Call it enlightenment of the soul through spiritual liberation or awakening of the illusory self to one true reality; throw in brain-twisters like, “Duality is always secretly unity” or “The world is only a manifestation in plurality”; stir it further with fancy terms such as “Watching your I AMness” or “Being one with Nondual Awareness”.
Call a person’s lone spiritual pursuit by whichever stuffy, conventional terms fancy us, but at the end of the day all that a seeker is truly looking for is not a glorious merging with Oneness ideal for a solitary hermitage someday, but the simple freedom from life-sapping thought patterns to make living undramatic every single day. The seeker is not looking for eternal happiness or elevation to pure consciousness. She is not chasing after everlasting peace for she knows that peace is not a grand goal but an inevitable side effect that will spontaneously happen, if only she could fix her vantage on her difficult thoughts.
Then arises the question: how do we deal with difficult thoughts? Why are they even there? What purpose do these repetitive, dysfunctional thoughts serve, those thoughts of fear, anxiety, unease, and pain accumulated through personal experiences or inherited from the world over time and across space, triggered by random events and immediately validated by a visceral discomfort in the body that is further accentuated by more descriptive, dysfunctional thoughts?
May is generally an unpredictable month of spectacular spring blooms, the first appearance of the northern cardinal in our backyard, and erratic weather conditions that are matched by an equally chaotic and emotional shitstorm on the personal front. My rattled mindset is usually brought about by the impending anniversary of a loved one’s passing and the unintelligible impact of the quarterly mercury retrograde on my already introverted mind in the shape of indecisions and uncertainties. But this time around there was an added level of physical ailments and health concerns in the family that created uncalled-for anxieties, not to mention the continuous reminder of inhuman cruelties like Russian war crimes in Ukraine and racially-motivated shootings in Buffalo, New York. Yet, I somehow managed to suffer all of these disruptors reasonably well, or so I thought, until my most dreaded nightmare scenario hit the news and became the match in the powder barrel.
There had been an elementary school shooting in Texas.
When I read the first news report that mentioned 14 children having been killed, I instantly went into denial and convinced myself that the news title was wrongly worded and that the subsequent reports would be more accurate. Accurate they were, only not in the way I was willing them to be. I waited for a couple of hours and came back to the news to find that 19 children and two teachers, all from a single classroom where the killer had barricaded himself, were heinously gunned down over one hour in a gut-wrenching, senseless act.
The horrific details coming forth from that point onward only got worse. I couldn’t stop my mind from generating imagery of fourth-grade children crying for help and not getting it, feeling petrified seeing their classmates riddled with bullets, their hope and innocence wiped out with a twitch of a finger. I did not want to think of it but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to scream, I wanted to rip myself into shreds so I don’t have to deal with this reality. The thought felt so painful that I wanted everything around me to vanish. I didn’t want anything, anyone, not the world, not even God to be around, but everything to get the hell lost so I can escape it all.
The tragedy had happened some 1,200 miles from where I live, but it came crashing at the very center of my heart. All of the world’s spiritual wisdom and teachings retreated a chasmic distance away while the cruelty of the pain alone remained. What good is the knowledge about the Awareness, the ever-present stillness, and loving grace when you are imploding with objectless grief that wouldn’t conform to words so it could be explained away? What use is the benevolence of a seemingly cold and insensitive Self that tells you “you are already at peace”, when reality feels far from it?
Now is not the time to tell me that the gunman, those 19 children, I, and everyone else in the world are the same manifestation of an all-encompassing consciousness and the atrocity is only an unavoidable price consciousness had to pay to express itself. Now is not the time to ask me to “see the seer” who is experiencing the pain so the truth will become apparent to me.
Maybe I need to go deeper than my pain to explore what lies beneath it, but right now I do not have any reason left in me to do that. I know I am blinded by emotions and that there will be light and clarity awaiting me when I am ready to see it. I know that I should ease my suffering by accepting reality for what it is instead of challenging it with my mind’s constructs, but today is not that day.
Today, I choose to remain the fool who rejects years of spiritual learning and reflection over pain that seems more real. Today, I refuse reality.
