Key Lesson: There are a thousand different ways to wrap a gift, but there’s only one way to receive the true “present” moment… and that is to be open to what it has come to give you.
For Further Study
Real success is a fearless state of being in a conscious relationship with an Intelligence that always achieves its ends despite ever-changing conditions.
But, if we’re honest, this order of spiritual success remains at a distance we’ve yet to traverse. At our present level of consciousness, our mind is always active, trying to figure out what we need to put together in our life to achieve its desired end. So we watch things come and go, and we make adjustments in our lives. We’re almost always trying to manipulate what we see as reality in order to feel fearless, and to secure a sense of ourselves that can’t be washed away.
The only way we know to try to achieve this success is by attaching ourselves to something that we imagine. And when we attach ourselves to what we imagine, we become dependent upon it remaining in place, which means we’re right back to having a life with fear in it.
All of us are trying to learn how to play according to the rules that others have given us, where, even as we set out to win what society says is success, and we get the sensations of that, we’re afraid! Why? Because “What if I don’t make it the way I want to?” “What if I can’t do it?” On one hand, I’ve got the apple in front of me, and I want the apple, but by imagining the apple and the pleasure from it, now I’m afraid I’m not going to get the apple.
And the way I’ll know that I didn’t get the apple is by seeing that my friends will see that I didn’t make it. I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve. Now I believe I’m judged by the world, and every time I’m judged by the world for my failure to succeed, I re-trench myself and I either start over with a new plan or just give up altogether.
We are not in this world to learn to play according to the rules of this world. We are here to play to learn, not learn to play. I’m learning to play in the world in order to become someone special, but I see that by the very act of setting out to achieve that specialness already sets me apart from everyone and everything. For one thing, there’s only so much specialness to go around, which puts me in competition with everyone, which means I’m in conflict with everyone! So I’m defeated before I even begin with that approach of learning to play according to the rules.
Success is not about learning to play; it’s about playing to learn. What a different approach! Imagine that you go out into your day, and you don’t go out to learn to play to win; instead, you go out to play to learn. You go out knowing that what’s important in your life is learning about your present nature that only knows how to put you in compromising and therefore fear-filled positions.
This brings us to an important understanding. On one hand, we’ve been trying to use the ideas handed down to us by this world, to make ourselves into something by achieving things outside of us that we believe will make us feel successful. That’s what it means to learn to play – all the time trying to figure out how to make a recipe, a new kind of combination of things out there – new people, new events, new homes, new plans – hoping that if we put all that together, at last our ship will come in. But we know that doesn’t work. But here we’re learning that when we play to learn, instead of trying to make something of ourselves in the world, we’re going to learn to make something new in ourselves that no one can take away.
Why is loss so traumatic to us? Because loss means we have to re-orient ourselves to life. We don’t want the loss because that relationship we have imagined, defines us in our world. And if the relationship starts to change, the way we’re defined in life and the way we know ourselves starts to change, and we don’t want that. We don’t want to be shown that anything we have imagined to be real is not, because the superstructure of our self is rooted in this imagined life from which we derive feelings of security as we imagine ourselves in it.
So the problem is that behind this sense of loss, behind the fear of it, and then the resentment that comes up, is the recognition that, “I’m going to have to change. I can’t be me.” There is immense resistance to the change that seeming loss produces, and I will live in conditions where I compromise myself in order to keep the imagined success in place rather than go through what I must. What is at the root of this refusal to re-orient my life, to let this change take place? I’m actually setting myself against the whole reason for being alive.
In our present minds, we think the reason to be alive is to succeed, but we’ve seen that kind of success isn’t success. In fact, it’s the antithesis of success. The more we imagine it, the more fearful we become, and the more fearful we become because of ideas and images and people in our lives that we say have to remain in place, the more we resist change in them. The more we resist change, the more static we become as human beings. Unlike every other creature on this earth, we are created to be re-oriented, to be changed, to go through transformations which, by the fact of that change in my life, if I allow it, I am put into a new relationship with a different order of life.
When I come out different, I’m no longer identified and attached to the things I was. So I exit those moments with a new mind, with a mind that no longer sees the world through the images, the conditions with which I entered into those relationships to begin with. I can’t relate to that world anymore.
There is a process by which a person gradually begins to wean himself away from the world. It doesn’t mean that you walk out of it. It doesn’t mean that you don’t make all the excellent efforts you can. It means that you have begun at last to recognize the futility of trying to find a fearless life in a world that has created nothing but images by which and through which one can only find fear! The difference is there is no longer an exterior direction in one’s life to find what is truly fearless. It becomes an interior direction.
Once we experience for ourselves that the universe is actually set up for us to succeed in becoming wise unto all things, we realize that the very ground of Reality itself is compassionate. It is founded in love, and with this discovery in us, fear is dissolved. Why is fear dissolved? Because we are no longer apart from life. We don’t have adversaries anymore because we have some idea of scarcity of commodity or even consciousness. We have awakened to something within us – the process of having an intention, then watching and being observant, aware of the interior make-up of this part of us we’ve never known. We gain this knowledge, and it becomes ours.
We know the truth of something because we’ve seen it operating within us. From that knowledge we are willing to go through things we were never able to go through before because in the past we’d want to find what would make us successful or fearless. Now we have a ground in us that has been established through this process of doing what it takes to participate in a world that wants us to succeed. And lo and behold, we find that fear cannot dwell in the presence of this Light.
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