That Bias Against Not Knowing

 

If you've lived long enough, there is a deeply transformative event that has probably happened to you. I call it "breaking open". It's when your worst fears, your deepest separations, and the destruction of your most cherished beliefs, lead you to such a deep despair, you begin to question everything you knew to be true. You realize you just don't have ANY answers--you have NOTHING to offer, and a survey of your life reveals no value whatsoever.

The first time this happened to me, I was in a difficult marriage riding alongside an existential mid-life crisis. I didn't know what to believe anymore. I didn't believe IN anything--certainly not myself. I felt like there was no "me" there anymore. What finally returned me to a functional ego was a book by Dr. Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul. In it I found a sort of spiritual rock to cling on to while I rode out the existential storms of my life. In time, I found comfort in the embracing of that dark night, as it revealed to me the depth of my feelings, the breadth of my not knowing, and the cosmic panorama of who or what I might be.

The second visit to the dark end of the street, was the loss of my partner. Her death broke open my heart, where I could see all the ways and hidden recesses of my resistance to loving, and the terrible regret I now had that I never truly shared myself with her. It hit me much harder than I had expected, or I should say her death was not what hit me so much as the realization that I never let myself love her the way she loved me. The further shock was seeing how I lied about it, and denied my own heart. Why was I seeing this NOW after she's gone! I cried, I writhed in the remorse, and I went deep into the grief of how I had lost my own heart.

These two journeys laid me out spiritually, prostrate on the rocky shore of the threshold to divine communion--a kind of ego destruction where nothing is important, and yet it all seems to have impact.

What got me reminiscing about these adventures was a talk by Miranda MacPherson called, "Ego Relaxation". She describes her own "breaking open" of her spiritual practice that reduced her to an extreme state of not knowing. Not knowing who or what she was, not knowing if she had anything to offer the world, or herself.

She finally came to an awareness that these profound states of not knowing are also part of who we are. And, in fact, are a gateway to our own divinity. As corporeal beings living in this dualistic world of opposites, we form biases in favor of knowing. We avoid and fight our own ignorance, and take definitive steps to transform our ignorance into knowledge. Culturally, not knowing has negative consequences, and is all twisted up with trust issues and existential security.

We diligently seek "answers" when we don't know something, and mistakenly carry over that habit into our spiritual life where there is a whole other thing going on. We get confused between ego knowing and the awareness of self.

The ego says it knows what and who we are--it knows what we've done and why. It knows what love is, and is certain about its own potentials and purposes. These are all ego constructs, and they are the solid basis upon which we build our sense of what is real, and what we are willing to experience.

The conflict arises when we attempt to connect to the Universal. We don't reference ourselves as being everything, because then there is no individual-ness, no point of reference between who we are and God. MacPherson points out that this is where the real spiritual work begins. We can begin to acknowledge and relax all the ego constructs, we can begin to seek to de-construct all those decisions and choices about who and what we are, admitting the Truth that we are everything, and yet are nothing. Our life is created simply because we exist, and yet what we are is an ineffable single point from which all things proceed.

By laying out the ego and allowing it to be just as much a part of our being as the rest of our life, allows us a transcendence of the dualities of living. Our identity can be more truly seen as a loved and loving character, an avatar if you will, in this game we have gotten so caught up in.

Your identity is loved. Who you are at any moment is loved. And through that love is the eternal connection we all have to each other.

Greener Pastures and Silver Linings

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine a playing field, such as a soccer or football field. Now, at one end the playing field is a beautiful countryside with rainbows, beautiful flowers, amazing villages, children laughing, super-high-vibes--your happiest place. At the other end of the field are your worst nightmares--darkness, sadness, terror, injury, drama and dysfuntion. Now, go down onto the field. Which end are you closer to?

We all live somewhere on this dualistic spectrum--some days closer to the light end than the dark, and other days closer to the dark than the light. Within this dualistic mindset, is an aversion to the dark, and a longing for the light, and therein lies a trap of sorts.

By resisting the dark end of the spectrum, we expand it, and by longing for the light, we demonstrate how the light end of the spectrum is not what we are having, doing, or being. It is a sort of double jeopardy, where one end seems unattainable while the other seems to be continually biting at our heels. As Princess Leia of Star Wars said to the Imperial General, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

We have been acculturated to deny and run from the darkness within ourselves, and like so many societal "solutions" to undesirable states and conditions, the more intensely we resist and deny the darkness, the more solid it becomes.

"Greener Pastures" are always "over there" somewhere away from where and what we are being right now. That "Silver Lining" is always behind those dark clouds, seemingly out of reach, representing a day of divine blessing that never seems to come.

What is easily forgotten, or overlooked, is that the "dark end" of the field could not exist without the light end. And if we find ourselves at the dark end of the field, it means there must be an opposing light end. The other unacknowledged truth is that within each moment at the dark end there exists a gateway to the light. We have only to make that choice to go there.

