This is a story told to me by a dear friend. Her name is Jessica Adams. I asked her if I could use her real name and she said yes. I am passing her story along because it was of great benefit to me. When I listened and received it, it was no longer a story. It was more like a homeopathic dose of medicine. It spoke to something I have always been aware of, and enlivened that deep knowing, gave it power and clarity. I am writing the story as if Jessica herself is speaking, so that you can hear it just as I did.
“I was at home one evening,” she said, “when all of these different aspects of my mind arose from within. They just appeared without warning, so many of the different viewpoints I have: judgments, resentments, sorrows, and longings, all of them just displaying themselves before me. They continued to arise for quite a while, as I remained present. And then something happened. A clarity arose out of nowhere, a very profound and simple realization: that my life, just the way it is, gives me everything I need. It doesn’t need to be any other way. All of the beliefs I have held about how it could or should be different—if only this or that would happen, then I could be happy—they just dissolved. Without having to think about it, it was pefectly obvious that none of these ideas were true. What was I thinking? My well being does not depend on any of these things: a husband, a better place to live, a pefect job.”
“That must have been quite a relief,” I said to Jessica.
‘’Yes, “ she said, “but the most wonderful thing about it is that now I can really be happy when good things come to the people I know. There is no longer anything in me wondering why I don’t have that, or why that didn’t happen to me. So I can rejoice in their happiness, without any reservation.”
After I listened to Jessica, I remembered a time many years ago in India, when I was listening to a teacher reading a scripture. In this particular teaching there was a description of a realm called ‘heaven’ or ‘the god realm.’ All the wonders and beauties of this realm were vividly described. Then it went on to say, “This realm promises so much, but it is very difficult to be happy here for long. Because no matter where you are, no matter how much you have, the nature of the god realm is that there is always someone above you, someone who has more than you do—more fame, more prosperity, more intelligence, more insight, more friends, more lovers, more fun.” This being the nature of this place, it is often referred to as the realm of the jealous gods. In an instant I realized that this scripture was actually describing human life—we don’t have to go to heaven or to the god realm to see what it is pointing to.
That was the beginning for me of an insight that has been growing and deepening for many years. (I’m kind of a slow learner.) One afternoon a few years later, I came into my mother’s room. She was lying in bed reading a Buddhist teaching. She had just read something about karma, and how we gain merit through positive thoughts and actions. “ Guess what?” she said to me. “If we are kind and virtuous, we can accumulate merit, and end up in a really great place. We might even go to a god realm, a place like heaven! Isn’t that great? I never knew that I could actually go to a place like that.”
“I don’t know Mum,” I said to her. “I think the promise of a place like that is really overrated.” I explained to her what I understood about the nature of such happiness. She was not impressed. “You just want to be so free,” she said. “I don’t care about all that. I’ll just go to heaven and hang out there for as long as it works.”
I think my mum’s attitude is pretty common here on earth. What most of us, like my mum, don’t want to hear or see is that such heavenly experiences really don’t last very long at all, wherever we may happen to be. I’ve been noticing lately that the experience of envy or jealousy is much more pervasive in the human realm that it appears to be. All of us have been jealous gods more often that we like to admit. Human beings have a lot of aversion to the experience of jealousy, so we tend it hide it. It’s not something we like to talk about very much. In public we want to look like someone who is happy when others are happy. So we keep our envy more or less hidden—it becomes part of our ‘secret life,’ as Leonard Cohen puts it. And in many spiritual traditions we are offered an antidote, a practice we can take on consciously: rejoicing at the good fortune of others.
Perhaps such practices bear fruit, but they also support the view that it will take us a long time and a lot of work to get there. The most beautiful thing about Jessica’s experience was that it all happened spontaneously. It wasn’t a practice, a project or a goal. Jessica has not been purifying herself, doing prostrations, reciting mantras, confessing her sins, or sitting long hours on the meditation cushion. So how did this occur? How did it happen that Jessica fell, without effort or intention, into a direct experience of instrinsic well being and natural rejoicing? Was it a moment of grace that descended on Jessica out of the blue? Was it the blessings of her ancestors, suddenly coming to fruition? Who knows? I can’t pretend to point to some clear lineage of cause and effect here. But I do know one thing that Jessica has been doing for the last few years.
She has been spending time just resting in awareness. This is a phrase from the nondual spiritual traditions that describes something completely natural, effortless and uncontrived. When we rest in awareness we are not trying to get anywhere, change anything, or improve ourselves. We are just taking it easy, relaxing in our natural state, who we are when we are not trying to understand, not needing to know anything, just being. It seems hard to believe that the goodness and clarity and joy that emerged for Jessica came without effort. We are so used to working hard at this kind of thing. And as soon as I take it on as a practice, it can so easily become another project, a burden I am now carrying: I want to appreciate my life just as it is. I want to be able to rejoice wholeheartedly in the good fortune of others. I do not want to feel jealous or deprived. There is something wrong with me, and I need to fix it.
Jessica’s experience offers us an entirely different perspective. I really wonder about what it takes to open to this way of seeing ourselves and our life. How much good news are you actually ready to hear? What if this is really so? How would you actually live if you could trust completely in your natural state? What if not one moment of struggle was necessary, in order to emerge from the realm of the jealous gods? Could it really be possible, that when you just allow yourself and everything else to be as it is, you discover a natural well being, a sense of fulfillment that doesn’t depend on anything?
I’m writing this to tell you that this is true. You don’t have to take my word for it, or Jessica’s. In fact, you can’t take anyone else’s word for it. It’s something available, accessible, to anyone who is interested. Anyone who is tired of the long exhausting path to fulfillment, well being, enlightenment. You can lay your burden down now, and rest, like an old dog, lying in the sun.
This doesn’t mean lying down like a dead dog, and collapsing. Old dogs still have a lot of life in them! It’s not about passively tolerating everything in your life without opening to movement, change and evolution. It just means that the movement comes from a radically different place, a place of gratitude and fulfillment, instead of a place of desparation and grasping. It can be hard to imagine how we would motivate ourselves, without that gnawing sense of discontent. I’m inviting you to consider that there is a way of moving, of evolving and growing that we cannot figure out with our minds. We have to let the heart open and the mind rest, and see what happens.
love
Shayla
