This can be a time of great unsettlement. Many of us are walking around feeling a sense of vague fear. We're not sure what the future will hold. Many of us are not sleeping well at night.
The spector of death and uncertainty can haunt us. The mind can run rampant.
But notice that it's the mind that runs rampant, not the consciousness. Your consciousness is always pristine, undisturbed.
Our consciousness is like the great ocean. The ocean does not mind what fish swim around in it. Or if various thoughts and stories want to swim around in it, that is also perfectly all right. The ocean remains undisturbed.
But detachment is not indifference. Indifference is born of anger, hopelessness, sour grapes. "I don't care," indifference says.
But detachment is different. Paradoxically, when we're detached we are more present, because we're more available. We're more available to the sunset, to the rose, to our lover, to the moment.
We're more available because we haven't fastened a death grip upon our thoughts and stories. We take them lightly, because thoughts are not reality; they're just thoughts.
Thoughts swim around in the vast ocean of our consciousness. We can just let them be, with no resistance to them.
No resistance means letting our thoughts show up however they like. It means letting life happen however it wants to—which it's going to do anyway.
Of course we have preferences. We prefer that it will go this way or that way. But internally we're willing for it to go however it goes.
Why? Why so willing? Because of an understanding that even the things which we take as most tragic in life are a necessary part of being here, are a part of the divine order.
That doesn't mean that we condone tragic and painful events. We deeply take them in. It just means that we're also willing for life to go as it goes, knowing that it will unfold as it has to, as it is.
After a while this gets so simplistic that it becomes like the question, "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" General Grant. It becomes so obvious that we wonder how we could not have seen it before.
Let's take the biggest example of all: death. Why does there have to be death (and by extension, all suffering)? Wouldn't life be better off without death?
No, it wouldn't. Because everything that we see around us couldn't be there without death. Death perhaps was the greatest invention of life.
That sounds strange, doesn't it?
Yet the remarkable fact is that all of us are here today because of death. Everything that we see—the beautiful tigers, humans, babies, dogs, flowers, trees, all the incredible life that we see around us—all here because of death.
Life evolves into new niches, new life forms, new variety, because of natural selection. And what is natural selection. It is basically death.
Life comes up with all sorts of variations and mutations, and natural selection winnows out the vast majority of them so that those that survive become better and better adapted to their environment.
On the surface this sounds cruel. Yet as we look deeper, we see that it makes possible all the life around us, including we ourselves. The evolution of new life forms, including humans, could not have happened without death.
And suffering? Without suffering, there is no compassion. We only learn compassion through suffering. As Thich Nhat Han said, "I would not want to live in a world without suffering, because it would be a world without compassion." The very openness of heart that makes life worth living ultimately comes about through suffering.
If this is true of death and suffering, can we really know then that they shouldn't be here with us? Maybe they should be here with us after all; maybe they make everything that we value possible.
Maybe the whole existence is like this, where everything, even the seemingly blackest moments, are like a brilliant mosaic of "light" and "dark" where each stone, of every hue, adds its necessary part to the unfathomable but infinitely loving whole.
—jim sloman, for 10/5/01
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