I am told that we volunteered for this.
This and all our many experiences have come about as a result of our voluntarily stepping into this realm. Our lives are no more an accident than the Sun ‘accidently’ cresting the eastern horizon every morning.
It seems that we voluntarily plunged into this river of being, and what we are experiencing in this day and moment is the aggregate of the direction, strength and currents of the waters of this living river. For many of us our efforts swimming across this river feel like a constant fight as we desperately try to keep our heads above the water, barely surviving.
But there is no doubt that we sure as hell jumped in. And, like it or not, we are responsible to see this through. Panic will not serve us. We must and will get to the other side one way or another. We have no idea what is there but we have committed ourselves to the crossing. Like one caribou among thousands we restlessly and fearfully ford this cold rushing river of Life. Why? Because of a call that we cannot hear, a whisper that we can’t understand, an itch that drives us onward to the Deep Mystery on the other shore.
(Are there some monkeys that don’t need to fight so hard to survive? This being an infinite Universe I can’t truthfully say ‘No,’ but I have my doubts. The experience of Duality, in and of itself, is harsh. There are no sages, masters, or elders that I know of or have met that haven’t been severely challenged as they made their way to the other side. As attractive as it might seem, skimming along like Krishna playing his flute just isn’t going to happen for you, no matter how much you meditate, no matter how ecstatically you twirl, no matter what substances you compulsively ingest. Sorry.)
We might try to bend the currents of this Life to our purpose, but to fight them continuously would be deadly. These currents have their own life and their own way of being. Their mission is different than ours. We are not the waters of the river seeking the waters of the ocean. We are like caribou, and our kind seeks to be on the other shore. There is a Divine Reason for this that is inherently unfathomable to us. We don’t need to know it. Anything we might imagine that Divine Reason to be is wrong. We don’t think like the Divine. We think like caribou. We think like monkeys pretending to think like caribou. We can’t see what the Divine sees except for little snippets and shards reflecting reality. The infinite totality which can never be totaled is far beyond our biological level to understand very well.
But we have the ability to know this. If we give up and drown, we’ll just be more pieces of flotsam that will make someone else’s crossing more challenging downstream.
Sometimes we get trapped in a whirlpool or eddy that we must escape or fail in our crossing. But inner resolve, commitment, strength, and sober effort are often not enough. Without some intervening luck such as floating branch within arms’ reach we could never get out. But what is that Luck, that Gift unbidden brought to us by a current that can be so frightening? Perhaps it is just another name for a Divine gift from a Power that is greater than our selves.
We must be vigilant, and ready to accept whatever help and luck that comes our way. Staying in the whirlpool until we disintegrate does not serve us or that poor soul that is bound to get clobbered by the debris of our destruction downstream. We need to seize these Divine opportunities if we have any hope to be a part of that Divine dance that drives us to the other shore.
This is your board! Grab it and kick hard!
