Thursday 19 March 2009

The Inadequacy of Words.

These words will never bring you to awakening. They're real crap, in fact, and wholly inadequate in communicating something that is not a concept. But they're fun, they seem to arise in great quantities, and there is no choice about putting them down or not. So here we go again.

Everything that seems to arise is seeking. Working, raising a family, going to church, attending satsangs, going to therapy, writing a musical, dating, getting married, donating to charity, volunteering for a worthy cause, breaking and entering to fund the heroin habit, drinking to oblivion, lashing out in anger, trying to be a better friend/spouse/parent, saving the planet, trying to scrape through the credit crunch, devoting all your time and energy to caring for an elderly parent, getting through the chemo, grieving for your lost child; it is all the same thing. There is some nebulous goal at the end of it: this life of mine will work, it will mean something, I will feel good about it, I will achieve it with some modicum of grace. Or it is all fuelled by a sense of disappointment, unworthiness, and incompleteness; despair that the goal will never be met. This is the goal. The goal has been met, it is always being met. Whatever the story seems to be, however difficult life's circumstances, or blessed, the goal is met. This is the goal. This is unconditional love, being cancer or being a tragic accident or being charismatic leadership or being that tree over there, or your child, or the chair, or your best friend, or you. Even that sense of incompleteness is paradoxically immaculate wholeness. And it is glaringly, overwhelmingly obvious, but not to the dreamer in the dream of being a separate individual. This is God, if you want to use that label. Everything is God, everything is love, everything is, and in existing, has met the goal. And if this is seen, the only thing that is missing is what seeks. It all seems to go on much as before, but perhaps without the sense of loss. Rejoicing is not the goal, but freedom seems to bring with it - sometimes "quickly", sometimes "slowly" - a lot of joy. Joy even in sorrow, for sorrow is. Joy in struggle, joy in more traditionally joyful things as well. But even the peace of sitting in a meadow or seeing your child asleep, safe and sound, is not the goal. It is all the goal. You've done it already, you are always doing it. This is it.

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