However, as long as you are in the physical dimension and linked to
the collective human psyche, physical pain — although rare — is still
possible. This is not to be confused with suffering, with mental-
emotional pain. All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance.
Also, as long as you are in this dimension, you are still subject to its
cyclical nature and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you
no longer perceive this as “bad” — it just is.
Through allowing the “isness” of all things, a deeper dimension
underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to you as an abiding
presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good
and bad. This is the joy of Being, the peace of God.
On the level of form, there is birth and death, creation and
destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly separate forms. This
is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle of a star or a planet, a
physical body, a tree, a flower; in the rise and fall of nations, political
systems, civilizations; and in the inevitable cycles of gain and loss in
the life of an individual.
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and
cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let
them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for
transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it
means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except
in the mind’s judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but
nothing can grow forever. If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on
and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive.
Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist
without the other.
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You
must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss
or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very
success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be
failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every
failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody
“fails” sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually
comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.
You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms
and circumstances, but you won’t be identified with them. You do not
need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life — only
your life situation.
Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a
peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be
periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also
be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you
are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last for
anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and
small cycles within these large ones. Many illnesses are created
through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for
regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your
sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as
achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified
with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the
low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the
organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an
illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary
regeneration can take place.
The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked with the
impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a
central part of his teaching. All conditions are highly unstable and in
constant flux, or, as he put it, impermanence is a characteristic of
every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It
will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you. Impermanence is also
central to Jesus’s teaching: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on
earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and
steal. . . .”
As long as a condition is judged as “good” by your mind, whether it be
a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical
body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you
happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part
of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension
where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may
undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday
or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same
condition that made you happy then makes you unhappy. The
prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.
The happy wedding and honeymoon become the unhappy divorce or
the unhappy coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence
makes you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind has
attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind
cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist
the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.
We sometimes hear of people who have lost all their money or whose
reputations have been ruined committing suicide. Those are the
extreme cases. Others, whenever a major loss of one kind or another
occurs, just become deeply unhappy or make themselves ill. They
cannot distinguish between their life and their life situation. I recently
read about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her beauty
started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she grew desperately
unhappy and became a recluse. She, too, had identified with a
condition: her external appearance. First, the condition gave her a
happy sense of self, then an unhappy one. If she had been able to
connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have
watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of
serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have become
increasingly transparent to the light shining through from her ageless
true nature, so her beauty would not really have faded but simply
become transformed into spiritual beauty. However, nobody told her
that this is possible. The most essential kind of knowledge is not yet
widely accessible.
The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha — a Pali word
meaning “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is inseparable from its
opposite. This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact
one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of
things, so that you don’t pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor
is it saying that you should no longer appreciate pleasant or beautiful
things or conditions. But to seek something through them that they
cannot give — an identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment — is
a recipe for frustration and suffering. The whole advertising industry
a nd consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened
and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more
you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. Nothing
out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but
you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize
that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will
also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but
they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused
and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of
the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of
God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work
hard for or struggle to attain.
Many people never realize that there can be no “salvation” in anything
they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realize it often become
world-weary and depressed: If nothing can give you true fulfillment,
what is there left to strive for, what is the point in anything? The Old
Testament prophet must have arrived at such a realization when he
wrote: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and
behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” When you reach this
point, you are one step away from despair — and one step away from
enlightenment.
A Buddhist monk once told me: “All I have learned in the twenty years
that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises
passes away. This I know.” What he meant, of course, was this: I
have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow
the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of
all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and
lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in
a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when
your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your
life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or
conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come
to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to
enjoy and appreciate them — while they last. All those things, of
course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with
dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with
ease.
The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never
very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of Being, the vibrant
peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance.
Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you
from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and
crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of
peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.