16 Relaxing into the struggle to find the Oneness

To our way of seeing things, we have been put into a world that is an objective, fixed place; everything is ready-made for struggle. Submitting to this version of reality, false though it may be, seems to make the most sense…To a degree, this assessment is correct. We must struggle to accept the world the way we find it and deal with it on its terms…At the same time we have a new vision of things rising up from the fog…

With this new awareness, we know—in our gut, not just in our head—that there is only good, only meaning, and nothing to fear…Knowing this is not a burden; it liberates us and makes us feel safe…But also by knowing this, it may be tempting to skip over all this grappling with duality. Let’s just go straight to the good stuff. This type of thinking comes from a childish desire to be king of the hill, even if we have to cheat our way to the top…

When we’re snagged on duality, we have tunnel vision that creates inaccuracy due to the fact we leave stuff out...Always, always, always, it’s our responsibility to search and grope and extend the limits of our vision. If we’re not in harmony, we still don’t have all the truth…

So back to that incontrovertible worldview in which we see opposites in black and white—wouldn’t it seem the epitome of delusion to not see things that way? For real, on the level of appearance, duality is a fact. Life appears to die, and bad lurks in the nook of every good cranny. There’s light and dark, and night and day, in sickness and in health…Whether we know it or not, our greatest longing is to find the deeper level of truth—that’s the silver lining…

First off, we can’t get there with our outer will alone. We won’t find it in a book or a philosophy class…In our reactions to our daily struggles, we’ll find our work…For starters, we need to realize that pain and fear are like white on the rice of duality…They’re so ingrained in our reality, we don’t know anything else. We take them so for granted, we don’t chafe under their appearance…

Most of us don’t know that duality hurts…On top of this, we often don’t realize there’s another way to view and live in the world, and that this other perception eliminates the pain of duality…

It’s virtually impossible to come out of the gates feeling the same way about two opposites; there’s no way we can force ourselves to react the same way to pleasure as we do to pain…

We can boil most of our feelings and attitudes down into two buckets: fear and desire. In the fear bucket, where we strain away from pain and death, there will be a measure of anger, resentment and bitterness…As long as we live with the straining, the associated inner tension will prevent us from realizing the ultimate unitive state in which there’s no death and no pain…

The way out of this maze is by going through the tunnel of our fear, including our anger, bitterness and rage at life—which up till now were skulking around in our unconscious—for putting us in this lousy situation of being helpless in the face of death and pain...

Even as we cease our struggling, we’ll know there is the right kind of struggle at hand. When we no longer fear and no longer reach anxiously, we’ll know that everything we desire is available right here, right now, at our fingertips. What we run from is an illusion, even though we can feel the temporary pain of it. When we move towards the pain, we unfold our real self.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 16: Relaxing into the Struggle to Find the Oneness