THE COMPONENTS OF SHIFTING TO ARRIVING
To experience the bliss of knowing that you are here now in this moment—and that it is all there needs to be, all that there ever was and all that you ever will know—you must learn to trust your higher self and let go of those ingrained teachings from all the egos that have influenced your life up until now. You will begin to realize that you are not on trial in the now-here. You will soon realize that your mission is to serve and extend the love that is your basic essence. Period.
You don’t have to do more, even though you may choose to do a great deal. Your overriding objective is to stay focused on sending and receiving agape, the love of God. If you incorporate the following ideas into the practice of your daily mission, you will succeed in your objective.
Nothingness. Your ego tries to convince you that the state of nothingness is an impoverished and undesirable place. If you experience nothingness, ego wants you to believe it is because you are unfulfilled. Ego further insists that feeling unfulfilled or empty is intolerable.
You must create a new relationship with this concept of nothingness or emptiness if you are to make a shift from a striving to an arriving way of living your life in the now-here.
Nothingness has a very positive value in your life. It is out of nothing that all is created. If you sit in silence and listen to the first sound that you make, you are forced to admit that it came from the nothingness, the silence. Out of nothing you created a wave that we call a sound. Without the nothingness you could not have sound.
Space is considered to be nothing—no particles, no form. So we describe it as nothing. To fear this empty space or to deny its value as a part of us means doubting our own existence. We came from nothingness—the nowhere I’ve described throughout this book—to the world of form, the now-here. We have an intimate connection with both the nothingness and the world of form. We are both. Both are part of us. We need both space and form to exist.
It is important that you get to the place of being able to love nothingness with at least the equal enthusiasm you feel for the somethingness of your life. Both are essential aspects of your existence. In that unified field you will find the secret that sits in the center of your being, the no-thing-ness. Here you will get acquainted with the peace of arriving and surrender the anxiety of using up your precious moments striving.
Surrender. To understand the concept of surrendering, you will not be able to rely on your ego. Ego never wants you to even consider surrendering. It would much rather you hang on to the belief that you must strive and cling to the familiar way.
The more you stay with what you are accustomed to, the more you will hang on to the worries and stress that are of the physical world. This constant frenetic behavior keeps you occupied and unable to make the connection to the world of spirit and your sacred quest.
The notion of being attached to what happened to you in the past can be very deeply ingrained in you by your false self. You must learn to recognize ego’s attachment to the past when it uses this to keep you stuck in striving. Surrender the belief that your past is what is driving your present.
Surrendering also means learning to recognize the signals from your higher self that something within you needs to be witnessed. This means surrendering to whatever is, in the present moments of your life. For many people it can be confusing to discern whether it is ego or spirit that is at the helm.
I find that using the image of a boat moving along the surface of a lake is helpful in making the distinction between ego and higher self. I visualize the wake of the boat as a symbol of the past. The wake is not driving the boat. It is merely the trail that is being left behind by the present moment movement of my boat image. What drives the boat is the energy generated in the now. I do not credit or blame the past for the boat’s present state of arriving in this spot on the lake.
I then breathe slowly and deeply into the image and ask my higher self to complete the inner picture. If the boat is faltering in any way, I witness it lovingly, without blame, just surrendering to whatever is. This is quite different than ego’s directions to go forever or faster, or to get a bigger or snazzier boat.
If ego chatter erupts, it is because ego is feeling threatened by this observation. It fears my quiet acceptance of arriving without striving. It wants me to stop this nonsense and get on with striving.
If ego is not threatened and the image of the boat is not faltering, then I know I am afloat. I interpret the boat’s progress as a symbol that I am proceeding in life without ego’s influence forcing me to look to the past and that I am not ignoring signals from my higher self to care for any accidental damage from the past.
If you try this and hear a critical voice almost nagging you to get on with it, know that it is ego chatter. Surrendering means surrendering to what is, not to what ego wants it to be right now or what ego thinks it should have been in the past.
Surrendering means letting go and being here now and nowhere else. It means knowing within you that you are here in this moment and that everything that has ever happened to you is like the wake behind the boat. As you watch the wake of the boat, you see that it stays for a few moments and then it slowly fades from your awareness. So too is your life precisely like that. Your past slowly fades away and all that is left is now.
That past cannot drive you in this now, and that past needn’t be held responsible for the boat’s problems. That means that you do not blame the past and that you do not deny the existence of a problem if that is what is happening now. What you do is surrender to what is happening in this moment.
Practice surrendering by creating a new agreement with now. Agree to know that your past is a trail of present moments that are all left behind, and at the same time know that if you are having difficulty in this present moment you will surrender to that reality.
