One of the great insights that has served me well is, there is no truth, only perspective, and perspective is subject to change. It's always possible that what I believe today may change tomorrow. There may be new information, or an insight into what something in my past actually meant, or the realization of how distorted my perception has been. I can always learn something new, about myself and about the world, and come to see things in a whole new light. I can revise my thinking. My consciousness can expand.
When I find myself vehemently declaring I'm right, I try to remind myself that I may come to doubt the rightness of what I say. When I'm feeling blue, I remind myself that I can find another perspective on whatever is bringing me down. When someone is spouting what I judge to be drivel, I remind myself that no one, least of all me, has a lock on the truth, and this drivel-spouting someone may turn out to be someone I admire and may have something to teach me.
There is an aspect of this insight that all beliefs can change which is very disturbing to some people. If there is no Truth with a capital T, what is there to hold on to? We want an anchor, to receive the message that than create it. We want something outside ourselves that is carved in stone so we can feel safe, protected, armed with the Truth. This is why some people fight so hard against the idea of evolution. The model of existence as a slow but constant flow, as an evolution that is random and not heading toward any particular end, means that there is nothing unchanging to hold on to. Nothing is eternal. There is no solid permanent ground. If that's true, what is there to have faith in and how do we justify faith at all?
I'm going to leave those particular questions for another day. In any case, there are enough philosophers, psychologists, theologians and ethicists preoccupied with getting to the bottom of them, as if such a bottom exists. I'll just talk about my own experience. Coming to understand that all of life is an evolution, that my own life is constantly evolving has liberated me. It has given me humility because I see that I might not have enough information and it's possible I'll turn out to be wrong. It's produced empathy for another person because once I say I may not know it all, it makes me able actually to see and hear the person standing in front of me, without judgment or the need to prevail. It leads me to compassion.
Basho wrote that every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. That is the insight at the heart of so many spiritual practices. My life is movement. Experience passes through me. The meaning of my life is in how I open myself to experience and stay open to learn from it.
What I like best is when my mind focuses in on an idea, a question, something, anything in particular. My mind wants to be engaged by something that takes me out of myself, out of one level of consciousness and into another. My thoughts can just meander, setting their own path, one following another. You could call it zoning out and that's a level of consciousness in which my mind is almost asleep, a computer whose screen is dark even though energy is feeding into it, keeping track of time or emails. Functioning but on the lowest possible setting.
Other times, my thoughts settle in and my mind comes awake. Everything in me sits up, alert and on the hunt. My thoughts don't want to meander - they want an object, a challenge, to follow an interesting trail, to create in words. Someone who studies consciousness may describe it another way, but to me it feels like becoming conscious on a very high level.
Despite having experienced many many times my mind coming awake, I still sometimes choose to zone out, to not think about anything in particular. To turn off my mind. But it's a paradox that taking time off to laze around doesn't replenish my energy; instead, it's enervating and has its own kind of perverse momentum, stretching itself out and flattening experience.
Choosing more often to focus my thoughts can become a habit - if I practice making that choice. I can ask the universe to help me be willing to make that practice day after day. I can make a new choice, the one that will always bring me awake and alive with energy.
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.
I had an appointment for an out patient surgical procedure this morning. I was nervous and used the twenty minute wait to meditate to calm myself down. Suddenly, I remembered years ago when I had a biopsy and felt much was at stake. I was in the changing room in a state bordering on panic. I was trying to breathe in and out when an image came to.
It was a ring of low stones. I see them very clearly, granite chiseled into rectangles embedded in the soil about six inches high. A voice came, "Step out of your fear. Step out of your fear." I closed my eyes and pictured myself slowly slowly slowly stepping beyond the circle of rocks, onto the cool grass. When I opened my eyes, in a miraculous way, my fear was gone. Whatever will be, will be; I'm ready for anything. The biopsy was positive and there was a long process in front of me, but that was the first and only time I felt panic coming on.
Over the years I've returned to the image of the stones whenever I'm facing something that makes me nervous. It's a primitive image, a miniature Stonehenge, and it comes from a deep place. Some would call it grace. I don't know. But I believe it comes from the deepest part of me, the part that wants to survive, to transcend my fear, to be all right.
What happened in that changing room still astonishes me. Fear came up and claimed me and I felt powerless, my being taken over, and yet the stones emerged and I obeyed the voice and stepped outside of my fear. In only a few moments, I was in a different place. I don't know how consciousness shifts in this way, but I know it can. I can't always quickly step out of fear and doubt and the signs which say, No. Sometimes, I have to picture the stones many times. But I know it's possible to move the fear, I know it from my own experience, and that is everything.
Years ago, I came across a book by a Dutch woman named Etty Hillesum. It was her journal for the year between the Nazis marching into the Netherlands and the time they took her away ultimately to die at Auschwitz. Her entries went from terror, helplessness, the desperate need for someone to save her, to a faith that freed her to act, to be of service to all those around her who were sufferings. She wrote, "No matter when they do to me, there is always room for praying hands." Praying hands isn't a phrase I relate to, but I understood she had had a spiritual awakening. She had faced a situation she was powerless to change but instead of that powerlessness destroying her, she found courage in it, a fearlessness that allowed her to do what she could do. She found a purpose to her suffering - helping others - and that purpose led her to a connection to something greater than herself. No matter what, she knew she would always feel that connection. She would find freedom in the most unfree circumstance.
Hillesum's spiritual awakening provided a framework, a context, for all the horrors she saw around her, for the horrors she knew were still to come. That context was the realm of the spirit and it was beyond everything, arching over everything. always present. Her belief was personal, individual, and it was real; it had real effect on her daily life and thought. It led her to acceptance and peace, which in turn enabled her to act.
I take it as a given that it is we humans who confer meaning and value to our experience. We don't discover a meaning and value out beyond our consciousness. Experience comes to us through our senses and we interpret it, we give it meaning, we assess its truth. When Victor Frankl says that no matter what our experience is, we are always free to change our attitude, to create new meaning, he is pointing to the greatest freedom we have, the great gift consciousness confers, which is the ability to interpret, to choose, what our experience means.
We may suffer but out of our consciousness and our spirit we are able to find a larger context for that suffering, a framework to discover the deeper meaning and purpose of our experience. That search for context, for the deeper meaning, is what I intend to write about here. I especially intend to write about the freedom that search confers.
