Love the pitcher
less and the water more. (Rumi)
Someone asked Vernon Howard, "I try to believe in
myself, but I find that I just can't do so." His response:
"Instead of trying to believe in yourself, try to discover
yourself. Do this by seeing the
difference between belief and discovery.
The captain of the Titanic believed his ship could not sink."
All of life
will not change you; it unfolds as a way to unmask you….Like fruit
that has fallen to the earth, the seed can only take root when its protective
covering disintegrates. (Cafeausoul –
Hexagram 23)
I know that there are a lot of people out there who have had the long
experience of following this and that path, system, beliefs, etc – one after
another. I am sure there are both common
reasons for that and individual reasons for it.
But it is hard to reconcile the idea of surrender to Life with thinking
that all of those things that “came to naught” were mistakes. We cannot possibly grasp what the long game
is. We are here to experience the
mundane results of being consciousness in form.
How that fits into the cosmic consciousness is not up to us to
understand. One of the keynotes of the
Open Head Center is thinking about things that don’t matter – that don’t matter
to your own life. Things that cannot be
known or things you can know but don’t need to know.
Occasionally I experience one of those moments where I can see the
threads of my life and the interconnections in one frozen moment. I can see all of those things, the beliefs,
the practices, the rituals and ceremonies that I have walked through and I wonder
which one held the key that enabled me to arrive at the consciousness that I am
at this moment. Or is it the quantum of
all of that? I prefer to see the driving
force as the synthesis of all of it. But
as I settled down to simple practices, it has become apparent that whatever lies
beneath all of these syntheses it seems to keep coming back to being present,
to mindfulness. Most of the practice
that I have been drawn to, while it may be accompanied by varying complexities
of the language presenting the practice or convincing us of the value of the
practice, most of it has the ultimate value of just teaching me to be aware
of what is, of what I am doing or thinking, or not doing or thinking. Through that process comes the letting go of
what doesn’t serve. Through the letting
go comes the revelation of the true self.
What is left after the water recedes is what is essential. and it actually seems to become more and more
effortless over time.
I am increasingly coming to see that whatever my
expectations were when starting this journey about the nature of the transformed
person was part of the problem. Despite
the efforts of my mind and its strategic conditioning, its adaptive strategies,
the true nature of my Design has always made itself known. I just never recognized that that part was
the real me and it has been here all along.
That slow evolution that is sometimes so frustrating wasn’t really the
slowness to change; it was the slowness to see and accept what was always here.
