Dialogues with Mystery: 5

Listen: creating a mentally abstracted "self" is not a shortcut to self-discovery.  Ego is psychological sleight of hand: it paints a smile on reality while our thirst for control blows up in our face.  Nothing finite is in a position to control the infinite.  Your life is not a hostage negotiation, and you are not in a position to present Divine Mystery with terms of surrender.  Craving, attachment, attraction and aversion, shame and blame and resentment gain ground every minute you buy into the lie that your will can change reality.  How many of your opinions are simply inward attempts to force, persuade or cajole others into thinking as you do?   Every attempt you make at that kind of control will demand its pound of flesh: anxiety is the cost of consenting to that illusion.  It is like unwittingly mixing ashes in your own food. [bxA]

Somehow, admitting that you're vulnerable has to come first.  After that, understand that the spirit acts in the body as it acts in the world.  Within you, it flows where it meets no resistance; outside you, it blows where it wills.  Wisdom makes every person on earth a hermit; facing your needs without manipulating to get them met is the only real solitude.  You alone can search your heart to know what's holding you back: the work is to become your own remover of obstacles.  You alone know how you have failed to cooperate with and harness the universe's power: the work is to "read the distance" between you and empowerment and take small steps toward whatever's more manageable.  Be wary of cycles of desire and fulfillment.  They never have, and never will adequately address your needs.   And they can distract the attention and sap the energy you might otherwise use to help yourself.

I am not here, nor are you, so that you'll start desiring spiritual things. Calling out for divine help will not gain you support.  The Teacher is a sign of contradiction--crucified so that the inner thoughts of many will be laid bare.  In the beginning, thought and emotion and sensation and energy were a free flowing stream within you, and it would slake your thirst as often as you drank it with remembrance.  But God help us, we forget--we forget, and can neither breathe and nor weep as we wish, and we live in such fear of our mortality that the sight of our own blood causes aversion.  The absence of divine assistance can teach the attentive to survey the wreckage, to more effectively distinguish what can be changed from what can't. I am here to restore calmness of breathing, to create openness to the gift of tears, to help you find the power in your own blood.

For the sake of living without anxiety, please be still...poverty is an absolutely miserable spiritual tool, and you will go through a hell of withdrawals as you learn to live with fewer stimuli, as you let go of your own petty manipulations.  But for the sake of your own serenity, identify what's worth more to you than stillness and let go of it.  If you are not able to sit in the center of your own body, the whole world will confine you.  If, even for a moment, you can calm the inner impulses seeking to chase one shiny object after another--if you can do that, the world will open inside you like the lilies of the field.   Then you will see: you are splendor within splendor within splendor.  But it will be no big deal--because you will be free, and that will be enough.