NEW PROJECT "WHAT TRAIN ARE YOU ON?"

“PROJECT” Etymology: “throwing something in front”. Like throwing a marker in the sand.

The idea is setting a goal and working towards it. Animals don’t normally do this consciously.  Humans do.

1.  To do it, you need to have a goal. And you need to know  what it is.
2.  You also need to follow steps which lead to that goal and not away from it to somewhere else.

And if you don’t (or maybe can’t) choose destinations, you may be drawn along by the whims of ever-changing desires. Or blown along by the winds of karma or the will of others.

The “train journey” is a metaphor. The destination is the goal. The stations you pass through are the necessary route to your goal.

Winning the Lottery is a good example of trains and stations. “If you’re not in, you can’t win”, is the slogan.

That is, you have to buy a ticket to get on the train. But you have to buy the winning ticket to get on the right train and win.

You can have many, many on-going goals, short term and long term. Tea at three. A week-end in Paris. Getting a degree. Getting married. Having a family. Retiring to Chiengmai. Becoming a millionaire. Winning Wimbledon.

But you won’t win Wimbledon by watching tennis from an armchair. It’s the wrong ticket. Think of all those hours of practise, the winners put in.

But for humans, all our many goals are temporary. They are not destinations in their own right. Achieve them or not, they, too, are stations we pass through.

These “destinations” all turn out to be stations on the real train journey for all of us. Our journey through Life. So  “What train are you on?”

This journey does have its destination, irrespective of the intermediary stations. If you get on the train at Birth, all stations lead to Death.

If you can read this, you did get on that train. This time round.

Actually, it is possible to choose not to get on at Birth. But, having got on, it is not possible to choose not to end up at Death.

This time round.

This is where our Projects came in. This Week’s Project began for us, it seems, on the 12^th of February 1986. It was Communication.

The intention was to encourage a happy, harmless and profitable Life, which would unravel real Truth and not end up just in Death.

There have been quite a few sharers in our Projects over the years and some seem have fallen by the wayside. They chug along, in various degrees of dissatisfaction, to the unavoidable loss of all those things that they have accumulated by intention or default. Death.

But there is an alternative and there has always been. The Pursuit of Truth, honestly practiced, reveals the existence of a train running parallel to the train of Life and Death.

The Train to the Deathless.

There are stations too on the track from Life to Death, which interconnect with the track to the Deathless. If one is aware of these, one can cross the platform and change trains at those stations.

The most important one is Seeing the whole and real Truth and the unsatisfactoriness of the conventional train one has been travelling on for so very long. If Seeing is 100%, one can spontaneously change trains forever.

Such a sudden realisation and total change of direction is very rare.

Subsidiary stations offer, as it were, short-term tickets to ride on Deathlessness and experience a more gradual acclimatisation.

The key one is Ethics.

Since Ethics is in tune with the Centre out of which all beings came, it means that thoughts, words and actions based on Ethics are not hostile towards any of those beings. And they are in harmony with Nature, in which all beings have their existence.

One can also obtain a temporary ticket on the basis of keeping Precepts or Commandments. But these depend on learning and knowledge and determination. They are therefore second-hand. They may be erroneous. Whereas Seeing is immediate, first-hand and effortless.

What is on your plate? Even language itself is unnecessary. Just look!

What train are you on? Intentionally or otherwise. Just look.

Print out available HERE