I used to think life was about finding one’s purpose, bliss, cause, etc. That we were born with a life sentence and before its end date we had this very tangible goal to achieve.
I also imagined there was this tiny population of people out there who had, in fact, found “it.”
It’s pretty clear now that I was wrong on all counts.
I suppose if there’s any goal at all, it’s to find some modicum of inner peace and, with any luck/grace, the Big Peace – the “peace that surpasses understanding.” I don’t know anyone who has found that. In fact, I don’t know anyone who is even remotely close to it.
No, we unwashed masses walk about with desperate little scripts playing out. Rare is the individual who even bothers to inquire into its authorship.
Everything we need to understand about the human world can be summed up like this:
I …
Whatever it is that takes the place of that ellipsis is part of a script over which we have zero ownership. We ‘think’ we do, but isn’t that thinking part of the script?
We are a curious species. Bizarre dreams fill our heads at night and it never occurs to us to claim authorship of them.
Nobody awakens and says, “I MEANT to dream those things.”
Yet all day long thoughts pop in and out of existence and suddenly we append an “I” to all of them. Talk about a terrible burden to bear.
And if you’re one of life’s unfortunates, the ones whose brains were programmed early and often to think and feel like shit about themselves, we’re talking BIG burden. And not just to the bearer. To all of us. These are the brains committing the most heinous crimes, suffering bankruptcies and addictions and so on. And why wouldn’t they? It’s in their nature/programming.
So where does peace exist? If we don’t control the thoughts and the script behind them, how the hell can peace of any kind be expected? Isn’t it just a crapshoot at that point? Either you lucked out with a golden childhood, or you didn’t?
The mystical traditions lurking behind all of the world’s great religions suggest there is a way. Hell, that’s where the “peace that surpasses all understanding” originated.
Peace exists in that which is aware of the thoughts, experiences, sensations and feelings that make up the thing you call “my life.” Something is aware or conscious of it – even when you aren’t thinking at all. Something is still aware, conscious, present.
Which is why, in mystical traditions, you see those three words more than any other: Awareness. Consciousness. Presence.
I have come to believe that peace lies outside these ridiculous little scripts we call ‘me.’ That, as the mystics taught, it is nearer to us than our own breath; that it is the very essence of existence itself. The script plays out upon or in it (I don’t think prepositions – or any words, for that matter – can apply).
You and I and the birds and bees and rocks and turds and nebulae – all of it is one and the same.
We aren’t born and we don’t die. All the silly little dramas these silly little brains take to be sooooo important are just that – silly.
Which is probably why the few who ‘awaken’ – who are en-lightened of this burden of me – so often are said to explode with laughter when the Truth is at last seen for what it really is.
For ‘me’ life’s goal – which is to say, the period of time still left to this imaginary me locked inside this physical meat suit – is to examine I … To explore that ellipsis and all that fills it and then, with any luck, deconstruct that silly little “I” that imagines itself the author and owner of all that follows.
