DHARMA FOR WHEN WE GET STUCK (PART 2)

[admin]

This idea of “getting stuck” in the mud of our life that I brought up yesterday has broad implications, especially if you want to learn how to deal with it. To me, in a sense, it is the essence of what I have learned from the Tibetan and Zen Buddhists, to work in the moment with what is, whatever that may be for each of us. And that includes feeling stuck where we are and not too happy about it, either.

The cycles of life (actually a spiral), with their ups and downs, seem more elliptical than circular, meaning the cycle leans on those two turnaround ends in the ellipse more than the long linear-like stretches. I tend to get stuck in the low spots of life and can’t get moving again, with seemingly less energy or will to do anything about it. And there I sit, wondering if this is just the way I am and/or the way life is. Or, is it just me?

I forget (if I ever knew) how to extricate myself from these virtual standstills and can only vaguely remember being stuck like this before, which I (of course) have been many times. I shouldn’t have to mention this (but obviously I feel I need to), that if we feel stuck in our present life-situation that, spending most of our time worrying about the past or hoping on the future, is not going to make things easier. It doesn’t help at all. In fact, it’s the problem.

Learning to just “be” alone in the present moment is, for most of us, not immediately all that easy. We are afraid of being bored or of not knowing what to do with ourselves if we are not lost (as usual) in this busyness or that. We may also feel uncomfortable being alone with ourselves unless we have our “worry beads,” the sense of doing this or doing that to fill up (or fend off) the space and time of being alone. The present moment, with all its instantaneity, nevertheless can appear at first as a vast empty space in time with nothing to do. Learning to get comfortable in the moment is not a trivial task. It can appear foreign to us. Some folks have vertigo or claustrophobia. In a similar way, many of us are afraid to enter the silence of the present moment.

As mentioned, to get comfortable and familiar with being alone, we first would have to stop endlessly filling up the naturally emerging gaps in time and space with our busyness and worry beads. It’s just a nervous habit, yet we wall ourselves off from ever being alone and are afraid of it.

Yet, what DO we do if there is nothing to do and we don’t fill that void with endless nervous busyness? And it’s true that there IS nothing to do because there is nothing that has to be done but be there. We have to stop “doing, doing, doing” and be done doing for the moment and let our busy fingers rest. Nothing is gained by that.

Like turning off the radio or TV because we suddenly realize that it is irritating us is what I am talking about. Yes, what we gain is the deafening sound of silence, but more important is the experience of the purity of the un-busy-moment, one without all of the white-noise we have been generating since we don’t know when. And that purity is not a vacuum or some empty feeling, per se, but rather the uncorking of the well of our intuition within us that has been obscured all this time by our own busyness and fear of true openness.

And out of this endless instantaneous moment called “Now” pours the cornucopia of insight and the purest intuition. And please don’t think or imagine that what appears are just more thoughts of the kind we are already so used to. Hardly! It takes some time for the obscurations caused by our busyness to clear but, given a little time, what starts to emerge is an insight that is more pure and original than anything we have known. It’s always been there, but drowned out by our own nervousness. To say by words that it is insightful or interesting would be to miss the reality. Words can’t go there.

The insight of purified intuition completes what has always been missing in our self and life; it scratches that itch that never has been scratched and satisfies where satisfaction has never been known. And don’t think that being in the moment is some big task we have to undertake; that’s not it.

We don’t have to do anything at all, EXCEPT to stop spending all of our time in past and future considerations. Like an elastic band, when we stop dwelling in the past and future, we automatically snap-back into the present. It’s been there all the time. And we have to make no other effort than that.

Yes, we may have to suffer withdrawal symptoms from endlessly surrounding ourselves with the white-noise of busyness and let the accumulated obscurations in our mind clear out. But after that takes place, we don’t just “do nothing” and sit there alone like a lump on a log. Instead, we begin to intake and be inspired by the naturally emerging insight that rises to consciousness. It is all the freshness that is. And, as mentioned, what is most unique about this intuition is that it is exactly what we need to complete us. That, we have never found before.

There is nothing extraneous about discovering our emerging intuition. It is pure signal and no noise. And, as mentioned, it’s about finding the missing pieces to whatever has been puzzling us in life. It main-lines a stream of insight that exactly completes us.