(This is Part 4 of a 4-part article. Go back to Part 3.)
Times are about to get much more scary on the outside— financially, militarily, ecologically and in other ways. As this happens, it will tend to be reflected in more prevalent internal states of fear, anxiety, dread, anger and so on among us. What can we do?
Let's look at our guideline again:
A guide for living: Always look to the larger context.
Let's go straight to the largest context. What is the largest context possible? The Infinite. The Absolute. The One. The Ungraspable. Whatever we'd like to call it.
Actually, my preference is to call it all those things in lower-case, to reflect the fact that the infinite is also in the most humble things. It shines from a common stone. The absolute waves from a blade of grass bending in the wind. The ungraspable reveals itself in the most ordinary moments, if we're willing to see it.
The mystery especially reveals itself in times of pain, because then we're more willing to let go, to give up our frantic attempts to control, manipulate, etc. to get the "right" outcome.
When we lay back upon the infinite, we're willing for life to go wherever it goes, knowing that 1) it will go there anyway; and 2) wherever it goes it will be the same in a way, because we're meeting the absolute (or to put it differently, ourselves) every moment.
It's in moments of great pain that we surrender, that we let go and admit that we don't know all the answers, that we don't where it's going, that we can't even judge parts of it anymore because it's all the same energy, the same matrix, the unnamable mystery that is you and I and the grass and the stars and everything else.
In the Bhagavad Gita it says, "Peace immediately follows surrender." When we let go, when we surrender to the All, peace follows. When we're willing for life, and "our" life in particular, to go wherever it goes, a deep let-go happens inside that restores peace. Then we're aligning with the fact that reality is exactly the way it is.
I call this "beer-truck awakening" because it's available to anyone, even the guy driving the beer truck. It's also available anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. Nor does it take preparation first. You don't have to become a "better" or "improved" model of yourself first before it can happen. No, it can happen right now. Just the willingness to surrender is what allows it.
Surrender of what? Surrender of our "rightness," of our judgments, of our attempts to control, of our arrogance. In deep humility is found peace. The absolute hides there, waiting for us to be humble enough to discover it—that is, to discover our true self—once again.
Then the parade of "good" and "bad," "positive" and "negative," "light" and "dark" and on and on are seen in the same way as we look at the changes of the seasons. We can welcome the colorful leaves of fall and the snow of winter just as much as we welcome the flowers of spring and the warmth of summer, knowing that it's all part of the same phenomenon.
Just as the turning of the planet brings both "day" and "night," so the turning of the universe, so to speak, brings both pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, victory and defeat, delight and suffering.
Paradoxically, it's in the moments of greatest suffering that the infinite most clearly reveals itself. Because then the heart can break open in silent surrender. In silent surrender to the infinite unknowability of the mystery. In silent surrender to the wisdom of the heart, that knows truths that the mind cannot know.
In silent surrender to the starry sky and the stone lying at the side of the road. In silent surrender to reality, to what is, to the highest good. Knowing that reality itself is the highest good that there is, and surrendering to That.
In that surrender to the largest context of all, our true nature reveals itself. In silent surrender we can clearly hear our inner guidance, and then we do whatever we do, which may look like whatever we did before—or not—but comes from a different place. Yet it doesn't necessarily look passive or inactive at all.
And what is that place? The place of compassion for all, or to put it another way, the place of itself in compassion for itself in all of its various forms and disguises.
—jim sloman, 9/23/02 for 11/5/02
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