“But you don’t know that they’re suffering. The suffering is yours, it’s happening in you,” we hear the Guide say, in response to practitioners, including this one, talking about suffering over the state of the world.
When I arrived in Ukraine to begin a new job this summer, a friend said to me: “I so wish for everyone who worries about Ukraine that they could come here and be cured of their worry.” Because what’s here is adequacy, Love, Life’s fortitude and good sense of humor. Everyone committed to making it work. Community, generosity, strength, kindness, warmth.
And as a spiritual principle, I realize that what my friend said is absolutely true: When we get Here, worry isn’t. Worry can only be maintained when attention is on a conversation in conditioned mind.
We are so conditioned that worrying about someone else is love. We are so conditioned that worrying about someone else is how to care. What an awful ruse. Worrying about someone else is making my ego-ginned-up experience the center of the universe.
Identified with ego, we read the news and we watch the world “out there” in a subject-object way, without any awareness that we are identified with a process of separation. We “see” suffering, inadequacy, lack, loss, deprivation. We don’t see that we are seeing through a process of suffering, inadequacy, lack, loss, deprivation. We don’t see that it is happening in us, not “out there.”
In this bamboozle, we don’t see what an ego indulgence it is to assume inadequacy. We don’t see what an ego coup it is to assume suffering. We don’t see what an ego mechanism it is for it to gin up suffering in us and say it’s because of what’s happening “out there,” using our goodness as the door it comes through to feast insatiably on our life force.
Are horrific things happening to humans every second? Yes. Are humans doing horrific things to other humans, to other creatures, to the planet? Absolutely, they are.
Yet, I remember once hearing the Guide say “every conscious breath saves all sentient beings.” As I hold that as a koan and look at what it could be pointing to, I see that when we take a conscious breath, we are, for that moment, not participating in and feeding the ego illusion of separation. We are not participating in evil as the shadow of inattention, as one of our heroes puts it.
For that conscious breath, we are not projecting inadequacy. We are not making things worse. We are attending to ending suffering in the one place we can end it. We are not allowing ego to distract us into resolving anything “out there.” We are not feeding the illusion of an “out there.” We are in Nothing Wrong. We are in Love. We are available to be truly moved and have the Heart broken wide open. We are in: What Now, Life? We are practicing being in the Refuge of Presence. And in so practicing, we might just be a Refuge.
Gasshō,
Anna L
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