ON GIVING UP THE STRUGGLE

On this mild, rainy Sunday morning, I’ve been thinking again about how life-changing it would be if I simply gave up struggling. As I was getting ready for the new day, it came to me that almost all of my days (since 1941!) have been taken up with a struggle of some kind or other. Right from the start, it seems, I have pictured life as a constant skirmish between a separate “me” and the countless other separate “me”s, and I have engaged in the struggle with earnestness. From morning to night, it’s been me against the universe. What if I simply – here and now, today – gave up the struggle? What if, once and for all, I fully accepted the simple fact that there is no separate “me” to do the struggling, and no separate universe to struggle against? What if I fully understood, finally, that the universe, including me, is a single, unified, harmonious, and peaceful dance? It’s something worth thinking about, worth working toward. It’s a revolutionary idea, one that would transform my life from top to bottom, inside to out. It might conceivably make life a remarkable celebration instead of a backbreaking competition.

“And God Said...”

I have read or heard the phrase “And God said...” probably thousands of times in my life, but only this morning, for the first time, did I actually think about what it means. Who is this God that talks to people, and how does he talk? All through the Bible, stories are told of people who heard God’s voice and responded to it, and only just this morning did I get a glimpse of what it might mean. I realized, first of all, (or recalled) that this God is not a person, but a force – not some powerful but ultimately limited superman or woman, but the infinite power of the Universe. His voice is not the voice of an individual person but rather the voice of the grand intelligence that created, and keeps creating, the universe. And I also understood, if only dimly, that the voice of God comes in the form of thoughts. They are the thoughts that occur to me clearly and forcefully 57,000 times each day – not “my” thoughts (as I usually think of them) but truly God’s, or the Universe’s, thoughts. There is no separate “I” that makes “my” thoughts, as I have blindly believed for 66 years. (That is an utter impossibility, for where is this separate “I”?) The thoughts that occur, or arise, or unfold, are the voice of God that speaks continually and powerfully. The people in the Bible listened carefully, and so should I.

I occasionally become concerned about whether I’m getting enough rest, but it occurred to me this morning, as I was rising at my usual early hour, that the universe, of which I am a part, always gets enough rest. Can we imagine the universe being tired? Can we picture a sunrise being exhausted, a sunset feeling listless, a breeze blowing by in a sluggish manner? Can we imagine a river, even the slowest and narrowest, even one that has been depleted by drought, not doing its proper rivery work in the steadiest way possible? My problem here is one I have to constantly deal with – a tendency to judge and label. When my body feels a certain way, I pass judgment that it’s “tired” and label myself accordingly: I am tired. Instead of simply saying that my body feels like sitting or lying down, I stick the label of exhaustion on it, which makes the situation a “problem” instead of simply another interesting situation in the infinite, vigorous procession of them which is my life.