“As long as you aren’t your own master, you may think you have gained something from what you hear; but it is secondhand merchandise, and not yours.” —- Yun-Men
The process of becoming your own master is for most of us a life-long journey, with many twists, turns, upheavals, forks in the road, disappointments, failures, losses, gains, surprises and a continuum of adjustment. When we look deeply into our lives without the cosmetic shimmer of false existence, we find another reality that we sometimes fight our entire lives to actualize. It is as Pema Chodron in her book “Living Beautifully,” shines that basic truth for all of us . . . ” The fundamental ambiguity of being human. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.”
For most of us in this moment of our existence, this can be quite a trick because our resistance has been so ingrained that becoming aware of human ambiguity is beyond our conceptual consciousness. We are not even aware that human ambiguity exists, and those who are aware feel that they are alone . . . which can be an overwhelming loneliness as if you were living in a vacuum without an exit. Sounds pretty hopeless doesn’t it? Only if you give in to the intensive training of programmable distractions that exists today, and permeates every corner of our lives. Becoming fully awake, aware and conscious is in itself quite an exercise in the revelation of our being asleep at the wheel in the first place. Simone Weil suggests another way of thinking about this . . . “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.” When that attention ceases . . . then what?
Because we live in a world of continuing distractions, what is it that we can change? Once the question is asked, which is the first step, so that door is opening for all of us just a bit . . . the next step is recognizing how we push through it to freedom without fear. For some of us this is huge and the risk is unfathomable. So how do we get to the other side of ourselves? This is a profound actualization of who we are at our core, and becoming conscious of that basic tenet is a tremendous leap of faith. We are at the threshold of conscious awareness, and the next step is revealed through the words of Walt Whitman . . . “In this broad Earth of ours … Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.” Once we jump off the cliff, the fear has been conquered, the risk becomes its own reward, and we for the first time give birth to our own perfection. JLR