Seeing things differently

Being lost is not at all a bad thing – if you know you’re lost and you know how to benefit from it spiritually. Most of us consider being lost a bummer, highly undesirable or even terrifying. We all have important things to do, there’s not enough time in the day as it is, thank you, and getting lost is a major fly in the ointment of success, a monkey wrench in the gearbox of progress. In the Western world, where “progress is our most important product,” we are encouraged from our earliest years to know exactly where we are at all times and precisely where we are going. Yes, such knowledge is often desirable if not necessary, but not knowing is of equal benefit. Indeed, the deepest form of wandering requires that we be lost.

Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Bill Plotkin, Being Lost

Difficult moments in our lives

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Rilke

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can offer us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult, though, when you are in the middle of a painful transition to mine the experience for inner growth.  And when your life falls apart,  it’s a lot easier to blame someone,  or to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful message carried by the winds of change. Sometimes when friends try to help by saying “There’s a reason for everything” or “It’s a blessing in disguise”, you just want to run away or you  want to say” Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?” So forgive me when I say that everything in life is a blessing – whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy…. It helps me to remember that everyone is confused when the friendly forces come knocking; there is no one alive who did not want to go back asleep instead of making a big change; and the journey from Once-Born innocence to Twice-Born wisdom is never easy.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

…. and the self is continually changing…

Some similar reflections, this time from a neuroscientific point of view:

Now we come to perhaps the single greatest source of suffering  –  the apparent self. Look into your own experience. When you take things personally –  or hunger for approval –  what happens? You suffer. When you identify with something as “me” or try to possess something as “mine,” you set yourself up for suffering, since all things are frail and will inevitably pass away. When you stand apart from other people and the world as “I,” you feel separate and vulnerable  – and suffer. On the other hand, when you relax the subtle sense of contraction at the very nub of “me” –  when you’re immersed in the flow of life rather than standing apart from it, when ego and egotism fade to the background  –  then you feel more peaceful and fulfilled. 

The experiences of self you just had — that it has many aspects, is just part of the whole person, is continually changing, and varies according to conditions — depend on the physical substrates of self in your brain. Thoughts, feelings, images, and so on exist as patterns of information represented by patterns of neural structure and activity. In the same way, the various aspects of the apparent self – and the intimate and powerful experience of being a self – exist as patterns in the mind and brain. The many aspects of self are based on structures and processes spread throughout the brain and nervous system, and embedded in the body’s interactions with the world.….In sum, from a neurological standpoint, the everyday sense of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid “I” is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the most fundamental basis of the sense of “I”  –  subjectivity  –  emerges in the field of interactions the body has with the world.

Rich Hansen, Buddha’s Brain : The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Letting there be room

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Trust in the difficult

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? […]

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

……and not judging it

As I have said, nothing that arises in our body and in our life happens outside of our journey, of our path, to full realization.  Everything that occurs needs to be welcomed with an attitude of acceptance and openness. No matter what happens, it is imperative that we do not judge it. Especially when we are going through very difficult and trying circumstances, one cannot repeat to oneself too often, “Do not judge it; do not judge it.” Only when we resist the temptation to judge what we are going through can the journey we need to make at this moment continue to unfold, and can we receive the needed development and transformation it may bring.

Reginald Ray, Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body.