When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
Lao Tzu
Preface
I am only writing this to make sense of my experience as it unfolds. I’m aware that words can never directly touch what I am intending to talk about. I am like a musician that tries to convey what falling in love is like: it sounds nice, but I will never be able to give anyone that experience.
Ever Expanding Love
When I came down the mountain, and subsequently returned to my life in Canada, it took several days for me to be able to return to a working routine. I would never, however, be able to return to the same routine I had before I had left for my trip. Something inside of me had shifted on a permanent basis, and it was only a matter of time for the rest of my personal life to catch up to it.
As the months passed, I began to see that Love wasn’t just a one-time thing. It wasn’t a switch that I could flip and that suddenly I was capable of fully loving all human beings from henceforth. For me, that capacity required nurturing. It required that I encounter other people, and it especially required that I be triggered by what other people did. Only when I was triggered in some way did I have an opportunity to see where the boundary of my capacity to love was, and it was an opportunity to be able to expand it.
Thankfully, I have encountered hundreds of such opportunities since then, and I still do. Here I will write just two or three of which stand out.
Other’s Beliefs
On Christmas Eve I went back to Ontario to spend time with my family. I took the opportunity to visit an childhood friend. We had a lengthy discussion about spirituality, and towards the end of it he showed a bit of melancholy. He said that he had sacrificed living a monastic life in favor of a life with a family and a kid. He expressed that he made a good choice, and that simultaneously he would have wanted the other life. Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I wanted to convince him what was so obvious to me: that it didn’t matter which path, that either path was as equally as spiritual as the other. Yet, he was absolutely convinced that he had sacrificed a deeper connection to the divine. I was unable to see his perspective for a little while. I was unable to let my friend be with his own uncomfortable emotions. The irony is that I did the same thing during my Quest. I honestly believed I was closing the door to divinity, and I was pleasantly surprised when the opposite seemed to have expressed itself the moment I really let go if trying to get anywhere.
Finally, I said to him, “Both paths can be equally spiritual.” Right then he paused for a while. I could see gears spinning in his head. Then he recounted a story he had read some time ago:
A young father went up to a monk and said to him, “I’m inspired by you! This monk life looks very difficult!” To which the Monk replied back, “I’m inspired by you! Your life as a father looks very difficult”
What I said seemed to have resonate something within him. He seemed to express a sense of relief. Yet, in hindsight, I almost want to retract what I said, if only to have another opportunity to allow him to be with his emotions.
It was only months later that I began to see that I was unable to yet Love my friend in that capacity. I was unable to let my friend hold on to his own beliefs, even though I didn’t agree with him. Thankfully, the same sort of experience happened a few months later. I recounted the story of giving up God and of giving up Spirituality, and this seemed to trigger someone at my table. They recounted a past difficult choice they made, one in which they chose an ordinary life instead of becoming a nun.
Immediately upon hearing their story, I dropped any intention to get my viewpoint across. I could feel a pain in their expression, and to be with that pain felt more important than getting my viewpoint across. It was right then, when I had surrendered my desire to be seen and to express my viewpoint, that two simultaneous insights revealed themselves to me:
The first had to do with expanding love. How can I let others be just the way they were? It was clear that I had to withdraw my personal beliefs, and let others be with their own beliefs. These beliefs held by others, painted a different perspective of life in their eyes. To impose my own beliefs on someone negated that other person’s experience and perspective. Its no different than saying to them, “No you’re wrong, because these beliefs you carry are not right. My belief is the right one, and this is how life really is!” I’ve probably done this a million times, and actualy I still do, in very subtle ways, and in ways in which I am unconcious of. But right then I was learning to allow the space for simultaneous and opposing beliefs to exist in the same room. This was the beginning of seeing the world in paradox, a prerequisite to being able to know divinity. This was the paradox of God’s love: there are no conditions for letting anything express itself. There is no right or wrong belief, and also there are simultaneously and seemingly opposing expressions of God’s truth which reify uniquely according to the individual. I could no longer deny that someone’s experience of God was false now matter how absurd or ridicolous it sounds. I could no longer use the knowledge of Good and Evil to find my way to divinity, as this is the very attitude which keeps me away from the divine.
The second insight was that of viewpoints or perspectives. Since everyone carries a unique set of beliefs, a hence viewpoints, then it is difficult to conclude an objective truth. Any objective truth is but a conceptualized or imagined objective truth, and not that it isn’t real simply because it is imaged or conceptualized. Every person is experiencing the truth in their unique way, and moreover that truth is constant in flux. There is no one single truth about God upon which any two people can ever agree on in the absolute sense of the word, and that’s because we’re all on our own journeys, all of us holding a unique set of beliefs, which paint a different picture of the world. However, this is the other end of the extreme. I once had an impression that my reality, and actually all of life itself, was subjective to me, and perhaps sometimes it is seen as that way for other people as well. Perhaps another more interesting way to put it is that there are as many universes as there are beings to observe them. However, this view is still limited.
