Murphy’s Law Revisited
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Whoever this Murphy guy was, he seems to have left his legacy deep in the heart of our daily human experience when he declared: “ If anything can go wrong, it will.” Now that’s a Law right up there with Gravity ! And don’t we know it! I hear old Murphy’s sometimes chuckling, sometimes stern “ Didn’t I tell you?” everytime I spill my coffee while reading the wrong directions as I walk carrying all my luggage in the wrong direction to the wrong air terminal to catch a flight that’s been rescheduled! And I feel Mr. Murphy prodding me from behind to be careful ‘‘ cause ya never know what might happen at this airport!”, when I then sit there huddled with my luggage under my legs as I keenly await the inevitable predatory onslaught of strangers about to threaten me and mine.
I can see ‘em all scheming too! There’s the dark one over there whose eyes flit nervously around the place; I know he’s watching for the main chance! And that woman a hundred feet away over there with the red hair? –she’s with him! They’re all connected like politicians in a huge conspiracy to get me! So you can’t be too careful these days, what with the Second Law that a Murphy must have known, and which, when rarely stated explicitly in words, says: “ If anything does go right, just try it again!”
You see that all the time, don’t you? I suspect the first Murphy was the smartest of the twins. So because you never know, it seems wise to cover all the possibilities –because you never know! It’s like my friend Michael Angell wrote the other day: “ I’m half Cowboy and half Indian. Just in case. “
But now, let’s for a moment allow for another possibility that neither confirms nor denies. A possibility that lies somewhere in the middle of the Murphy’s, and one we’ll call The Law of Perception. Simply stated, (though volumes have not been written about it) this Law says: “ We perceive what we believe.” In other words, we experience what we think is real.
The mindmixer, a.k.a. the “cement mixer” of our habitually hardened and rebar reinforced mind, produces our reality in a continuous loop. The seeing of that possibility, a kind of felix culpa or “ fortunate fall” that also happens consistent with Murphys’ Law, is the beginning of a realization that (a) Everything simply happens, and (b) If we allow everything to be as it is, we end our suffering. In fact, we no longer have a quarrel with reality. And, in so realizing, with this kind of Gateway experience, we enter into a whole new world. We see that what we believe to be the way things are, is just our personal thought about it. We see that, in a reality independent of our mind, there is no such thing as a true thought. Or, as the Indian guru Sri Pooja Papaji said:
“Whenever their is a difference, it is the minding which is cheating you.”
We then are in fidelity to what is. We no longer depend on the randomness of life to meet our expectations. Life happens! And our life happens in accord with it. This is not to say Mr. Murphy will stop nagging away –mind keeps proposing its ideas about reality – but we don’t believe it the way we did. We use it instead of being used by it. And we are freed from the prison of mind – concepts and, at the same instant, we free all around us. Judging drops away and love arises in its space. A love that is so engaged with and in this life that it no longer depends on anything to be content and happy.