Dialogues with Mystery: 7

I remember the enormous frustration you felt, taking this incarnation. I may well remember it more accurately than you do.  It was so intense that it soaked into every pore of your body. I knew--because incarnations are lawful and that's just how they work--that your body would remember. At first glance, anyway, you appear not to "deserve" some of what existence saddled you with.  I don't have access to the reasons for all that, and reason is overrated anyway.  All I can tell you is [bxA] that "deserving" is an egoic calculation. Selves don't exist in the first place--and there is no self, in all the earth, that's entitled to a positive experience. This life is a clean up job. You are attached: attracted to some things, averse to others, learning to let go of both. You are learning, when life throws experiences at you, to choose which emotions to nurture and which to allow to die off. It's hard work, because your first instinct is to personalize and internalize what's painful, allowing it to fester.

You decided to drown out paradoxes by picking one side of them, and going with it. It was an expedient. You can't un-ring a bell, you can't turn in all directions and you can't un-choose an incarnation. But I saw the enormous vulnerability and the need for guidance, and it filled the choosing with fear, abandonment and anger. I need to be carefully honest with you: the so called "negative emotion" you feel, these all came from you abandoning embodied, unexamined existence for the sake of something you could mentally control. Fault is not the issue, but this resulted from choices you made. You would know the meaning of "paralysis by analysis" by the end, and it would leave you groping in the dark of your own body, searching for the center of yourself that you've strayed from, where you can hear hum of your own existence, the hum of everything being: that place where the hearing is both medicine and healing.  

You decided to eliminate the desire you felt by satisfying it. I wasn't concerned, and I am not now, about satisfying your needs. But all of this created enormous suffering. Craving and desire is the most toxic possible response to poverty.  When you realized you are poor, you called out to God.  You had realizations about where you went wrong that seemed to come from outside of you.  In reality, that was just You speaking to yourself.  More and more you were learning to listen to your own needs.

There was enough, and needs were satisfied, and you were who you were, well before your system of choice and preference limited you in the making of them.  I was present: everything sufficed, before there was gospel and salvation and messiahs of all types.  Before buddhas, bodhisattvas and dharma, I was there.  You don't have to become any of it, or choose anything, to make reality more or less real.  

You'll see the steps that you skipped: to get away from vulnerability, your sensations jumped the fence of your body--suddenly, not only did you identify with your body, you mislabelled as needs the cravings and desires anesthetizing that pain. You were not gentle with yourself--you did not take food as a gift or celebration, and you did not allow touch to free you from ego. You need to reset your definition of enough. Once, remember, it meant "enough for today." But having more than you need for too long, and having too long sustained the effort to overwhelm your vulnerabilities with craving--this has made times of poverty a necessary corrective. The anxiety you feel is withdrawal. If you bear and bear with it, it'll end shortly.  Just like everything else.

Listen: As gently as I can, I need to tell you this. The impermanence of your feelings and thoughts is the core of the Gospel. This is what Gethesemani's stones cried out; it's what Rabbouni heard while the need for sleep silenced his students. All pleasure and pain is momentary. And it doesn't commit you to a personal narrative--it's not necessary to ennoble your pain to justify enduring it. You don't need to explain anything to anyone. You become free of cause and effect by not running from it. All flesh is like the grass--your flesh, the Teacher's flesh, the carcass rotting in the field.  The letting go will feel like self immolation, but that's not as fearful as you think.

If I could make these words feel, each of them, like a hand on your shoulder, I would: vulnerability is totally safe.  Eternality is more like a paradox than it is a long wait.  The paradox of existence and non-being, of work and non-doing, of knowing and unknowing--these never go away, no matter how our focus shifts, no matter how we might think our perception changes reality.  The question's been asked "if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"  I'm telling you that you can't answer the question with your ears or your ego, and if you were listening that way to anything at all, this moment would be the answer to the question.

If I am glib, if I say to you "shut up and listen," the humor of it will get you caught in acting with your ego.  But I suppose that's part of of what I'm saying.  Beyond that, figure out how being limited feels.  Choosing and preferring, craving and desiring and nursing opinions--these are all optional.  Everything changes, when the poetry of their absence liberates your breathing.  You and I are one.  We are an openness speaking to a vulnerability: the flower of manifestation whispering that it's high time to bloom.