1. True Self
Who of us has not asked, “Who am I?” “Who am I really?” “What am I all about?” “Is there any essential ‘me’ here?” It is as if we are all a big secret to ourselves and must search for clues, however obscure they may be. Yet the search never stops fascinating us, even as we grow older. (If it does, we have almost certainly stopped growing.)
This curiosity about ourselves grows more intense in the teen and young adult years as we try on a dozen costumes and roles, and we surely covet any recognition or praise of our most recent incarnation. We quickly grab it and try it on for size, as if to say, “This might be me!” Some never take their costume off. A too early or too successful self becomes a total life agenda, occasionally for good but more often for ill. Think of the many young athletes, musicians, and poets who become obsessed with their identity but never make it to the big time. Even if they do succeed, there are too many stories of unhappiness, being lost, and self-destruction. Our ongoing curiosity about our True Self seems to lessen if we settle into any “successful” role. We have then allowed others to define us from the outside, although we do not realize it. Or perhaps we dress ourselves up on the outside and never get back inside.
This confusion about our True Self and False Self is much of the illusion of the first half of life, although most of us do not experience the problem then. Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success… If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”
Success is hardly ever your True Self, only your early window dressing. It gives you some momentum for the journey, but it is never the real goal. You do not know that, however. In the moment, it just feels right and good and necessary—and it is. For a short while.
-Richard Rohr
2. Where Are We Going?
“Where am I in my journey on the spiritual path? Where have I been? Where am I now? And in which direction am I going?” These seem to me such vital questions. And the question itself is more important, perhaps, than any answer. To keep the question alive, to keep inquiring, to keep looking, witnessing, experiencing, this is crucial for all of us; not to fall asleep on the journey, but rather, as Christ said on the eve of the crucifixion, “Stay awake!”
These questions are important to us not only as individuals but also collectively. Our species must ask itself: “Where have we been, how far have we come, and where are we now? What is the situation on Earth? And what is the path forward?” If we do not ask these questions, we drift unconsciously, randomly. Yes, grace still reaches us. But we have lost the opportunity to participate consciously and purposefully in the destiny of the planet. And is there any other reason for us to have incarnated in the first place? Did we incarnate to make a collection of pleasant objects, to be entertained, to pass our time? No, we came with a driving force that propelled us into embodiment out of the surging throngs of angels, for the opportunity to descend here, to the frontier of the divine self-disclosure, to participate on the crest of the wave of God’s self-discovery, to take part in the awakening of the very fabric of the Earth.
Where are we on our spiritual path as a species? When we look around the world today, we see much that is amiss. As a nation, we have been at war for years now. And we are deep in debt. We are beginning to see the effects of living beyond our means, of getting out of balance. We are in debt to other nations. We are in debt to other species. We are even in debt to future generations. The whole Earth is in a fever. The temperature is rising. The effects of our over-consumption, our insatiable hunger, is despoiling the planet, and we are anxious and afraid, living under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, weapons now capable of destroying the whole human race, indeed the whole system of life on Earth. The stakes are rising. History is speeding up. And yet we are drifting. And yet we do not ask the basic questions: “Where are we in our path?” and “Where are we going?”
Now amidst all of the portents of danger there are also the most remarkable signs of hope. We have come a long way. Civil rights, democracy, an egalitarian society in which each human being is respected, recognized as equal under the law; a world in which we are discovering cultures so different to our own and yet which carry in their depths the same essential truths of the human experience, uniting us in the awareness that humanity is one field of life. We are united from the vantage point of the planetary perspective, symbolized in the image of the planet Earth from space, an image that truly represents the myth of our time. There is tremendous possibility, tremendous blessing and opportunity in our midst, and there is an awakening. As recalcitrant and rigid as are the forces of the old order, the forces of strife and competition and ruthless exploitation of the Earth, the power of these forces pale in comparison to the creativity, the inspiration, the passion that is beginning to well up. And it wells up in response to a cry. It wells up in response to the depth of despair that is the symptom of our forgetfulness, our fragmentation, our alienation. It is as if the anima mundi itself cries out.
Now amidst all of the portents of danger there are also the most remarkable signs of hope. We have come a long way. Civil rights, democracy, an egalitarian society in which each human being is respected, recognized as equal under the law; a world in which we are discovering cultures so different to our own and yet which carry in their depths the same essential truths of the human experience, uniting us in the awareness that humanity is one field of life. We are united from the vantage point of the planetary perspective, symbolized in the image of the planet Earth from space, an image that truly represents the myth of our time. There is tremendous possibility, tremendous blessing and opportunity in our midst, and there is an awakening. As recalcitrant and rigid as are the forces of the old order, the forces of strife and competition and ruthless exploitation of the Earth, the power of these forces pale in comparison to the creativity, the inspiration, the passion that is beginning to well up. And it wells up in response to a cry. It wells up in response to the depth of despair that is the symptom of our forgetfulness, our fragmentation, our alienation. It is as if the anima mundi itself cries out.
-Pir Zia Inayat Khan
3. Questions
My
dear friend: I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time;
not because I had forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that
one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize
you in it as if you were very near. It is your letter of May second, and
I am sure you remember it. As I read it now, in the great silence of
these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even
more than when I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away
differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble.
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds
move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one
anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in
their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate
people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very
delicate, is almost unsayable.
But
even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if
you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting
upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small
Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge,
immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very
simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor:
then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow
more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays
behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and
knowledge.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
4. Dragons We are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.
So you mustn't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
