“All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
One of the things you should expect if you genuinely begin to embrace nonduality is the growing habit of questioning everything. I mean everything.
Little blips of truth start to emerge, to nibble away at the corners of the projection you’ve come to call ‘reality.’ Given the startling nature of these little glimpses, we look still deeper, and still more layers peel away. Nothing, not one thought or atom of existence is taken for granted.
Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about.
As a parent, we do much for our children. One of the most important, particularly for those of us hailing from difficult childhoods, is to celebrate the uniqueness of a child. Good stuff, right?
Why, then, are so many children of the middle and upper classes, of the rich and famous, so damned miserable? Why do so many overachievers, the kids who have been celebrated from an early age, dissolve into drugs and booze or worse? Why, in a nation of such prosperity and helicopter-parenting, do so many of these ‘special’ teenagers commit suicide?
Popular – which is to say, mind-made – theory has it that these kids are under enormous pressure to succeed. Or, the self-esteem movement has left them ill-prepared for life’s hard knocks. Or … well, there are many, many explanations.
Except this: Look more closely at those well-intentioned offerings to children and, more important, the who behind those intentions. In other words, has the mind doing all that cheerleading itself been examined or is it merely parroting its own conditioned thinking?
It’s an enormously important question. Because at the core of all human experience is fear. The fear of being separate, apart, alone. From the moment we are expelled from the womb the world sets upon us, reminding us in ways large and small that we exist, that we are separate, that we are born alone and we die alone.
It’s an awful message if you stop for a moment to consider it.
Yet precisely because we don’t examine such thoughts we allow the fear not only to dominate our own lives but also to infect the messages we feed our young.
Unbeknownst to that unexamined mind, then, comes the ‘thoughtful’ message, “You are so very, very special, Junior,” which to that nubile young mind translates to, “You are so very, very separate and apart and alone, Junior.”
Little wonder that these kids stumble forth into the same world of fear and isolation, of competitiveness contrasting with a desperate desire to be loved, tortured by a near-schizophrenic desire to be unique and fit in all at the same time.
Put more bluntly, steeped as it is in fear, the unexamined ‘adult’ mind has nothing but fear to offer its child.
The Bible calls it “the sins of the fathers,” and a host of philosophers, poets, and mystics have cautioned against the miseries of an unexamined life.
Examine it.
