PEACE IN OUR DAY: Taking refuge in fact and reality.
“Unless you stop and look, you are a confused entity.”
– J Krishnamurti
In mankind’s cultural and social conditioning the world over, if we stop and look, we may find the roots of our suffering. We may see it in the ways and mores of all societies as they’re expressed in their particular rituals, beliefs and ceremonies, whether they be conducted en masse in a church, a temple, synagogue or arena, whether we worship god, brahmin, buddha or money and sports, there’s a collective comfort in apparently possessing authority, in being variously attached to traditional balms for our confusion. Indeed, we’re individually and collectively seeking solace in the known, the past, the rituals of our heritage, our forefathers and their religious authorities.
ALL WE REALLY WANT IS PEACE
In rituals, in traditions, we find some small or large comfort; our anxious minds and hearts are a little more assured, a little less frightened. Indeed, rituals, like laws, have bound separate societies together even as they have divided us into communities, tribes and nations with their respective assurances of security, of belonging, of knowing. In knowing our particular God, we trust; we find the solace of the past, of legions of written and spoken authorities. And we find at least in our various cultivated beliefs, some Saturday or Sunday morning consolation, some comfort in our minds regarding our insecurities about the basics of our survival: food, clothing and shelter.
Of course – if only because it ‘happens’ – there’s a bonding element that’s all good and even necessary for mankind to live in a relatively conforming and therefore comfortable way; but for some, yesterday’s rituals et al, are not sufficient. They don’t bring the peace they long for, the fullness and completeness of direct self-knowing, of being a light to our self without intermediaries, priests and pageants. Absent these ceremonies, sacred and profane, some few of us turn closer to home – to consciousness, to our aware nature.
It seems all consciousness is ‘a movement of nature’ And one of those movements occurs in some of us – albeit rarely, though more so in these unsettling times – to sincerely explore our own real nature deeply – to go beyond the traditional map deeper into the territory; to move beyond all apparent, accumulated, third-hand knowledge, all forms with their formal mental constructs and constraints, beyond the personal and the particular.
Speaking from my own experience, (and with love and respect for all forms of seeking refuge) those decades of seeking in formal ways, from Sunday school, to evangelical worship, to marriage and business success and failure, to protracted Christian esoteric and contemplative practices and sundry serious searches in spiritual books, teachers and teachings – there was a ‘red thread’ in the pattern of all my seeking. I was deeply, desperately, unhappy with the shallowness of things. Out of that suffering, confusion and longing, there arose a passion that propelled a life-long compulsion to know for myself, directly, the truth of existence. One essential question urgently arose – not of my bidding – that suddenly took over and drove my life: “What is truly, really, going on here?”
LIVING AN UNSTRUCTURED, UNKNOWN LIFE IN PEACEFUL AWARENESS
I still don’t know what’s going on; there’s a discovering of that daily, moment-to-moment, so to speak. It seems that the very subtle, constantly changing truth in aware living I sought, while apparently ‘found’, cannot be spoken; it’s known only in silence, by silence. In love, by love. While now there’s no knower and nothing known, there is a certain ‘knowing’ that cannot be passed on but only, very imperfectly, pointed to. At bottom, it seems it’s up to us – if we’re sincere and powerfully compelled – to courageously explore the nature of our suffering and unhappiness to the root, to the knowing of our Self, which is a constant discovering and uncovering of the facts aka truth (sans personal desires and fears) of this moment, here and now. And in my case, it’s a truth imperfectly lived and expressed…still, love urges, and we follow its bidding with a grateful heart, yes 🙂