Don’t let ego convince you to blame the present on the past, and don’t let ego convince you to strive to fix the problem without the input of your higher self. Ego will try to get you to fix the present pain or difficulty with ego solutions for fear that you will get too cozy with your loving presence.
Ego fears most of all that your surrender to what is in the now will lead you to the ultimate surrender—the acceptance of death, that most embarrassing of events for the ego.
Several years ago I received the following piece from a reader in Milwaukee. It is titled There Is No Death, author unknown.
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says, “There! She’s gone!” Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able to bear her load of living weight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There! She’s gone!” there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout. “There she comes!” And that is dying.
Surrendering invites your loving presence to be available in every now moment. What a pleasure each moment can then be. Even the last moment.
Acceptance. Once when I was asked to define enlightenment, the best I could come up with was “the quiet acceptance of what is.” I believe that truly enlightened beings are those who refuse to allow themselves to be distressed over things that simply are the way they are.
To arrive rather than to strive means applying the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Knowing the difference can be the most difficult part!
The ego tries to prevent you from having the wisdom of your higher self by
keeping you in a fighting or a striving mood. Ego wants you to believe that you must be upset and anguished to prove you are a worthy person who cares about world problems. This ego-agitated approach to problems prevents you from ever becoming part of the solution for things that can be changed.
Acceptance does not imply endorsement. It merely refers to a state of mind that allows you to be peaceful and know the difference between things you can help to eradicate and things that simply just are the way they are. If you are in a state of acceptance, you are free of internal stress and can actually be more open to listening and helping.
You do not learn when you are talking to others or being judgmental and angry to yourself. Quiet listening and inviting your higher self to participate is the way to the wisdom of knowing the difference between what you can change and what you accept as presently unchangeable. Nonacceptance can be your ego insisting that its way is the right way rather than accepting what might be God’s divine design, which you are unable to perceive in its entirety.
There is a spiritual solution to every so-called problem that we encounter. All of our social ills derive from a spiritual deficit that I address in the final chapter of this book. Your desire to fix those deficits is just as much a part of divine design as are the deficits. By shifting from nonacceptance and judgment to acceptance, you actually become part of the solution.
Acceptance means arriving at a place of peace. It is the place that William Blake referred to when he wrote the following: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is…infinite.”
Cleanse those doors of judgment and see your higher self telling you that this is a divine universe and an intelligent system that you are a part of. Even if you don’t understand how and why so many things are transpiring the way they are, that is not a reason to be upset about them. Acceptance leads to solutions. Judgment and nonacceptance feed the ego’s hunger for more problems and more striving.
There is an ancient Zen teaching that says: “If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.” This is the essence of acceptance and the way of arriving rather than striving.
Bewilderment. When you are busy striving for something, you have very little time or energy for being in awe of your immediate surroundings or immersing yourself with wonder in the present moment. A state of bewilderment occurs when you take time to appreciate all that you are, all that you have and all that you can become.
Your physical being is an enormous miracle—its thousands of working parts function with a divine organizing intelligence. Consider your blood circulation, air inhalation and oxygenation, your eyes, muscles and bones all responding to a brain and nervous system that is beyond comprehension. There are miles of arteries and veins, intestines with infinitely tiny microbes, all working in unison with that divine intelligence that creates the body you occupy.
To be in a state of bewilderment, stop and behold the wonder of you. Allow yourself to enjoy the bewilderment and awe of who and what you are. There is the miraculous machine that houses you, and there is the incomprehensible mystery of the ghost in the machine that is your mind and soul, observing all.
Your higher self becomes readily accessible when you contemplate the mystery of who you are. The stress that ego thrives on is gone, so your authentic self is available. Your ego will try to bring you back to its reality, threatening that you will become indolent and nonproductive. But you can override ego if you see the mystery revealed as the presence of God everywhere. Then you will “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment,” as Rumi instructed.
Patience. As you make the transition to arriving in place of striving, your higher self reveals the presence of spirit, which is the organizing intelligence of the manifest world. Your faith will shift to a knowing, and you will begin to patiently rely on the gentle counsel that spirit provides.
The need to strive for answers will disappear. It will be replaced by a patient knowing that divine design will reveal what the next step along the path of your sacred quest will be.
I have found this kind of patience to be an enormous virtue and guide in my life. When I feel inclined to listen to my ego, I am able to call up the attitude of patience and say simply, “I am leaving it in your hands. My ego is pushing but it just doesn’t feel right, so I will silently wait to see in what direction I am to go. Use me as you see fit.”
