It is obvious from experience that when we worry about situations and circumstances, the mind becomes an active monitor plumaging through the past and imagining what could possibly happen in the future. The incessant activity, a bid to protect the seeming individual by playing every possible scenario where there could be a loop hole or perhaps where something that happened in the past could be avoided in the past.
What is obvious, however, is that this type of mental activity does not yield any results apart from the multiplication of its narrative. Somehow, the ego believes that through the multiplicity of these activities and narratives, solutions emerge. But we can use the tool of mind-memory to find out that worry and anxiety just does not work. They don’t yield anything. It could be argued that some solution in the past worked when you spent time worrying about it. Could it be that you would have found solution without worrying or could it be that something much better would have happened if you were more relaxed. Or could you have seen that sometimes solutions to our problems emerge out of themselves? Learning to let go allows us to see the latter clearly!
Letting go, allowing things to happen just the way they will, seems at first insane. It’s unintuitive and goes against the grain of societal indoctrination. However when seen through, it feels incredibly obvious what’s at play in the grander scheme of perceived things.
The mind says ‘this should not have happened to me’. It says, ‘why is this happening to me’, ‘what can I do to solve this in a way that should never have been in the first place’. It goes into a future narration of ‘this terrible thing is likely going to happen to me so how do I stop it’. Every single chit chat, every single thought pointing to an imagined self- a ‘me’.
What if we could examine this grander scheme by resting — by letting go. Letting go of a need to change anything. Letting go of a need to fix anything. Letting go of the mental movie of what could happen and what should not have happened. A sinking into the immediate senses — seeing that the individual is present within a very colorful or colorless present experience that has almost nothing to do with the mental chatter. Hearing all that’s perceptible to the sense of hearing, tasting what’s being ignored in the mouth and diving into the visceral awareness of what’s happening in the body. These are more real than what’s happening in imagination. These are more real than the siren call to jump into the waters and head space of endless suffering. The present is more real than the past. It’s more real than the future. And the present isn’t even here any more.
In letting go, we can begin to wake up to this grander scheme where life happens as it is meant to whether you meddle with it or not. You see that all has been well right from the beginning. Letting go reveals that the rope you clung to wasn’t preventing a fall; you were always on solid ground all along and the tight grip you had on that rope is what causes your fists to ache in the first place. This obviously sounds like roses, unicorns and butterflies and I am not implying that these words should be taken hook, line and sinker. That would in fact amount to yet another holding on to instead of letting go. Ah! What a paradox.
What I’m suggesting here is to conduct an experiment. To investigate for yourself what it is like to let go of the mental assertion that life has to be a certain way for this ‘person’. When your kite begins to sail effortlessly in the wind, when the bike of ‘you’ begins to cruise without any pedaling, examine to find out how true or false these words are.
There’s a grace that bleeds through and totally takes control of all of existence even in the midst of pain and suffering. We don’t see it when we get lost in our projected thoughts, taking the thoughts for reality and reality for nothingness. There’s a peace that transcends the understanding of the mind when we rest, rest knowing and trusting that the right actions will be awakened by itself, through you, through life, through seeming others.
There’s a love that transcends our attachment to thoughts(in all its anxieties), it sees those thoughts but sees them as a passing stream, not rejecting them but loving them tenderly. For thoughts, all of our thoughts, are just a beautiful kaleidoscope of playful existence. They are neither real nor unreal, powerful yet so powerless. They are impermanent yet they seem to be persistent.
Letting go of them allows these thoughts to find their rightful home in the nothingness of all things!
