| Riding Transcendental Waves: Part 2 |
 Riding Transcendental Waves Surfing and Meditation An interview with Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa (Chris Butler) Part 2 Q: Would you agree that the surfers who are trying to tear it apart, rather than harmonize, are not succeeding? Jagad Guru: They are not satisfied. In the first place because a person is not completely satisfied with the tube ride for the reasons I mentioned earlier he wants to dominate the wave. You think you’re so powerful you’re ripping the wave apart – but let’s see you go out to Sunset, turn the wave around and make it go out to sea. Are you such a powerful surfer? No, you must go with it. This is another point. Trying to tear it apart is a manifestation of another characteristic of the spirit soul. Not only do you want to be in harmony, but you also need to express your individuality. You need to be active within that harmony. So you can be perfectly in harmony with the wave and yet dancing with it. Being in harmony with it. Relating with it. Although you’re in harmony with it and in tune with it you’re also being propelled. While you’re in that harmony you can dance with it – you can drive off the bottom, then hit off the flip and fly back down. You’re going with it in oneness but you’re simultaneously also expressing your individuality. So surfing then shows that impersonalism – seeing God as simply being void impersonal force – is not enough. You need to relate, you are still an individual and you still have to be active within that harmony. When we’re talking about being one with God we’re not talking about being nothing – we’re talking about having an active, loving relationship with Him, having one’s entire life based on this harmonious position as a foundation, but within that harmonious oneness there is variety. The idea of becoming nothing or void is not satisfying to the soul either. Spiritual life means oneness yet simultaneous diversity. I’m one with God, yet still I’m separate from Him, I’m an individual, and God’s an individual. Yet I’m one with Him in love and will. Q: Many aggressive surfers boast at their ability to conquer the wave. They think they are somehow conquering that force of nature by ripping the wave apart. Jagad Guru: The fact is, even a person who is aggressive has to use the wave’s energy. They have no energy of their own. The reason a person who is an aggressive surfer has so much power, or the reason that they move so fast, is not because they are really great people, or strong or something – it doesn’t have anything to do with that. It is a matter of being able to find that part of the wave where there is the most energy and utilize that to gain speed or power and go with it. They have to go with it. They may think that they are conquering the wave but there is no such thing as conquering the wave. Let’s say you are an aggressive surfer and you get really locked in on a tube, how do you conquer that? Like a tube at Pipeline or something. If you get hit by it how are you going to conquer it? You just get dragged over the coral. The only way that you can conquer it is to find that spot as far back as you can where you’ve got that speed to break out of it, right? You can’t fight it and make it turn around, you have to go with it. Or let’s say that it’s a smaller tube and it hits you and you continue on your board. Let’s say just for example, you go into a shore-break and it looks like it is going to break on you. It tubes over you, and instead of kicking out you decide to go with it and stand up, so called defeat it. You just hit it, blast through and keep going. The only way you can do this is if, while your eyes are closed, you perceive which way the energy is moving and balance accordingly. You might break through it but then you haven’t defeated the wave – you just lost it. The point is that you couldn’t be moving if you weren’t going with the energy of the wave – you have to go with it otherwise you lose it. The more aggressive surfers are getting into the finer parts of the wave where they are actually tuned into and utilizing the greater energy of the wave. As far as guys who just turn the board backwards by the strength of their thighs, that’s something else. But they still wouldn’t even be able to do that if they weren’t on the wave. In other words, they can’t do that on land. You can’t do that on land just standing there with your board. Let’s see you turn it backwards and forwards and move it at great speeds. Skateboarding is an attempt, but they need a hill, the same thing with skiing. So you just go with the energy already provided by nature. The whole thing is based on going with the flow, if you don’t go with the flow you will either lose the wave or fall off the board – you get “crunched.” Ultimately a person has to give up his idea of defeating the wave. They need this idea that they defeated Sunset or they defeated a wave, or they defeated something due to their desire to put themselves in the illusion that they have defeated death. “This tube was chasing me and I made it out. I have defeated death again.” So I go out there and catch it so that I can make believe it was chasing me and I beat it. It’s like going to a horror movie to experience the fear. You go to Sunset horror movie so you can have that fear and defeat it. You feel that you are not a man. What does a man mean? It means defeater, number one, lord, master. But these are illusions of mastership – you are just a little ant making believe he is some kind of master. If you go half a mile in the sky you can barely see Sunset Beach and how big the waves are. All the guys out there look just like little ants and they’re thinking; “I’m great.” But in reality they are nothing. So none of us are masters, we have to recognize that we are all dominated or subordinate. We are all energies and we come from the Supreme Energetic and our business is to be in tune or in harmony with Him, acting as His servants. As long as we are trying to be masters, then we have to continue to experience the fear of death. We can live in illusion for some time that we are defeating death, but ultimately death comes and takes us. |