One thing that has occurred to me, time and time again, is that one must risk a lot, to gain a lot (and lose a lot). And loss, ironically, is the greatest gain of all. (Notice the proper application of the adverb "ironically"). Our down periods almost always correspond with trying to hold on to a lot – playing it safe – and still finding what little we imagine to be secure slip through our fingers anyway. If we can shed our clothes, masks, and roles, we seemingly risk everything that makes us, us – we become utterly naked. Our fear is that only a shriveled, pink worm will remain, pathetically writhing and whimpering – in need of a hole. But, in troth, that nakedness leads somehow to the infinite security of having nothing at all to cling to or possess. We are really giving up the fearful worm itself when we stop our spasmodic and inevitably tragic performance of doing, grasping, and shouting. How can I know all this? I can't really. Not through experience anyway, as my worm is still quite secure on a pedestal fashioned of granite and steel that I carry around in my gut like a hapless Atlas who has swallowed the world, hook, line and sinker.
"Look at me. I'm the president of my own company!" Think about that, the president of my own company. My own company, not the company of others. I keep myself company under the presiding influence of the ego in chief. No "others" can enter this lonely domain because "I" am always present (and president). Me and my company. Me, myself and I. As long as "I" am presiding, there too is no possibility of authentic presence. The "I" is founded on all we have accomplished, accumulated and squirreled away. If we are to really be present, we have to give up entirely the infrastructure and back story we have spent so many years crafting. These things don't exist in the here and now. They can't. Performance and accomplishment can only be measured over the fiction of time. Self-promotional press releases can only speak of what was, or what might be, never what is. They are dead documents, frozen in space, whereas the moment is liquid and alive. I am never a doctor, a bestselling author, or a supermodel in the infinitesimal NOW. And NOW is the only place we can ever truly be. Open the do-er to the fridge, and grab yourself a be-er. ©
By simply falling into the lap of what is (and isn't), we relinquish our controlling, promoting, choosing selves and we discover the ineffable lightness of being. Quite unlike the solid, fleshy mass we take ourselves to be we find only shimmering wavlets, manifesting all the qualities of light. Here one second, gone the next. If we thrust a lance inside the body we took to be a Brownian bag of billiard balls, we tilt only at vast empty spaces. When we cease to identify with first our bodies, then even our thoughts, we become transparent and allow the creative light of God to shine right through. Even the shadows we took to be real and once hounded us wherever we turned, are illuminated.
St. John of the Cross writes:
In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,
Desire pleasure in nothing.
In order to arrive at possessing everything,
Desire to posses nothing.
In order to arrive at being everything,
Desire to be nothing.
In order to arrive at the knowledge of everything,
Desire to know nothing.
How this ties into my diatribe is not clear to me. But it does.
© 2005 Mark Peters Company
