours as a form of aversion. We might also find ourselves desiring to have our neighbours, or their possessions, as a form of craving. And yet all aversion or craving will do is to create suffering.

The best answer I’ve come up with so far is to love my clowns. Through acts of forgiveness and harmonious awareness we dissolve away hidden fears. There are two types of people in the world: Those that blame their neighbours for their own clowns or those that take responsibility for the clowns in their car and respond from a place of love. What type of person are you?