The Ultimate Gift

Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzo, Ramana Maharshi, Rumi, and scores of other mystics simply and consistently stated that our lone goal in this world is to (re)discover our true nature, the central conceit being that a false ego has arisen to cloud this reality.

Sprinkled across human history, these mysterious, rebellious souls reminded those who would listen than the unfettered joy, love, and peace that ‘surpasses understanding’ is always and forever in us and around us; that we are bliss itself and that it is nearer to us than our own breath.

And often under the threat or actual execution of torture and death, they told us not to fear; that we were never born, will not die, and that all of the world’s great evils and suffering are fictions of the same minds that occlude the light of our own being.

Why so few actually respond to or feel sufficiently called to such teachings is a mystery. But this much appears true: the troubles of the human world are inextricably linked to this willful resistance to and denial of these mystical teachings. Put another way, the more we obsess about and strive for the material rewards that our minds tell us matter, the more troubled and unhappy our world becomes.

If we placed human consciousness on a spectrum, on one end would lie the pathologies of the mind – the sociopaths, psychopaths, neurotics. At the other end are those who have attained, for wont of a better term, cosmic consciousness – those who have become ‘enlightened’ of the ego or awakened to their true nature.

Across the middle of that spectrum exists the majority of human kind, the mass of men ‘living lives of quiet desperation.’

Depending on our life’s events, many if not most of us shift back and forth along that spectrum – though as noted in a previous post, I suspect we’d be surprised how often we’re moving in the direction opposite the one we imagine (that our ‘successes’ in the material realm actually move us deeper into darkness, a camel passing more easily through the eye of a needle than a rich man making it into heaven, etc.).

Indeed, there are many stories in Sufi, Zen, Christian and other traditions outlining how a steady diet of suffering actually is a gift urging us toward the inner awakening that is our ultimate destiny. The mind, of course, struggles to see a death, divorce, bankruptcy, disease, depression, etc., in that light, and it works day and night (or gives up entirely) to rectify the situation.

The mind, ironically, urges us toward greater forms of mental pathology and unconsciousness – more money, more things, more, more, more of all those external goodies. We look down our nose at the poor and wretched masses, the beggars and whores, missing the quiet woman in the corner bathed in sublime inner light and peace.

For reasons unknown, a gift (grace) is bestowed and the mind at last is turned inward and that false, frightened little ‘me’ is called into question. Where one man’s thoughts grow increasingly fearful and propel him into a mall to shoot other supposed separate little entities, another is compelled to turn inward and ask, “Who is this ‘me’ that is experiencing these thoughts of pain, loss, frustration, anger?”

The unexamined life – the one that wreaks such havoc on its host and those around it – at last embarks on the journey of self-inquiry. For most, that journey no doubt unfolds in fits and starts (that certainly remains the case here). A small epiphany here, only to have it co-opted by a mind only too eager to claim ownership as ‘my realization.’ (How many ‘gurus’ are borne of such early, limited epiphanies?)

Some become trapped in one of these stations, following a guru or religion or movement; a fortunate few are prompted/compelled onward. It is ironic that the spiritual journey requires so much of an ego ultimately tasked with its own undoing (who said God has no sense of humor?).

Grace reminds us that all such thoughts and compulsions are not ours; reminds us to give thanks for the thoughts that remind us we’re not in control, have never been in control, have no hope of being in control. That we are a life being lived.

For this ‘Doug’ thing, this anxious ‘me’ that regularly bounces along that spectrum of consciousness, I am – at this moment and so many others like it – immensely grateful for the journey. I write these words months into a very difficult stretch of life. But those difficulties are entirely in and of the material world. Whether those challenges are overcome is ‘immaterial’ to the quest (my own attempt at humor). And again, ‘I’ have no control over that anyway.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. – Meister Eckhart