Probing Uncertainty
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Truth keeps bumping and banging into me. Last night and again this morning, I am both confronted and somehow comforted by this constant Sharpe thrust of reality. It’s invasive like a scalpel; it removes what’s left of the egoic self like a cure for cancer. But not in one merciful stroke! 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 slight 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. 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 pre-dispositions going in. That way we get what we want and want what we get.
Of course, all this is only words, attempts to map the territory by going into our spiritual vault and extracting an ancient Taoist gem! “Just let go!” says that inner voice. Truth is, there is no James or Janet to let go! And so it goes, round and round on this wheel of Samsara, of persistence, insistance and resistance.
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. And we are that. We are the moveable feast called Life; the choiceless expression of Source that includes my concepts of a separate Me, a personal, individually tagged body of resistance 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 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 stay in Conflict is not our call, and we may or may not be Graced in this life to move out. In any case, no body 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!
