Shriyoga Blog

Why Not?

Posted on November 14th, 2011

There is much I could have and potentially “should have” written about since my last entry on September 11th, and yet somehow, I have a slight case of aversion to just blogging for the sake of blogging.  And, then there is the ever-lingering fear of writing something that just reeks of bulls**t even if it is sincere.

I have readily admitted that I have a long history of  being more interested in that which I can touch, taste, smell, hear and see than what I cannot.  It is this tendency towards lacking faith in the unknowable during some of the most challenging times of my life that brought me to yoga, philosophical/spiritual studies and meditation in the first place.

So, last week when I was bombarded with all kinds of emails with messages of the promise of spiritual harmony on the much anticipated day of November 11, 2011…. and, it’s super potent, second long, moment of 11-11-11-11-11-11, I said to my skeptical self:  “Why not?”

Why not believe in something that is predicting a potential opportunity to raise consciousness and jump a spiritual level as both an individual and as a unified collective?

And, honestly, who cares if it is fiction if it gets people to pause and consider their lives as something much greater than their “to do” lists.

Yes, there is mayhem everywhere:  we can touch it every time we bring a plastic bottle of water to our lips, taste it in our genetically modified corn and inhumanely raised cattle, smell it in the sewers after Hurricane Irene, hear it in the chants of Occupy Wall Street and see it on the news with our persistent wars and  financial crisis.

Supposedly, we are still in the midst of  the afterglow of this period of illumination and insight.  If this is true, then why not take the proverbial leap of faith and consider when you look into someone else’s eyes that maybe, just maybe, they are, who you are… looking back.

Thank you George Bernard Shaw (and all those, including Robert Kennedy, who have used his below quote in subsequent years) for asking us to ponder “Why not?”.

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”

-George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), Back to Methuselah (1921), part 1, act 1