One of my favorite (and sometimes most dispiriting) lessons from Robert Adams was his admonition that you can tell how far you’ve come in your spiritual growth by how you behave when life throws you a curve ball. Do you retreat into your shell, throw dishes against the wall, lapse into a depressive funk, reach for the bottle or bong, pout, find fault with the world around you? For 99.99% of us, the answer to one of these is ‘yes.’
People who fancy themselves as well-adjusted, easy-going, or happy-go-lucky are anything but the moment life stops cooperating the way they want. A lost job, disease, the suffering of a loved one, divorce – any number of life’s little tripwires can send us spiraling into ridiculous behavior or modes of thought. And then, when the storm inevitably passes, we behave as if nothing happened. Which helps explain why we keep falling into the same holes over and over again.
The mystics have pointed out that our suffering is a portal into growth, a rich opportunity to break out of our comfort zone and challenge the concepts we hold about ourselves, the world around us, existence itself.
Yet the moment turbulence strikes we seek ways out of it, don’t we? We are miserable, perhaps terrified the unhappiness will remain with us. We cling to the departing mate with whom we may not even be happy, rush out to replace the miserable job with another miserable job, bombard the disease with poisonous chemicals and radiation – anything and everything to stop the pain, to ‘return to normal.’
It rarely occurs to us to inquire into what the hell this ‘normal’ thing really is, to recognize that it – like everything else – is just a mental concept, something we have come to accept as reality or truth.
We awaken in the morning like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But what’s so natural about it? What does natural even me?
Stop and consider your own existence for a moment and it may just jar the hell out of you. I mean, you don’t have to exist, do you? You take for granted that you are a ‘human being’ of a particular name, sex, race, ethnicity, age, pedigree, and on and on and on. Yet they’re just concepts, aren’t they? The only ‘basis in fact’ is a kind of mutual agreement of mental concepts with other humans.
You gaze out the window at the tree stirring in the wind and take for granted that ‘tree’ and ‘wind’ are what you say they are. But these too are labels, aren’t they? Mind stuff. In all the universe there is no such thing as tree or wind or, for that matter, ‘universe.’
Look at that swaying tree again and drop the concepts and what is left? It’s just a, uh, well….
Follow the vision backward and inquire into what it is that is seeing that non-conceptual tree thing. See if you can drop that concept of ‘me, the seer.’ What’s left?
How fascinating is this thing we know as existence. We work so hard to create a comfortable little niche for ourselves and fight like hell when that niche is threatened, like a newborn pup desperately wriggling back to the nipple, back to the warmth and safety of its mother. Back to all the mental concepts that tell us everything is ‘normal.’
Yet it is when we are yanked out of that concept-laden niche that the concepts are ever-so-briefly exposed for what they are.