By getting hung up about "how dark it all seems", we expand it, make it greater than we are. We lose hope of ever getting to the light, and tumble further and further into that Dark End Zone. We stop looking at the light end, throwing away personal power in favor of "fate" or a rescuing "savior" that will make it all go away.

News flash: We are all our own saviors, and we save ourselves by choosing and committing to that light end of the field.

When there is pain, we must acknowledge that relief co-exists with that pain. We choose relief and thus begin the hero's journey out of pain. When there is the loss of a loved one, we must acknowledge that connection, oneness and love is co-existing with that sense of loss. When there are financial setbacks and poverty, there can only be such things because prosperity and abundance exist within those conditions. Just as with any problem, the solution exists within it.

I was sent a very special video by a friend that got me going on this--a talk by Miranda MacPherson. She speaks about the practice of non-duality being a frontal assault on everything we've decided we cannot be. Everything convinces us that we are not good enough, strong enough, smart enough or conscious enough to experience joy, grace and unconditional love in our lives. By fully embracing the entire spectrum of dark to light, and truly accepting and allowing both ends as eligible for unconditional love, we rise to the awareness that all is good, all is joy, and all is love. There are no excuses for our perceived weaknesses, as those are a denial of our strength. There are no excuses for our stupidity, as that points directly at our innate intelligence--how we learn and grow to appreciate our choices.

As we become inclusive of ALL of who and what we are--the entire spectrum of densities from that carbonized black goo to the glorius effulgent light of infinite being, we gain a mastery over our choices. We gain a truly deep appreciation for everything we've gone through across the entire spectrum of experience, for it has brought us to this place of true understanding.

We become free to run and jump and roll around anywhere we please on that Field, in the full knowing that no matter where we go, we are loved, we are cherished, and we are infinitely free.

The Art of Non-Duality

I keep coming back to this "non-duality" concept, because it is so much at the crux of creation, and indeed, why we as infinite creators continually choose to participate in such an extreme form of duality.

It is a dramatic world of opposites, contrasts, and all the messy grey areas in between. Don't we have something better to do than to get all tangled up in this morass? Well, no. You see, by experiencing and being these extreme states of opposites, we come to know ourselves as infinite beings. By the sheer contrast of the non-being and solidness represented by life here on Planet Rock, it reveals to us our infiniteness.

Most of what we experience is what we are subconsciously co-creating with all these other infinite creators. It doesn't seem like we are creating the universe of our lives because most of what is being created is what we subconsciously agreed to be a part of coming into this life. As we "wake up", or become aware of this fact, we can then start making conscious choices about what we prefer to experience.

What it takes to wake us up, though, is usually a carnival ride of torturous swings from one extreme to the other. We are seemingly tossed back and forth from dark to light, hard to soft, easy to difficult, and everything in between. The bewildering input of contrasts assaulting our senses seems to be more of an attack against us, throwing us into defense mode.

Is it any wonder that most of us just put our heads down and take the path of least resistance, complying and compromising our own preferences in the hope of "getting by", "fitting in", and fergawdsakes not rocking the boat. It seems easier, or at least a whole lot less threatening to find a somewhat comfortable niche, and dig in, hoping to avoid any real revelation of the infiniteness of who we are, and the crushing responsibility of our own creations.

With the advent of the the planetary information web (the Internet), and the inevitable development and involvement in "social media", or what I call selective hive minds, we can compartment and validate our own value systems, creating our own self-bubbles that shut out dissenting views or emotional conflict. This serves to amplify our responses when we stick our heads up every once in a while and are bombarded by the seeming insanity of an opposite world assaulting us. We either quickly duck back into our comfort zones, or take up arms to attack those opposing our niches we've become so attached to--mostly in self-defense.

There eventually arises a desire to "rise above it all", to transcend the hive minds, and get beyond all the conflict of this Opposite World. This is Nature's way of squeezing our consciousness into present time awareness, and drives us to be mindful and non-judgmental about everything around us. It's the only way out, really, and even though it's difficult, it's certainly preferable to living in a hole in defense mode.

Our lives then become a series of self-awarenesses about our automatic responses developed in self-defense to assaults on our personal values and ego attachments. The door has opened, and now we cannot go back--what is seen cannot be un-seen, and leads to more awareness and more clarity. At some point, there is a reckoning, and in a slow flash we start to see this conflicted world as the birthing of something greater, something inherently beautiful in its becoming--a world where polarities merge into a continuum of necessities, much like the birthing process where writhings of pain morph into the beauty of a new life.

It all needs to be there. It's all happening because it's supposed to happen. All the suffering, pain, agony, joy, glory, and poignancy coalesces into one immense, amazing and glorius birthing event. There are no longer opposites, but spectrums of being--none better or worse, or righter or more wrong than the other. Without the one there cannot be the other, and both are required for what is being wondrously created.

It becomes a matter of dropping all our requirements of what "should be", un-creating all the evaluations, judgments and conclusions about what we see and experience "out there". And by doing so, "out there" becomes "in here", and at last we have a shot at truly creating the glorious world we've always known is possible.