Just what is letting go? You could say it's moving away from old ideas and embracing the new. It usually comes out of a spiritual or psychological admission of powerlessness, a willing surrender to whatever it is that represents to you a power greater than yourself. It's the search for the courage to take your hands off the rock you've been clinging to, the steering wheel of a car you thought you could run. It's a release of whatever has been holding you back, and if you can't see what's up ahead, you have the faith and its child, courage, that you will be all right.
I'm fascinated by the fact that we can let go, that we can shift from one way of being to another, widen our perspective, discover new ideas, see what we haven't noticed before. Sometimes it comes in a sudden burst - I was blind but now I see! - but those awakenings, conversions, and thunderbolts of clarity and intuition are rare. For most of us, change happens slowly, step by step, until we realize we're in a different place.
I'm sure scientists and philosophers would laugh at my fascination. I imagine them saying, "Duh - that's what consciousness is." I suppose what I mean is that I'm in constant awe of the miracle of consciousness. That it springs from the brain in a way we still don't understand. That it's given us the ability for self-awareness, to look at ourselves and others and understand that we're separate, to feel an inside and an outside to our bodies, to project the future and know that we are going to die. It's at the heart of our ability to feel love. Well, it's at the heart of everything when we're talking about human beings.
It's impossible to say all of what consciousness is and what we can do because of it. I'll leave that to the experts, the neuroscientists and the artists. But I know what my fascination with consciousness does for me. It fills me with awe, an awe that doesn't come all that often in my every day life. It makes me feel I know what miracles are. When I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking of the deepest things with the deepest part of me. It gives me a sense of spiritual connection - which of course occurs in my consciousness.
Years ago, my days were pretty much filled with nothing but anxiety. A terrible tension, as if it were 3 o'clock in the morning and I had to figure out everything by dawn or else some unknown phantom would take me out and shoot me. It didn't matter how I tried to calm or distract myself - fear of some undefined future, dread of the abyss I was certain was up ahead kept me in a paralysis of indecision -- how could I choose anything when that choice might be a fatal error, a mistake which would consign me to a lifetime of loneliness and failure?
Then one day I was talking to some friends and someone said, "One day at a time." Such a cliche, I thought, but for some reason the words stuck. \ I heard, really heard them, and with a jolt, my constant inner tension gave way to a new realization. If I actually saw my life as one day at a time, it meant I didn't have to be haunted by the failures and mistakes of the past, and I didn't have to live in dread of whatever was to come. I could focus on the present, a place where one action leads to another and then another. No choice could be fatal or final; it would only lead to a new set of circumstances out of which I would make new choices. Each action was part of a continuum, the slow unfolding of my life. An image of the abyss had been constantly in front of me, I thought it could engulf me and so I feared a fatal error, the possibility of complete destruction. But the sense of a continuum which was now opening out felt like solid ground, a path made up of events and accidents and the unforeseen and the wonderfully unexpected, all of it grist for the mill of my ongoing evolution. There was spaciousness in the unfolding, ample room for steady deep breaths.
On that day, I began to find a new perspective from which to view and understand my experience. The overarching image of the abyss began to give way to the image of the continuum unfolding day by day. I began to understand that the circumstances of my life might not change, but my view of those circumstances could be transformed.
It is this I keep coming back to: out of the miraculous consciousness our brains give rise to, we always have the possibility of a new perspective, a new idea
which can set us free.
