If we're holding strongly to our desires, we're bound to be frustrated a good deal of the time, because the nature of life is that we win some and we lose some.
If we're holding strongly to our stories, we're bound to feel stressed and isolated, because we're not really living in reality. We're off with our stories.
The great masters have often talked about choicelessness. They didn't care which way things went, because they were going to be in love no matter which way things went.
Of course there's preferences. We go to the ice cream store, we might prefer chocolate. But if they don't have chocolate, we can enjoy vanilla.
The more choiceless we are, the lighter we are, the happier we are, the more blissful we are.
We're willing to let things go whichever way they want to go—which they're going to do anyway.
At a deep level, there's no more choice about life or death, good or bad, right or wrong, like or dislike. Everything is just happening. The energy, for lack of a better word, just evolves and happens however it does. Everything just is what it is; there's no resistance to anything being the way it is.
On the surface, we have preferences or opinions or goals. But by holding them lightly, we get to stay in touch with the ungraspable at the same time, because we're choiceless at bottom. We've surrendered.
Then It moves. A particular situation ends up this way or that way, and we're in love however it goes.
Nevertheless, we keep on working on the environment or helping the homeless or driving the beer truck or whatever it is we're doing to make our contribution.
But inside we're choiceless. If our partner sleeps with another, say, we can either be complaining about it or just being there with it, letting it be the way it is. If sleeping with someone else would make our partner happy, why not?—after all, if we love them we want them to be happy.
There's a great true story about a Zen monk who was respected by everyone in the village; everyone wanted his advice, or wanted to be in his presence.
Then the daughter of a local official, having gotten pregnant and not wanting to implicate the real father, accuses the monk of fathering her baby.
The outraged village converges on the monk and berates him for fathering this child, and tells him he will have to raise it. His response to this is, "Is that so?"
The monk takes care of the child, and because he has no respect in the village now, has to beg to get milk for the child.
Then the daughter of the official, in a pang of conscience, absolves the monk and names the real father of the child.
Now the village goes to the monk and says he is innocent and wonderful, and by the way they need the child back for its true mother and father. "Is that so?" the monk says in giving back the child. A true story.
Choiceless. The energy just going wherever it wants to go. Yet, within that space, having preferences and appearing to make choices. But holding lightly to them.
Then happiness can alight, like a butterfly, whenever and however it wants. It just keeps happening, and we can be in love with it however it goes.
A good way to do that is to slow down, listen. The more we listen, the more we "approach" the ungraspable and its sublime suchness, though we already always are that anyway. Hopeless contradictions...
Listen...the raindrops are falling. And the inner raindrop, the inner voice or energy as it moves in love, is also always falling.
—jim sloman, 7/19/01 for Jul 19
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