Mea Culpa!

Worked on my 100 feet long painting till about 4 this morning and still could not fall asleep after and so decided to take a walk to the corner of the block coffee shop for some 'Nasi Kandar' which I normally do. part of the reason for not being able to fall asleep is because of my hunger. half way through my meal along came the neighborhood bum who places himself across the table from me as he normally does gawking at my eating like a cat waiting to be thrown a bone. As much as i wanted to do good so early in the morning I felt a sense of anger at being intruded by this guy who smell from not taking a shower perhaps since yesterday keeps floating into my direction. I kept eating practically ignoring him, it is always this way like i am obliged to put up with his agitation. A guy who just arrived and sat at the next table from me decided to play nice and handed him a dollar (Ringgit), makes me feel shitty off course but i was not going to give in to my sense of guilt at this early in the morning and after i had rushed through finishing my meal which i did not enjoy I paid and left. As i was walking home in the dark along comes another of the neighborhood bum walking towards the shop and  off course this even makes me feel more guilty as i normally would hand out a dollar or two depending on how rich I felt. As it was this morning i had my last ten Ringgit and i was walking home with three left in my pocket and so i was not feeling rich either.
I am writing this entry as soon as i had arrived home and I am still feeling like i am being jerked off by some cosmic joker who wanted to test me in these dark hours of my time. So where does it all end? Why does one have to go through all these vexations even with all the efforts of trying one's best to avoid as much as possible any external interactions so as to keep one's practice less disturbed. Stupid! How can I not stumble upon one jerk after another in this life as they are my own creations my own mirror image, my own insanity manifested in forms, the bums, the guy who cooks rice for the catering business and most probably hates his job so badly that he punishes the huge pots by banging them around, (what got me out of bed in the first place). I am manifesting all these aggravations like it or not and there is no escape from what is. Trying t escape by any means is creating karma to destroy karma. What I would need to do is just accept and give and hope and pray that it will all drift away once and for all because the debt is paid. However as it is more debts are being created and such is being in practice towards self discovery. This too is who I am; Mea culpa. (my bad!)

Mea culpa is a Latin phrase that translates into English as "through my fault". It is repeated three times in the prayer of confession at the Catholic Mass: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault". The three phrases are in the ablative case, which gives the instrumental meaning "through"...Wikipedia.
And how did i come upon this Latin expression? From a song by Enigma which I am also listening to! I did not know what it meant but wrote it down anyway and after sought out the meaning, not bad! I have been doing allot more meditation sittings in the last few weeks guided by a Vipassana Practice method and hence i have been under a little 'stress', to keep to the discipline as closely as i could. No doubt meditation is to make you less stressful,however under the circumstances that i am in it is also a means to bring into focus all my little quirks and petty tyrants, irritations and vexations originating from way back when and is still unresolved. So these what the Buddha calls 'hungry ghosts' are still my companions as i am still bound to this physical life with all its faults and follies lust and, desires. Yes i see them now even as they keep arising and sinking from and back into my subconscious mind. Only time can heal this fractured heart of mine and only time can mend this splintered soul. Karmic debts will have to be repaid one way or another, if not in this life, in the next or in the after if you do not subscribe to transmigration and incarnation of the soul.
How well does one know of one's soul? What is this soul? In Islam the question of the soul said the Prophet of Allah is best left unquestioned as it is beyond human comprehension and in other religions the soul is the primary essence of the spirit of man and of all beings that lives. How evolved the souls is, is up to the individual spirit in its own understanding of who or what it is in the scheme of life, hence the more spiritual one has evolved the more closer one finds one is to the essence or the soul. The soul belongs to to the Divine and will be returned to its owner when the time of its existence in this physical realm is over. This is basically what most religions profess to be the truth. It is the Divine spark that is located in the heart of every creature and the spark departs from the physical form when death occurs or is extracted to be more accurate, by the angel of death. For those whose spiritual practice is strong full or merits and virtues, the divine spark is pure and bright when it leaves the physical realm, and for those who have lived life a little more on the wild side, the divine spark is more dim and needs to be purified before it is returned to its rightful owner. Hence the Buddha says you will keep coming back to work it all out till you got it all cleaned up and shining again pure as when it was in its original nature. And for those people of 'The Book', the dark soul is cast into hell fire, that which is hot enough to burn out all the dross from the pure light. This is only my own imagination for i know not truth myself, truth be told.
So what is your spiritual work? The Muslims pray five times a day and special prayer on Fridays, The Christians have their own series of things to do as well as the Jews and the Hindus and the Buddhists, what is yours? How do you reconcile this topic of the soul and the spirit and th life and death and all the rest of it? Where do you begin if you decide to take a crack at looking into your own mind with the spiritual intention? An atheist is only an atheist when he or she has understood that there are no religion or God or Gods and to do this he or she will have to have studied these religions and come to that conclusion. One does not wake up one morning and declare, "I am an Atheist!." Then someone will ask, what is an atheist, and the answer will be in knowing all about religions. It may even be safe to say that atheist knows more about religions than most people who say the are believers.

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence” 
― Bertrand Russell
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