Not Going Crazy

Not Making Things Worse

Borrow the Beloved’s eyes.
Look through them and you’ll see the Beloved’s face
everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom…
Let that happen, and things
you have hated will become helpers.

—Rumi

It is not about waking up but rather noticing that this reality dreams eternally.

— Peter Brown

Mark Twain famously said something like, “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life and some of them really happened.”

We are weeks away now from a big election in the USA (and don’t worry, this is not going to be a political or partisan post). People on both the left and the right are terrified about what will happen if their candidate loses this election. There are intelligent, reasonable, well-informed people on all sides. And there are less intelligent, unreasonable, poorly informed people on all sides. Lots of scary scenarios are on offer on both the left and the right. Yes, some of them might come true. But many of them probably won’t. And even if they do, what is the best thing we can offer to this troubled world? More hysteria? More fear? More anger? More scary stories? More violence? More separation and division? More hate? More sleepless nights? More refusal to listen to “the other side”?

I’ve taken in recent years to listening to independent journalists and podcasters with varied views as well as media from both the right and the left. I see elements of truth as well as exaggerations, blind spots and falsehoods on all sides. As I dip every day into the cacophony of political material in my inbox, in the media, on YouTube and in conversations with friends—all the different views on Israel and Gaza, on Ukraine, on Iran, on how best to deal with racism, on Trump and Kamala, on wokeism, on MAGA and fascism, on transgender issues, on censorship and free speech, on abortion, on the Mendez brothers, on this and that—it becomes ever more obvious that there is no solid truth in this relative Rorschach blot reality. It’s an endless shape-shifting of conditioned perceptions and ideas, my own and everyone else’s, and my own views keep slipping around and changing shape.

Virtually everything we each know about world and national events comes from second or third hand sources. Which sources we trust depends on our life experience and conditioning. Even if we have had direct firsthand experience in such places as Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Iran or anyplace else, we can never see the whole situation—the whole history, the whole present happening—we can only ever see a particular, limited, partial view. Most of us have no real background in economics, epidemiology, or any of the many other topics we have strong opinions about—we trust experts, and there are always other experts with different views. Who has it right? I’m not suggesting that all views are equally correct, but all views are partial and subject to error.

Can we perhaps recognize that the storylines and the enormous dramas of emotion-thought are all very much like dreams or nightmares? Whatever happens in this movie of waking life, it will pass. Everyone reading this will eventually die. Eventually, this whole planet earth and its sun will pass away.

The illusory forms appear and disappear, but as Rilke said, “In you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.” Or as Nisargadatta put it, “After the disappearance of everything, whatever remains, that you are.” Or Darryl Bailey: “We are this mysterious happening and nothing can ever harm it. The false appearances of form come and go; they suffer and die. They can be viewed as adequate or inadequate, successes or failures. But the unformed happening that actually is never comes or goes.” This placeless, timeless, centerless, unbound presence, this intelligence-energy, this germinal darkness, this light, this infinite no-thing-ness is here now, beginningless and endless, ever-present, showing up as endlessly shape-shifting, unfolding appearances.

Yes, in the appearance, in the dream or the nightmare, in the story, throughout human history there have been tyrants and genocides and periods of repression. There have been famines and wars and plagues. Empires have come and gone. Yes, these are all real enough. The pain really hurts. Yes, things we regard as terrible can and do happen.

But as Mark Twain said, many of the things we have feared and predicted and lost sleep over never actually happened. And even when they did, what is the best thing we can offer?

This is a question for all of us to live with.

It may help to do The Work of Byron Katie about our thoughts:

Is it true? From the perspective of the universe, can I really know this is true?

What does it feel like to believe that thought? How do I react? What happens?

Who would I be without that thought? What would it be like if I didn’t believe that thought?

Can I see a reason to hold onto believing that thought?

If I can, can I really know that’s true?

These are not questions to approach intellectually by thinking about them. They are questions to feel into deeply. They are questions that can open the heart-mind in profound ways.

Maybe we can bring some silence into this troubled world, some stillness, some open listening presence. Maybe we can question our deeply held beliefs, opinions and ideas. Maybe we can recognize that when we oppose something, we often strengthen it, and when we meet something or someone with hate, we often push it further into what makes us hate it.

Yes, there is a place for expressing our views, for peaceful protesting, for action, for speaking out, for critical thinking. But can we take care in how we do this and what we say? Can we ask ourselves, is this actually helping or is it further enflaming and dividing? Are we really making this better or merely shoring up our own belief systems (and our illusory selves) and getting off on self-righteous anger?

