Lifeletters

I remember one day in Grade 5, when I came home and told my mother what I had learned in science class. I was on fire with it.  This was in the 50’s, long before we all heard about quantum physics

‘Mum,” I said, “When you look at that chair and think it’s solid, that’s not really how it is!”

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“It’s just how it looks,” I told her. “ But really, that chair, and everything else, is made of tiny little particles called molecules and atoms, that are zooming around all the time.”

My mother looked quite stunned. “Are you sure that’s what your teacher said?” she asked me. “And what are these little zooming things made of?”

“Well,” I said, saving the best for the last, “molecules and atoms are really nothing but space.” After that my mother was very quiet. She just walked around, touching things and shaking her head, for the rest of the day, in a state of wonder, curiosity and deep bewilderment.

I have always remembered the feeling of that afternoon. It was as if my mother and I reached a precipice, over which our minds could not carry us; and we stood there together, peering into the mystery of Being.

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Over the last twenty-five years I’ve spent teaching and coaching, I’ve become very interested in the nature of real change. It seems to be such a rare phenomenon; and yet there have been these moments, in myself and others, when something opened, and nothing was quite the same after that. I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to people about this mysterious process called transformation. How does it happen? What leads up to it? What’s it all about? Shakespeare had a phrase for it: ‘Ripeness is all.’ What brings about that ripeness in us? It seems an important question to ask at this time in our world. I think a lot of us are experiencing a kind of ‘evolutionary pressure’, not just as individuals, but collectively, as a species that needs to transform in some radical ways.

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We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so we can open to the life that’s waiting for us. (Joseph Campbell)

In Zen Buddhist practice, when you meditate you sit and face the wall. One thing this does is confront you with your aloneness. A fundamental aspect of being a human being is that you are very much alone. You crawled down the birth canal by yourself, and no-one will go with you when you die. No-one else can breathe for you, meditate for you, think for you, eat for you. Coming to grips with our aloneness is an essential part of our evolution. Then we no longer look to others to take care of us. We discover resources and capacities inside ourselves that are deeply fulfilling and enduring.

The other side, which is just as true, is that we are not separate. We live as beings who are intimately connected to everything in the universe. Our capacity for ignoring this connection is one of the reasons for global warming and the environmental crisis. It’s becoming more and more obvious that we can no longer afford to live our lives as though we are small, separate, isolated beings. The price is too high. There are things we need to do that we cannot do alone.

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“You are not a walking mistake
You are not a problem to be solved.” (Adya Shanti)

I remember one session of ‘The Gift of Presence’ where we were exploring intention, and how it really works. I asked the participants to spend some time contemplating what their deepest and strongest intentions were. One woman in the course called me during the week to ask me more about it; so I encouraged her to throw caution to the winds and really see what was going on with intention in her life. She returned the following week with the brightness people carry when they have discovered something for themselves. “It’s so simple,” she told us. You can talk all you like about your grand intentions, but if you want to see what they really are, just watch what you actually do from morning “till night. Everything else is just fantasy.”

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