About Life
We land on Earth with no idea of how it happened or what existence really is. Early on, we start by assigning names and qualities to everything and everyone around us, trying to make sense of it all. We craft stories about things and people. We separate the good from the bad. We construct complex sets of beliefs and make up rules about how we should live our lives.
Before long, we believe we’ve got it all figured out. We believe we know who or what we are. We think we know what we want, what we need, in order to be happy. So we start chasing after the things we believe will bring us joy and fulfillment. We set goals and become increasingly fixated on them.
We begin our quest with a sense of confidence and certainty. But when time and again life defies our expectations, we're thrown off balance, filled with sorrow and frustration. Over time, resentment grows into anger. We yearn for control. We become arrogant, cynical. Our suffering starts to affect others as well, and eventually, turns us one against another.
For years, we persist in this struggle, wholly absorbed in what we perceive as a fight between us and the world. We’ve now constructed a whole drama, the drama of “me” and “my life” where we, the protagonists, are in a perpetual battle against obscure forces conspiring for our demise. And to some degree, that narrative seams to justify all the difficulties we encounter.
But how did it all begin? What exactly are we fighting for? Why do we suffer? We've lost sight of these questions. In fact, questioning our beliefs is the last thing we want to do; they act as a shield against what we fear may be insanity. "I have values. I know what’s good and what’s bad. I know who I am and what I deserve" is our inner silent mantra.
So we keep going, we keep striving, we keep hoping. We may achieve great success, accumulate enormous wealth, surround ourselves with the most sophisticated objects, the most loving people. We might even get everything we ever dreamed of, but somewhere, deep within, we still feel like something is missing. We try to distract ourselves from this empty space right at the center of our being, indulging in various entertainments and fleeting pleasures.
We cling to our beliefs and hopes, into which we have poured so much of ourselves. But as time slips by, and twilight approaches, increasingly disillusioned and hopeless, we might start to wonder: What have we been chasing? Was it ever real, or just an illusion? Was it worth the battles, the hardships, the pain? Perhaps there's been something else to life, a piece we've failed to grasp, a melody we’ve missed. And then, before we know it, it's all over.
So what was that piece that we’ve missed? For the better part of our lives, we believed that the world was fundamentally a threat to our existence and that peace would only manifest once circumstances conformed to our desires. But since the beginning, the world went its own way, and the fleeting joy we felt upon achieving our hard-pursued goals didn't last more than a moment in time.
How often have we allowed ourselves a hiatus from our mental narratives, our judgments, our insatiable desire for more: more knowledge, more possessions, more control over our environment and fate? How often have we paused to appreciate the actual wonders that surrounded us at all time? How often have we been truly thankful for the beauty and kindness that appeared at our doorstep? Since these things were readily provided, we were too blind to recognize the gifts they truly were. Absorbed in our fantasies of power and control, busy chasing our ambitions and escaping our ghosts, we may well have missed the simple fact that being alive, being Life itself, was actually the miracle we were seeking.
All our lives, we believed that there was something intrinsically inadequate or not enough about the world, about others, about ourselves... and therefore that something needed to be corrected, improved, changed into something better. But the simple question: "How could we possibly want to improve something we barely know or have even tasted in the first place?" likely never came to our mind…
Just as peace cannot be born out of war, well-being too cannot be the product of conflict, whether it is with part of ourselves, others, or reality itself. It is essential to come to see that the true source of our psychological suffering isn’t our unfulfilled desires, or some obscure force working against us; rather, that most of our desires are themselves naive, extravagant and misguided, stemming from the belief that we are separate from existence, separate from others, separate from Nature, separate from life itself, and therefore that our current experience, as it stands, lies unaccomplished. In other words, the conflict within us does not arise from the circumstances themselves, but rather from the tension existing between our mental narratives (as long as they are believed in), — our sketchy, self-centered, incomplete, and therefore fundamentally erroneous representations of ourselves and the world — and the reality of what the circumstances of our lives actually are.
The question, then, is: What are these circumstances really, what are they essentially, when we perceive them without the bias of our preconceptions, our ego-generated fantasies? Aren't these circumstances Life itself, first and foremost? Aren't they the miracle of presence, available here and now, effortlessly, regardless of the perceived qualities of its current manifestations? The wonder of being able to comprehend these words... The astonishment of life and awareness... The sheer blessing of existing at all, when in place of this present experience, there could well be nothing whatsoever, pure void... The simple miracle of being, which, in and of itself, is already complete and accomplished as it is.
Can we be open for a moment to the possibility that life may be, in facts, much simpler than we think it is? Maybe we could begin with what’s here already, with what we are already. Maybe we could start with gratitude, with true appreciation for the given. But can we even see, consumed as we are, trying to subdue Nature to our will?
What if Nature has never been a real threat to us, only to our illusions about ourselves, others, and the world? What if, in fact, we were never really separated from Nature? What if the void inside of us wasn’t really there to make us feel empty, but instead, was a space to be filled—not with distractions and illusions—but with what's real, here and now: being alive, being able to marvel at a flower, at a beautiful melody, at the depth of the firmament, observing the patterns of light passing through the leaves of a tree, or losing ourselves in a smile or a gaze, where time stands still, and a moment becomes eternity?
IMF