The illusory me always needs something to oppose and something to assert in order to sustain itself. What Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body, our habitual patterns of emotion-thought and reactivity, feeds on conflict and opposition. Having an enemy and opposing something strengthens the illusory self-center. Anger and self-righteousness can feel very good, very energizing. At least, on the surface.

But in my experience, love (or awareness) is the deepest truth and the deepest healer. The deepest healing goes to the root rather than just reacting to and rearranging the surfaces, none of which ever actually have the solidity and the certainty we think they do. Thinking divides, classifies and abstracts. This is a useful survival function, but it means that we mistake abstract, conceptual maps for the very slippery, ungraspable living territory that they represent.

No country and no person is all good or all bad. This living actuality is much messier, much more nuanced and complex than our simplistic views. And we are each reflections of all the others. We contain multitudes.

The deepest healing sees from wholeness, through the eyes of God or unicity, the Beloved’s eyes, as Rumi says in that poem I began with. The deepest healing sees the dream-like nature of everything that seems so solid, as Peter’s quote at the beginning suggests. Seeing from wholeness allows us to hold all the ever-changing appearances more lightly, and to see what is the same in every different experience.

So as we approach this election and whatever happens afterward, and as we live with this world with all the wars and the ravages of climate change, can we take care not to needlessly scare ourselves and everyone else? Is it possible not to pour gasoline on the many fires? Is it possible not to fall into simplistic black and white, us and them, doomsday thinking? Is it possible to listen deeply, both to “the other” and also to our own reactivity, our own certainty, our own self-righteousness?

And when it isn’t possible, when reactivity and old conditioning and the illusory sense of separation overwhelm us, can we see that this is nothing personal, that it is as impersonal and unavoidable in the moment it happens as the outer weather at that moment? Can we see that everyone on all sides is doing the only possible given their conditioning, their life experiences, their nature and nurture?

Whatever happens is the only possible. It cannot, in each moment, be other than how it is. And it is never the way we think it is. It is always much more complex, much murkier, much more slippery, much more unresolvable and unpindownable than our ideologies suggest. Life includes the light and the dark, and they cannot be pulled apart. They go together in ways we cannot begin to fathom. There is light in the darkness, and darkness in the light. And in each moment, the universe is born anew.

There's a famous poem by William Carlos Williams,  The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

— William Carlos Williams

A lot depends upon each one of us and on what may seem unimportant or trivial. Every action, however tiny, affects the whole. Finding the beauty in each ordinary moment, finding the humanity in the other, loosening our grip on our opinions and certainties, opening the heart-mind, finding the perfection in the imperfection, discovering the unresolvability of everything that appears, recognizing the wholeness that cannot be other than it is—all of this changes the world.

In my experience, the greatest healing power is awareness. Awareness illuminates and beholds everything. It sheds light. It accepts everything and clings to nothing. It might be called unconditional love. Attention is focusing of the light of awareness in a particular direction, like the beam of a flashlight. And as Zen teacher John Tarrant put it, “Attention is the most basic form of love.”

So, can we give open, nonjudgmental attention to what is happening as we read and listen to political commentaries and news reports, or as we engage in conversations, either argumentative ones or ones confirming our own positions? Can it be noticed how all this feels in the bodymind, what it stirs up, how it feels to argue and defend? Can our addictive attraction to all this be seen? Can we also notice how it affects us to read and listen to nondual spiritual voices, or to sit in silence? Are we reminded of a deeper truth and a different possibility? Can we notice how that feels in the bodymind, and what it brings forth?

Awareness grows (or the recognition of awareness grows) when we take time to be quiet, to be silent, to be still, to breathe, to allow everything to be just as it is, and to open to the vastness that is always already allowing everything to be just as it is.

Other good ideas: Take walks in nature. Listen to the rain and the wind and the birds. Spend time with your dog or cat. Be still. Be knowingly present. Don’t overdose on media and news.

Upsetting and unsettling times can be great times for spiritual exploration and discovery—for seeing how the mind works and how suffering is generated, not “out there,” but in here, within each one of us, and for discovering and opening up to a different possibility.

One of the things we realize as we grow old is how much history repeats itself, although in another sense, we never step into the same river twice. But in some way, we’ve been here before, over and over, cycling around and around as this dreaming presence that periodically imagines itself separate and lost and in need of salvation, fighting wars, gaining and losing ground. And yet, here we are, not having moved an inch. No time, no space. No me, no you. No good guys or bad guys. No birth, no death. Just this vast immovable listening presence, being and beholding it all.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

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Love to all…