Once in a rare moon, I am blessed to fall into a perspective transcended from these viewpoints. I have seen that we are swaying between the two extremes: that there neither exists and there simultaneously and paradoxically exists both subjective and objective viewpoints in any one instance. I find I lean more towards objective thinking, and I believe that's because in my day-to-day, and in between my responsibilities, I need to maintain objective truths about things. For example, when driving I as well as others need to adhere to the objective truth of the traffic laws. Otherwise, we’d get into accidents, and we’d blame each other endlessly if there wasn't a pre-determined right-of-way. When writing exams, I need to remember objective truths about the way things work in order to get a good grade. However, viewing the world objectively is simply a conditioned way of seeing things. I would imagine that in other environments, such as in wilderness living, that it is different. This is evident in traditional indigenous language. There tends to be more verbs than nouns. For example the descriptive words for rivers, mountains, even trees are all verbs. Many languages don’t have nouns for many things. This suggest they see more things as processes, rather than solid permanent things. They must have had a different way of referencing and orienting themselves in their world. In another example, Irish Gaelic doens’t have the words Yes or No. If someone asks, “Are you hungry?” the typical response would be, “I am!”
“Would you like some water?”
”I would!”
Anyway, having invested too much attention into my responsibilities, I sometimes struggle to see the subjectivity of things throughout my day, especially when I am triggered and when I am speaking to others. I used to dream about the potential of finally knowing some universal truth that we can all adhere to. Wouldn’t life be grand if that were the case? That would make access or realization of the Kingdom of Heaven, (or Enlightenment) straight forward, into something that we could earn and work towards, and we wouldn’t need Bibles to be so cryptic. I saw that I was carrying a habitual way of thinking about truth.
Adyashanti, one of my favourite spiritual teachers, called our objective view of things “collective realism.” It is a type of reality that we are all agreeing to live by, but which is almost completely imaginary in everyone’s minds. This is a version of reality that is passed down. We read knowledge from books that contains the most up-to-date information about a facet of our material reality. This is information that we are constantly updating as we create more sophisticated measuring tools. Yet, at the heart of matter, we don’t truly know what reality is except from our ideas of it, and of the reification process of our minds.
Finally, God seems to show up for people in unique ways, and the ever expressive mind has an unlimited number of ways to reify the expression of God. Who’s to say that a particular expression of truth is real or imagined, truthful or not? Only a mind that is attached to an idea of objective truth about God is interested in such a question. This mind wants to know: “Is this particular expression of truth finally THE ultimate truth I’ve been searching for?“ and “Is it the right one that will lead me to God or is this another false prophet?” Such a mind could believe that a spiritual leader has the truth and that such a truth could be passed down by them. Such a mind would question which source of truth is trustworthy. Finally, such a mind believes that truth could be figured out, reached, solved, or earned. After all, it is mind’s job to create order, to find orientation in our material world. However, God is unknowable and uncontrollable, and cannot be known with mind, except as an idea or concept of it.
The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart had arrived to this conclusion when he stated in a prayer, “God, let me forget you, because I know that whatever idea I have of you is not it.” He knew that God was grander than any of his own ideas or concepts of him. In the canonical version of the Bible, it is reinforced again and again that “Jesus has already figured this out for us.” It is another way of saying, “don’t use mind to try to figure it out, it will get you nowhere.” Indeed, it is mind itself which is putting a veil in front of our eyes. Not that mind is an enemy and that we must do away with it and we all revert back to being two-year olds. The mind is a very powerful tool that we use to orient ourselves. However, you wouldn’t ask a hammer what you should do with your life and your relationships. That’s silly! Yet, we all do this! We trust everything the mind says about the world and about ourselves, to a point where we think we are our minds! Thus, a great portion of our reality is covered up; the sweetest, most beautiful and sublime parts of reality. In the bible there is allusions to this that “[the kingdom] is sprayed across the land and nobody can see it.”
Ultimately, everyone has a unique outlook on life. Everyone is going through their own journey. By that wisdom alone, the most loving thing I can do is to let others be, and not try to convince them that how they see the world is wrong in anyway, especially in the context of spirituality. Of course, in our day-to-day, it would still be important for me to interfere with someone’s attempt to run a red-light, or eat a poisonous plant. These doings align with what a person almost always wants, which is to live.