How miserable everyone is. A global pandemic, political and cultural unrest, economic struggles – the list of challenges is seemingly endless. Makes you want to stop the planet and get off, doesn’t it?
I remember similar days when I didn’t want to get out of bed, when I couldn’t escape the deluge of negative thoughts. But for reasons unclear, I gave myself a stay of execution, wandered off to see if inner peace could be had via a vision quest, shamans and their hallucinogenics, sweat lodges, healers and any number of other alternative approaches.
Alas, there are no magical elixirs out there, no silver bullets.
But something curious did in fact happen during that ill-fated quest for inner peace: the misery started to fade and a sprinkling of ‘good’ things started coming into my life. That trend has more or less continued over the succeeding years.
How did it happen?
Looking back, I suspect it was a combination of surrendering to God (again, use whatever term you want) and a corresponding willingness to abandon the many human antidotes and therapies typical prescribed for the anxious and depressed.
In other words, by letting go of my life and its many scripts, some unseen agreement was being made with the Author.
I’m fairly confident the same is possible for others. But there has to be a willingness – an opening in consciousness, if you will – to abandon your life and the old ways of doing things.
Look at our world, for a moment. Notice all the agitation. Where does the agitation originate? With people, of course.
And where does their agitation originate? In a word, thought.
Billions of human things powering their way through life and filled with countless preconceived ideas of what is right, wrong, required, forbidden, good, evil, etc. And because the only ‘reality’ they know is the one served up by thought, it doesn’t occur to them that thought is the culprit.
In fact, it can’t occur. Because you only know what you know. There has to be a grace, a gift, an opening to the idea that you are acting out a dream. For me, that gift came through intense, suicidal suffering and, with it, the willingness to chuck my old life into the trash.
In short, the only way out of suffering is to leave behind the sufferer. Or in the words of the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart:
“There is a secret hidden in the heart, a treasure as close to us as our breath, a mystery living in the midst of our soul. Finding it is simple, but may be hard, since to do so we must abandon the self we thought we were and seek the gift that is always ours; this inner spark that no darkness can finally extinguish, though it keeps us from knowing it.
This gift is always present to us, if only we have eyes to see. And when we do, we will find its radiance in everything, and at all times, this light that blazes on in a darkness that cannot put it out, this secret that finds us when we risk abandoning ourselves to this presence.”