This is not an abdication of self-responsibility, as the ego would like me to believe. Ego is impatient. It wants to keep the action going. Ego’s use of impatience is an extremely effective way to keep us from our sacred self.
Our loving presence offers us the infinite patience that originates with God. It has taken me over fifty years to know many of the concepts I write about in these pages. God has been patient. I have done things in my life that today make me shudder in contempt, yet God somehow stuck it out with me, patiently seeing the potential for something grander. I have stolen and shoplifted in my earlier days, lied all too frequently, been promiscuous and unfaithful, used substances—and through all this and much more, God showed me her infinite patience.
The stories of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Francis of Assisi describe the same kind of patience. This infinite patience is available to you at all moments. Regardless of where you have been, how you have lived or how much you have relied upon your false self, God’s infinite patience is ever present.
Because of the existence of divine patience, you too can develop this kind of patience. Great things have absolutely no fear of time—they are patient, largely because your higher spiritual self knows that time does not exist except in our minds. Infinity and eternity are concepts that deny the existence of time. Your higher self is a part of infinity and eternity and offers you patience.
These then are the five categories of arriving. By cultivating a new attitude toward nothingness, surrender, acceptance, bewilderment and patience, you will feel a dramatic shift take place—a shift away from constant striving for something more than the now. You will arrive in the precious present with the serenity that accompanies your higher self.
SOME TYPICAL STRIVING BEHAVIORS
The inclination to avoid an arriving attitude can appear in too many ways to describe here. Here are only a few examples. By noting them when they appear, you will begin to understand why you have opted for striving. Then you can begin to make decisions to leave them behind as you embark on your sacred quest.
Putting stress in your body. High blood pressure, internal chaos, ulcers, nail biting, smoking, excessive drinking and eating are all evidence of a perpetual state of striving and anxiety.
Measuring your happiness quotient based on your position either on the job or in the community. You constantly pursue higher positions of power and prestige to demonstrate your competence or value.
Seeking external success symbols. You put your attention on grades, trophies, ratings or any other symbolic merit badges that you need to feel good about yourself.
Living with a constant inner dialogue of worry and anxiety. You have conversations with yourself that revolve around such things as shortages in your life, the need to get the promotion, fear that your security is at risk unless you have more money, and anxiousness about your family’s lack of motivation. These thoughts remove you from the present moment and squander it in worry or fear.
Putting a price tag on everything that you do. You have an ongoing inner thought process centered on money and financial matters. Your tendency is to use a monetary gauge as your exclusive means of evaluation of yourself and others.
Making “trying” and “effort” the cornerstones of your life philosophy. You feel that you must always be busy in order to be valid. You judge others as lazy or incomplete if they enjoy being instead of doing.
Finding fault with what is. You are unable to accept the unpredictability of nature’s ways. You are preoccupied with fear of death and attracted to conversations bemoaning the disasters that oc
cur.
Being unable to spend quiet time alone. You fill every moment with talking on the telephone, watching television or planning for future events. You are constantly concerned over upcoming deadlines. You reject the idea of meditation or contemplation as a waste of time.
Not being able to allow silence to be a natural part of your interaction with others. You feel compelled to fill any silent gaps with activity or conversation.
Tending to do everything quickly. You are impatient with those who do not talk, move, eat or drive fast enough to suit your standards. You rush through life and judge those who move at a slower pace.
These are a few of the potentially endless types of striving behaviors. When we rely on our false self rather than our spiritual consciousness, these behaviors become a habitual part of our lives. It is possible to transform these ego-dominated patterns when you explore why your ego pushes so hard in this direction.
THE SUPPORT SYSTEM YOUR EGO HAS ERECTED FOR STRIVING
Here are some of the primary reasons ego pursues the path of striving. I’ve listed some ideas for making the transition from striving to arriving.
Ego wants you to believe its misrepresentations. The biggest misrepresentation is that you are your body and your accomplishments. If it can keep you convinced that that is true, then you will continue working hard proving yourself with striving behavior. By staying focused on striving, you will not see your higher self.
Ego promotes the false idea that the feelings of emptiness or nothingness are intolerable. To ensure ego’s dominance, it encourages you to avoid contemplative or meditative activities and to strive to fill every feeling of nothingness with activity, noise, conversation or substances. There is never a time for arriving.
Ego persistently directs your attention toward the past or the future. Using your thoughts up on the past or the future obliterates the present moment. If you shift your attention to the present moment, you automatically let go of stress about the past or future. In that present moment you meet God, which ego is sure is a bad idea.
Your Sacred Self Page 24
