Posted on 04/05/2015 3:55:43 PM PDT by TBP
Spring is a wonderful time of year. Despite T.S. Eliot’s line that “April is the cruelest month,” spring is a time of renewal, a good time to remind ourselves to open up to new facets of life.
One of the best things about spring, to me, is the opening of the baseball season. I am a fervent baseball fan. To me, there is a good deal of metaphysics in baseball. You start out at a place called home, then you go on a little journey like the Prodigal Son, the aim being to return home. The ones who go home more often are the winners.
Isn’t life like that? The more often you get in touch with home, the more successful you are. The best tools we have to “go home” and get in touch with home are prayer, affirmations, and meditation.
Opening Day is one of the most important days in any baseball fan’s calendar. Opening Day is a celebration, a renewal. And it is for a good reason. It’s the start of a new season. Everyone is in the same place. Anything could happen. Theoretically, you could go undefeated and that team that lost 100 games last year could theoretically win the pennant. On Opening Day, every team has an equal chance to win the World Series.
What if every day were Opening Day? What if, in consciousness, we made every day that day when all things are possible and each of us had a full chance to do whatever we consider winning in life?
A while back I read a terrific baseball book that also happens to be a metaphysics book. It was A Zen Way of Baseball by the great Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh.
In the book, Oh writes about his very last game. He was retiring and he wanted to hit just one more homerun for the fans. The game was against his team’s archrival. Well, in the fifth inning, he got a pitch he liked and he hit it out of the park for a homerun. As Oh rounded third base, the entire opposing team – manager, coaches, bench players, and the nine guys who had just been playing the field – were lined up along the third-base line bowing and wanting to shake his hand. Remember, this is the archrival, the team that they most wanted to defeat. And all they wanted was to congratulate Oh.
Oh writes about what that experience taught him: “That the opponents and I are really one.” He defines an opponent as “one whose strength joins with yours to create a certain result.”
“Let someone call you enemy,” he writes, “and he has lost the contest.”
Oh writes about how he missed passing the entrance exam to one of Japan’s most prestigious high schools by one point. As a result, he had to go to the less-prestigious Waseda Commercial High School, which just happens to have the best high-school baseball program in Japan. Failing that entrance exam is what made him who he is, the great slugger Oh. Had he passed it, he might never have gotten the opportunity to do that. Missed opportunities are gained opportunities.
In Can We Talk to God, Ernest Holmes tells us, “Prosperity is inevitable if a person’s mind is right. Nothing can stop it. Healing is inevitable if a person is in harmony with life. There is nothing that can stop it. It is a law. “ When we live in Opening Day consciousness, that healing, prosperity, and joy are inevitable.
One of the key concepts ion Oh’s book is ki, which means Spirit Power. Oh writes about going down to the dojo to see Ueshiba Sensei, one of the founders of Aikido. Ueshiba was a very small man, about five feet tall, yet he was throwing much larger men like he was throwing feathers. How was he able to do that? Clearly it wasn’t by physical strength. It was ki. His power came from Spirit.
Well, doesn’t real power always come from Spirit?
The Japanese say that “sickness comes from ki.” They say that you will be sick if you think you are sick, but you will be strong if you discipline your mind to think you are. Well, if that isn’t New Thought, I don’t know what is. This is The Law in action.
Meditation and treatment (scientific, affirmative prayer) are two excellent tools to discipline your mind to believe the Truth about yourself.
As Ernest Holmes tells us in Ten Ideas That Make a Difference, “We need to remember that there are two aspects to a spiritual mind treatment. There is the essence as well as the word. The essence involves what may be termed the spirit of the treatment, incorporating what is meant when the word “God” is used. The word is the specific declaration of the good we desire to see expressed in the life of John Smith. One is a feeling, an emotional awareness and conviction, which is the foundation for the intellectual statement and acceptance of the words pertaining to the situation. Both are necessary, and together they form what may be termed the technique of spiritual mind treatment.”
Or, as Oh writes, “Belief and Technique are one.” We apply the technique to maintain the belief and we use the belief to support the technique. Together, we use these to stand in the field of possibilities.
Opening Day is the field of infinite possibilities. On Opening Day, everyone is equal. Everyone is 0-0. Everyone has a chance for glory. You and I have a chance for glory every day. We all have our chance for glory if we just go out and do it.
In the musical Damn Yankees, the hit song is “You Gotta Have Heart.” There is a lyric in that song that goes, “There’s nothing to it but to do it.” Know that it’s done and the doing of it is easy. As Richard Bach tells us in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, “You must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
Oh quotes his teacher Arakawa, the batting coach, as saying that “The same ki that is available to a master like Ueshiba Sensei is available to you and me.” That universal energy can be our strength if we let it.
In the words of Ernest Holmes in Love and Law, “if you could realize the tremendous power of attraction that holds everything in its place, it is yours, it is yours, this gift. It is the divine birthright of every living soul, but we limit ourselves by thought of limitation. Now, we must open up the doors of our consciousness and expand and expand and expand, and no longer think in terms of the backyard lot but in the terms of the infinite nature, in the terms of the universe.”
That is how to make every day Opening Day. And doing makes every day the most dynamic, empowering day of your life.
Baseball is life made enjoyable.
Some people say baseball is boring. I say it’s pastoral. Go Tigers!
Ever traditional, ever current: that's baseball. Gawd I love it.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.
-George Carlin
Just got back from hitting some balls and shagging some balls with my kids and grandkids here in SE Michigan (metro Detroit). GO Tigers!
Definitely!
There is more action in three hours of baseball than in three hours of football.
What if every day of your life were Opening Day, with all teh possibilities and excitement that entails?
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