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Our life is always varying between happiness and unhappiness, or sometimes between relative happiness and relative unhappiness. It is shifting, changing, and we long for a bedrock of peace and stability. It is natural to do so, but most of us spend a lifetime seeking, seeking, seeking, for a bedrock we never find. Can we find it? Yes—if we comprehend and deal with the problem involved. Until we do, we seek the bedrock outside of ourselves; we hunt with hope for the person or situation or belief system which will supply us with that which we believe we lack. The illusions of romantic love, of the perfect (and nonexistent life) work or partner (or home or living situation) all beckon to us like the Sirens to Odysseus. If we don’t understand, time after time our little ship will be shattered on hidden rock.But the other side of such disasters is the dawning recognition that each rough episode in life can be our true teacher; each difficulty is, as one sutra says, ‘the Buddha come to greet us.’ We slowly awaken to the knowledge that the spiritual bedrock we seek is not a life beyond disaster and pain, but the embracing of disaster and pain as they occur. If we want a refreshing drink of water (of life), we cannot separate out the molecules that we think will be pleasing and tasty for us. If we do (or could) we would not be drinking water but a monstrosity of our own creation. Similarly, if we refuse the direct, and sometimes painful, experience of this moment, we are left stewing around in our usual thinking muddle of blame, criticism, judgment, or avoidance. To know the wholeness
of life, we have to drink the whole glass of water; we have to experience
the moment as it is, not the distorted version of it that my mind can
concoct. Since the whole glass is nothing but the wholeness of each moment—unavoidable, ever present—when we are more willing to experience our fear and pain directly, the wholeness (bedrock) of our lives is revealed as the miracle it is. Simple, yes. Easy, no. For most of us, this is practice for a lifetime. However, the bedrock (always there) is more and more known to us as being there. The good life. |
