what must we be to live in a world that we instinctively love but have learned to fear?
There was a time when I was never in doubt that there would always be plenty of time to do whatever I had to do. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that it never occured to me that I would ever run out of time. But that was was a long time ago. These days, as I awake to each new day with a disturbing awareness that the world is not yet perfect and neither am I, I get a little anxious by the fact that there is much work to do and that I’m never going to get it all done.
It’s a discomforting thought and not one that I particularly want to begin the day with. And so, as I have learned to do, I re-mind myself that this thought, like 99 percent of my thoughts, arrives out of the Ego’s playbook, its unexamined script flagging an urgency to the things that I know I have no control of, demanding that it is I who must make the world perfect and that I must do it now before it is too late.
It’s been over twenty years that I’ve been consciously studying the nature of this mind which I might sometimes describe as fearful and/or bullying depending on the mood it sets me in. So, this re-minding, this being aware, this simple act of observing the mind, is a useful thing indeed. Without it, I could easily spiral down into a helpless, hopeless, ever more anxious human doing, feeling impotent and unable to be much good either to myself or this world that I want so much to love. But it can sometimes feel impossible to love a world that feels hateful, hurtful and unapologetically divided and unjust.
The despair of the individual adds to the collective despair of the world and goodness knows there’s a lot of that hanging over us, like glum clouds in a darkened sky. I think of the undeniable truth (is there any other kind?) in the words that the nurturingly playful mystic, Hafiz, gifted us:
I think we are frightened every moment of our lives until we know Him
And so, this thought-cloud of doom and the downpour of anxiety that it threatens us with can only be lightened, en-lightened, with the realization that there has only every been One in charge, One that actually knows what it’s doing. One that knows anything at all. One that is the ultimate ‘knower’. And yet, the grand paradox that we must be willing to live with is that there is no ‘one’, no ‘thing’, no ‘being’ however superhuman we might imagine it to be. Just the ever-Presence of an ineffable ‘is-ness’ that we call Life, which when we rest in it, frees us from all concerns while gracing us with the response-ability of Love.
In this grace-filled state of response-ability, we can move more lightly, more calmly, more clearly, more assuredly, in this world that we instinctively love, but have learned to fear. We move with the assuredness of the ant building its nest, of the rosebud unfolding its petals, of the magpie singing its morning song into the still sleeping world.
We move in accordance with Life’s natural rhythms, with a dignity of pace and poise that allows the world to love us as we love it. No, not because we love it, but simply as we love it. Not transactionally. Not conditionally. Without attachment. Just naturally.
We move response-ably as waves belonging to the one Love ocean, each one of us its unique expression, unbound by the pressures of time, unchained from the meanings we have dragged through history and our personal biographies, unblinded from the illusion of the separated self. But how do we un-see, un-feel, un-think the separated self? With great understanding, the mystic acknowledges that this is our hardest work:
Just sit there now. Don’t do a thing. Just rest. For your separation from God, from Love, is the hardest work in this world
Hafiz
But he knows, as we too will hopefully come to see, that surrendering to Love is the only way we can be Love. It’s the only way we can stop fearing Life. It’s the only way we can be the presence that serves the good of all. But we’d be naive to think that the Ego will willingly surrender. Oh no! It will resist with all its might, with all its cunning, and with all its masterfully crafted identities, shape-shifting seamlessly between all guises including as both victim and oppressor!
Surrending to Love is the only way we can be Love.. It’s the only way we can stop fearing Life. It’s the only way we can be the presence that serves the good of all.
Nor is the surrender a once and forever event. No. It requires the moment-to-moment presence that shines the Light of Awareness upon the Ego’s theatrics, stripping it naked and empty. This is life-long work. But in every moment of unseeing the illusion, in every moment of true seeing, we experience the priceless freedom to move, not from any sense of duty borne by one or other identity, but as the lovingly natural order of Life. In fact, we are moved into effortless action by the very power and wondrous possibilities of Life. One with the movement of Life, like waves in the ocean, we are finally freed from our fear of it!
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