LIVING IN CONFLICT AND MOVING OUT.
* Here’s a perhaps relevant ‘old’ note about some of my apparent exploring along the way, noted in 2007 and accompanied with a then profound text/picture from that time; it’s posted as written, as a digestive aid, as is most of my writing; you too may recognize and enjoy the searching, the musing, and the dance, so to say.
Love all, and all is well. 🙂
~The trouble all seems to reside in my taking up residence a long time ago in Conflict. (That’s a place between Pleasantville and Dogtown, near Disaster and way past Harmony, where I was born! ) So what’s Conflict like?
To be in Conflict, it seems, is our natural human condition. We’re constantly pressed in our mind and body to resolve, to decide, to find the answers. Answers which, when finally found, will lead to a harmonic happiness. A final, End–of–all–Seeking, a sighing “Ah, that’s it!” And the proverbial Devil is in that detail, that distinguishing, that habitual and “thoughtful” sorting of good from bad, desirable from undesirable, useful from useless.
“This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not.” ~ Adyashanti
So, okay, how do we Unbecome? What do I do? Well, I already know the answer even as I pose the question – nothing! Something recognizes that there is nothing I can “do”. That there are no real choices here, only sleight-of-hand trick questions, accompanied surely with unsatisfying answers. So there is nothing to be done then? Well, yes and no!
It’s true that there is nothing to do and no one to do it. Being totally conditioned, it appears we have no will, period. But what we can have, it seems, is a willingness. A deeply felt and necessary willingness to allow what life inevitably produces from itself, to itself. A leaning into whatever happens, regardless of our predispositions going in. That way – as the saying goes – ‘we get what we want and want what we get.’
So what are we willing to let happen? Are we willing to live in the flow, not moving from our own volition, but being moved? Do we have a choice?
No. Never had, never will have, any choice. We ultimately live only in the flow of all life. What we think of as permanent is permanently moving. We are the moveable feast called Life; the choiceless expression of Source that includes concepts of a separate Me, a personal, individually tagged body of resistance apparently formed smack in the middle of what is formlessly fluid. We are both the baby and the womb that nurtures it. That is to say that we are the divided expression of undivided consciousness.
So, while we may reside for a time in Conflict, and by all appearances live in this habitat as long as we breathe, we can simultaneously know from awareness that we don’t only or actually, live there. And that, ultimately, there is only One expressed as Many, and the Awake Dreamer we think we are continues because it must. Whether we live in Conflict is not our call, and we may or may not be Graced in this life to move out. In any case, nobody ultimately leaves Conflict by trying to move out. Like everything else, it happens, or it doesn’t.
For myself, I realize that the tree must fall the way it’s inclined –toward freedom. Meantime, there’s a certain teetering at the brink perhaps. Sure, it would be nice to be less and less conflicted, to rest more and more in willingness and uncertainty. Let’s see what happens! 🙂
~ Today’s delights: to perhaps help one stay out of conflict:
” Constant battle and struggle with yourself is a waste of energy. Find out why you have conflict in yourself all the time.” J Krishnamurti
*AI, and all words, are symbolic pointers. The word ‘glass’ doesn’t hold water (truth) Reality, peace, is beyond words, believed.
*In seeing the weight of beliefs, like overturning old rocks, we find their Authority in the mind’s dark recesses is fed by fear.
* We’re raised to think, feel, react, and repeat from yesterday’s memory. Look and listen from childlike innocence. Life isn’t personal; it’s fresh, unknown, living itself. 🙂
