By Christian Chensvold
Here’s a simple test to check your health that doesn’t require any medical paraphernalia or professional diagnosis. It’s the simplest thing imaginable, which means in a chaotic age such as ours, only seasoned experts can do it.
Here’s the test: can you sit and do absolutely nothing for five minutes? That is, can you leave the house without your phone, find a bench or a plot of grass, and just be? If you can’t sit alone with yourself for five minutes and not slip into a state of irritability, with a million agitated thoughts running through your mind, then your “mental health” is in serious trouble.
You’re what I call a replicant; you look like a human being from the past, except that you’re a counterfeit version. You got body-snatched, or rather, soul-snatched. Think about it: shouldn’t you be able to sit with your body and your thoughts and not have to auto-lobotomize yourself because of all the anguish and nihilism built up inside, and which only goes away if you distract yourself?
When you start listening to others who’ve awakened to metaphysical reality, you find a recurring theme. Eckhart Tolle became world famous as a spiritual guru, and recounts how after reaching peak suffering and finally awakening, he spent the next two years sitting on park benches in a state of rapt wonder at the mystery of simply being alive.
Once you’ve mastered sitting and doing nothing for five minutes, you can try doing it while imagining yourself as an ancient king or queen, and I’m not being a court jester here. Throughout Greece, Persia, India and the other great spirit-infused kingdoms, the ability to sit on the throne in a state of immutable calm was the visible expression of a sovereign’s divinity. In Egypt, the ability to sit perfectly still with an aura of supreme command was believed to be a supernatural quality of a king or queen that proved their celestial lineage.
After learning to sit in simple tranquility, then with resolve and poise, you may be ready to take up yoga in its higher dimension, and learn to sit in superior calmness to everything external, completely centered to the transcendent dimension within, the part of you that is greater than you. As the great religious historian Mircea Eliade wrote in a seminal study of yoga, body postures are capable of evoking hieratic stillness, the purpose of which is to become transformed into the image of a deity.
And so what began with sitting on a park bench doing nothing becomes the first step on the path to immortality.
