Someone recently sent this quote from a Socratic email class to me with the suggestion it could be a newsletter article. So here we are.
Have you ever questioned what the big deal is about being the “right person”? What is the “right person”? What does that mean? For example, I don’t have be-the-right-person issues. Just never comes up for me. I offer that as an example of it’s possible not to care about, suffer over, or get beaten because of it. What if you didn’t?
It reminds me of my favorite Martha Graham quote from the yearlong retreat about the unique expression of Life each of us is, and how if we don’t express that expression it’s never going to be expressed. The ego voices of karma and conditioning would have us believe that someone else, probably lots of someone elses, could surely be able to express that expression better than we could, and probably are already doing so, but that’s a lie.
For anyone with be-the-right-person karma, or regularly accosted by the self-hating voices with “what you did wrong,” please consider this: How would you know? How would you know what being the right person is? How could you ever know that how you were was the wrong way to be? (I suspect we’re not talking about killing/stealing sorts of sins and crimes here, right?) There’s only one way, isn’t there? You have to listen to and believe egocentric self-hate voices in your head. It’s the only way. You can’t find out from everyone you encounter how they feel about how you are, what you say, how you act. That leaves you with one place to check for information, which just happens to be the one place in the universe devoted to making you believe there’s something wrong with you!
So, yeah, let’s just agree to drop it, shall we? Let’s get on with the very important work of being the only expression of Life that’s ever going to be possible for anyone to be. How will we know if we’re doing it right? We won’t. But since, in order to pull this off, we’ll be in close, intimate communication with the Unconditional Love and Acceptance that is our Authentic Nature, we will happily not be concerned!
In gasshō,
Ch