A friend, referring to the website articles on the economy and the future (see Predictions), where I foresee a high probability of a very serious economic implosion within a few years, asked for suggestions on how to hold what she called all this "doom and gloom."
There are different levels at which it could be held:
First, the personal: My opinion is nothing more than that—just an opinion. I've been wrong about all sorts of things many times in my life, and prediction, by its very nature, is always an exercise in foolishness.
Second, the practical level: If we assume that what's being predicted may actually happen, it's better to know about this possibility (and the reasoning behind it) than not to know about it.
For instance, some preparation can be undertaken. It looks like an equal apportionment between gold (as the ultimate store of value) and cash or cash equivalents (short-term treasury money market funds, etc.) would be a good idea. But bear in mind that I can't possibly know what's best for you personally.
Another factor is that people will be suffused with fear and confusion, hoping that things will go back to where they were. Knowing that that probably won't happen can potentially relieve one of the great pain involved in such hoping.
A third, deeper level is the social: As external conditions get worse, people will of necessity have to pull together more. There will be much more group living, people supporting each other in various ways, and an increasing knowledge that our caring for each other (and all of life) is what makes life worth living.
This will stand as quite a contrast to the current prevailing mood that happiness depends upon acquiring the items on our wish list. (Actually, such a list is far more about pleasure than happiness.) But because of that increasing pulling-together, who knows?—the coming years could turn out to be the best of your life.
But even that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. A deeper level yet is our own willingness to surrender to whatever life is going to bring us. When we begin to really trust life, not to bring us what we want but to go wherever it goes, exactly what that will look like will begin to matter less and less.
Whether life goes this way or that way, we'll always be meeting the same thing—the ungraspable. In that sense, life then will be exactly the same as it is now—because we've never done anything but simply meet different faces of the mystery.
It's as if the mystery is continually saying to us: "Are you willing to meet me (or more accurately, yourself) this way? And how about that way?" The more we're willing to meet the mystery exactly as it shows up, the more that a love for the whole spectrum of it will arise in our hearts.
That embracing of it all has far more to do with our true happiness than the pleasure and pain involved in trying to force life to look like however we think it ought to look.
An example: If we're feeling sad or depressed, we can try to change our mood, we can think "happy thoughts," we can go to the fridge or make love or do whatever we do, but none of that will have any deep effect.
The embracing of that sadness, the surrender to that face of life, the appreciation of that beautiful flower of sadness can bring us to an entirely different place—paradoxically, right here. An incredible sweetness can arise in our hearts when we stop thinking that happiness is about climbing some mountain of "ups".
The same applies to external events, whatever they may be. And they're going to be however they are anyway, whether we embrace them or not. But that context of embracing life doesn't necessarily mean at all that we're passive or inactive. (Search on "inner guide").
It's not that loving existence or reality as-it-is brings us happiness, but rather, that the love of reality however it presents itself is the very happiness itself. And then, right in the middle of the sadness or the fear or the confusion or the anger or the chaos, we find the mysterious jewel that's always there waiting for us.
—jim sloman, 8/28/02 for Oct 17
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