a commentary on the spiritual life
Be-ing
This is part of our response to an inquiry from TZF’s good friend, Elsa Joy Bailey.
Don’t worry that you don’t know for sure where your life is headed. You don’t need to know. Your function is to live (be) your life. That, after all, is what you are: the Divine being you.
That’s what each of us is. God Elsa’ing. God Stefan’ing. God Nancy’ing. So, let Mother design your life, and you simply be it. That way, you avoid all the karmic baggage that comes with choices & consequences.
What that requires, of course, is surrender. And nothing about that is easy. Even getting yourself started in that direction requires silent consideration of your self and your life.
You will insist that there is no time in your life now for you to undertake that kind of inner work. Just so, the first step in surrendering — first to your self, then to God — is about making time: setting aside other stuff in order to enable this stuff. That process demands a form of activity. You have to do it.
The other — surrendering to God —is not so much an activity as it is an inactivity.
Surrendering starts with learning (teaching ourselves) to be silent. To sit still, the body and the mind. Accomplishing neither of those is easy. We assume that sit still
is no big deal. Just sit down. But it is not that easy. The fact is that stilling the body is, at least when we first begin to try it, difficult. It may look like we are not moving, but we are, especially it seems our limbs. And itches: they always seem to arrive when we are trying to sit still, and ignoring them is a struggle.
And still the mind? Forget it. By comparison, the twelve labors of Hercules were a piece of cake. My experience has been that the best approach is not to try. Trying generates motion, endlessly. Instead, allow yourself, allow your mind, to wander, to think, about whatever it wants. It will anyway. But, and here is the key, pay no attention to it. Do not involve yourself in that process. Just watch it. Be an observer. Pursue none of the thoughts, judge none of the thoughts, consider none of the thoughts. Just sit still (!) and watch. Eventually, the absence of any interest from you will slow down the mind. Maybe even … silence it.
What has this to do with knowing for sure where your life is headed?
Sitting still enables you and your entirety — which includes God — an opportunity to converse. You will not hear it, of course, but rest assured, it will be going on. The moment we stop running around in circles, which is what we all do too much of our time, we enable ourselves to perceive God, Who knows precisely where our life is headed.
Remember this: You are not alone in thinking you do not know where your life is headed. None of us knows. Often, we think we do because we have carefully laid plans and schedules. “Look, I’m in charge! I’ve got a drawer full of calendars, resolutions, insurance policies, and other documents to prove it.” But then we end up expending as much energy revising, adjusting, adapting, and footnoting those as we did developing them.
The appearance of order in our lives is an illusion created by the ego in its endless effort to offer itself as a substitute for God. “You don’t need Him!” our mind insists. “I can perform all the functions He promises, and at half the price.”
Here’s the thing. Divine Chaos is the Natural State of the Universe. Consider the writings of all the great mystics. None of them has any idea where their lives are headed or what’s in store for them, and, what’s more, none of them cares. Just like a child, with perfect faith in its parent. Of course, getting to that Place is scary as the devil (because the ego knows that if it weren’t terrifying, we’d leap immediately!). But it’s where every true spiritual path leads.
And the way to get there is to learn how to sit still.
And then to sit still.
We are not alone. We are never alone. But to awaken to that, to sense the reality of that, to ingest it, we need — in the language of the railroad industry — to stop, look, and listen. In other words, sit still.
