By Amaya Gregory
Sedona, AZ — Today has been an interesting day. While mowing an acre of grass, taking a hoe to the vegetable garden, and enjoying a three-mile walk with Sophia, I’ve been pondering life, this appearance of duality that is physically dubious and yet remarkably, manifests shamelessly as the material world. It is the veritable impossible dream.
I’ve been thinking about how life hooks us into believing in it, how it reels us in with its drama, how it creates the illusion of something to fight for, something to fight against, and how if we don’t buy into it, we are deemed the crazy ones.
It’s been fascinating to sit in the middle of the dissonance, to feel the seemingly inbuilt impulse to do my part, to save the world with my solidarity. How easy it is to judge those who don’t see the world my way … how dare they, how stupid could they be? What’s the fear … there’s always fear at the foundation of righteousness, the need for change, the cry for justice. I wanted to see it, to look it in the eye and see what’s really there.
I wondered … does the ego use the dramatic hooks to maintain its identity? But wouldn’t that be one thought using another thought to maintain a thought? Thoughts don’t have free agency. Thoughts don’t think. Outside of pure experiencing, outside of untouched, raw, naked perception, feelings, and sensations, is there anything that isn’t a thought? No, so that’s not the core.
Watching, wondering, pondering, it’s clear that this is a bottomless trap, not a shallow sand trap like the ones on a golf course, but a mind trap that sets itself and then springs into action without warning. Maybe trying to figure it out is the trap. Maybe I don’t need to see what’s there at all. Perhaps all that I need to do is be me as I am.
Now that goes against most everything we’ve been taught since our arrival in form.
Oh well. As they say, in for a penny …
Maybe the core isn’t a belief at all, but simply a reflexive response to perceived pain and suffering. Perhaps we are hard wired to care about one another, What if the more we’ve seen our own complicity, our own powerlessness (yeah, I know those are contradictions in terms) the more able we are to care, to genuinely love the other characters in this divine play? What if at some point in our evolution, caring is no longer optional?
What’s really funny about this inquiry is that I know life will as life wills. I am powerless and yet, in this leela of a lifetime, we appear to have power, appear to make choices, we learn and grow, or we appear to flush ourselves into a devolving spiral of greater pain and suffering. What I am going to do is spontaneously orchestrated by things beyond the count of techniques or control mechanisms, or more simply put, orchestrated by life itself, the thing that is not a thing, the one appearing as ten thousand things … so why would I care about deceit and lies, about suffering and grief, about what happens here in the play if no one has control over what they’ll do next?
I’ve have to say, it is one hell of a paradox.
I care even knowing that life is sorting itself out, albeit more slowly than feels comfortable. I care, even knowing what I am going to do next, what others are going to do next, is already in the pipeline of experience making its way into the here-now. We are conditioned by all that has come before. My caring is part of the unfolding now, the collective experiencing that is constantly rewriting the next experience. I can’t not care, because who I am, the role I am playing, cares.
Ultimately, the only thing that feels right is to honor that fact that this character in the play cares. To pretend or attempt to not care, to ignore the impulse to care and to inspire others to care, (yeah, as if that would work) would be a waste of effort, for caring is hard wired now and is how this expression in our valiant play lives and breathes. Really, the why of it doesn’t really matter. That’s part of the trap, the mind trap, trying to figure out why, to change reactions, to make myself wrong for caring, to make me wrong for being me.
Even knowing incontrovertibly that none of us has free agency, I care. Knowing that people are behaving the only way they can in the moment, I still care. Grokking that it’s all above my paygrade and that I don’t or can’t see the picture beyond the next few feet of film, I care.
I’m me. I love the entire world and all its crazy expressions, even the ones who don’t understand me, who seem to be troublemakers, who are so wounded they can’t help but wound others. I don’t need to know why. Whatever I figured out would only be a temporary fix anyway. I think I’ll let life do life, and I’ll do me. There I go again .. I know … I am life too. Damn, another paradox. They are everywhere. If the two, life and me, intersect in ways that are uncomfortable, oh well. It is life after all.
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