One of the beautiful things about this world is that we have to deal with physical reality, the real world. That's a great gift.
It's not so hard to be conscious sitting on a mountaintop. We can be as conscious as we like in such an atmosphere. But perhaps a more interesting challenge is to be as conscious as we can while being fully engaged with the physical world.
The Buddha made an interesting point about the physical world. He said it was the ideal place to become more conscious.
Using a metaphor, he said that in the heavenly realms we would be so naturally peaceful that there would be little incentive to grow. On the opposite side, in the hell realms, we'd be so preoccupied with our pain that we wouldn't be able to grow either.
He said that right here, on what we now call planet earth, is the ideal place to grow in consciousness.
Why? Precisely because it's balanced on a knife's edge between darkness and light, good and bad, right and wrong, up and down, joy and sadness, success and failure, beauty and ugliness, pain and pleasure, comedy and tragedy.
This presents a unique challenge to us, in just the right dose—not too much as in the hell realms, and not too little as in the heavenly realms.
Our challenge exactly is to find a way to be conscious and compassionate while still being fully engaged in the conflicting demands of reality-as-it-is.
To take a simple example, we can be as spiritual and conscious as we like, but if we jump off a cliff we're still going to go splat. Gravity is not going to make an exception for us just because we might be evolved in some way, or have good intentions. No; we have to learn to deal with gravity on its own terms.
Just as the laws of physics are not suspended for someone who is conscious, neither are any other laws. For instance, if we eat a high-fat diet we'll still likely come down with heart disease or cancer no matter how evolved we might be otherwise. The laws of how the body works are not going to be suspended for us.
As another example, for most of us, we still have to pay the rent or the mortgage each month no matter how many courses we've taken or how many things we've learned or how "developed" we think we are.
And in the real world, sometimes we have to deal with jealousies and depression and fear and...on and on. In dealing with the real world, reality doesn't let us off the hook just because we like to think that we have a good heart. We still have to pay the rent; we still have to weave our way delicately sometimes, with as much skill as we can muster.
An example: When I came out of childhood and adolescence, I was a dreamer but I was also as reactive as a serpent. Nobody could cross me about anything. I'd get in screaming arguments three times a day sometimes. I'd tell people off and where they could go. There was a very reckless quality about me, the kind of toughness that comes from being young and angry.
After quite a while, I began to realize that this was not the behavior I wanted, that this was counter-productive. It wasn't conscious and it wasn't compassionate and it wasn't much fun.
Then, over the years, I went to the opposite extreme. I gradually fell so in love with everything that I became a kind of mushball. I'd cave for anybody with a fairly good intimidation schtick. I was extremely "soft." My emphasis was on being receptive, getting in touch with my feminine.
But this also had a downside, I eventually realized. I wasn't so much dealing with reality as avoiding it, caving when necessary so that I wouldn't be bothered or distracted from what I really wanted to pursue. But that sometimes resulted in regret.
Gradually it began to dawn on me, in my gradual way, that compassion did not necessarily equate with spinelessness. That it might be possible to be both compassionate and yet stand up for oneself in the real world.
I learned a lot about this from Byron Katie. Katie is as compassionate as anyone you'll ever come across, but yet she can be extremely firm when necessary. Or to be more accurate, she simply tells her compassionate truth at all times, and it comes out looking like an alternation betweeen compassion and authority.
I also learned a lot about this from my mother. Right up to the end she retained a lot of backbone, yet she was absolutely pure compassion at the end. And it's a funny thing, I carry a bit of her with me now.
I notice that since my mother died I'm quite unwilling to be bullied or intimidated by anyone about anything. In as nice a way as possible, I simply get very steely about it. That firmness ultimately comes from the fact that I don't much care about the "outcome" of my life. I can't detect much concern anymore about where it all goes; it's just going to go wherever it wants to go.
Yet that steeliness is rare. 99.9% of the time I'm about as sweet and reasonable as an apple pie; I certainly try to be, want to be, and believe that I succeed a fair amount of the time. Yet a kind of compassionate steeliness is there if need be. I like the combination.
Recently I had to negotiate my way through a very delicate situation. And the principle I kept in mind, whether being steely or receptive, was this: Everybody had to win. Ultimately, it wouldn't be any good unless everybody came out smiling. And I tried to be as compassionate as possible through the process. And it did come out well.
I used to think it onerous and unfortunate that reality insisted sometimes that we negotiate through conflicting demands and navigate through perilous seas and so on. Now I see it as a great gift.
Because it's our proving ground. It's where we get to see how conscious we can be while in the middle of a storm, which as far as I can tell is the kind of consciousness that counts. If our consciousness can't take a storm—and "storms" are plentiful on planet earth—then our consciousness may be somewhat ephemeral and perhaps not suited to the real world yet.
It's so beautiful that reality asks this of us. It's the very thing that helps our consciousness, wherever it is, to become deeper, more mature.
It's fascinating to be here on this planet, in this time, faced with these challenges that we all face as human beings, individually and collectively. It's a great privilege to be here now, when reality's challenges are hot indeed. What a formidable set of challenges we humans have at this moment!
And that is our opportunity.
—jim sloman, for 6/2/02
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