Struggle
When you quiet your mind, and start to look at life with fresh eyes, one of the first things you will notice is the amount of struggle on this Earth. If you have traveled and seen poverty and hopelessness as it exists in so many places on this planet, you will know that the struggle for food and water is a reality for millions. But even in the rich countries, there is struggle as well. There is struggle to find good work, to find a good place to live, to find a good lover, to experience good moments in life.
Struggle is ongoing; it is ceaseless. We wake up, and we begin our struggles. We struggle to get out of bed. We struggle to get to work on time. We struggle to leave work at an early hour. We struggle to eat a good dinner. We struggle to have a little joy and relaxation. Then, when we are done, we struggle to get to sleep, so that we can wake up and start struggling all over again.
We are trained to struggle. But this was not always so. If you know children, you will know that children do not struggle. Children are spontaneous. It is only adults who are not spontaneous; spontaneity has been beaten out of them.
When you see the war on this planet, and the lust for power and the quest for resources, when you see all these things, you should learn to see the struggle that has sparked them. I don’t mean the geopolitical strategy or the economic motivations or anything like that. You should learn to see the struggle of the individual people involved in those events, their inner psychological battles they wage against themselves every day. It is the workings of those minds, the inner clockwork — that is the source of war and misery. The president and the prime minister struggle internally, and then they take that struggle out on the entire world. The person who cannot accept himself is the first person to call for war on the other.
There is a seeming paradox about existence that must be explained. It is true that there is a universal consciousness, of which we are all individually apart of; and it is also true that there is no larger consciousness than that which is contained in our own individual minds. Do you see this paradox? Everything outside our minds is connected, and is one; and at the same time, there is also nothing beyond our perceptions. Both of these things are true.
Of course, this is not really a paradox — our minds operate at the same wavelength of the universal consciousness; the two are both one and the same. But because of the struggle, because we have been taught from an early age to dress up our egos and compete and kill each other, we have lost touch with this basic universalism, a universalism that all other nature comprehends. The mind is the universe, and the universe is the mind; open your mind, and you will explore the universe.
This, too, you must see — the universe does not struggle. The universe is effortless. That is its way. The universe is chaos, and chaos is effortless. Yet chaos is in fact the only true order. Again, a seeming paradox, but only because we do not yet understand.
Nature is effortless. Anything of grandeur that Nature accomplishes results from its lack of effort. Nature will set the stage, but it will then allow events to transpire as they will. There is so much energy and effort in a hurricane, in a giant storm. But it will not destroy a mountain. On the other hand, the effortless march of a glacier, inching forward decade by decade, propelled only by its own gravity, its own inertia — this will hollow the greatest of mountains. This is the effortlessness of Nature.
Nothing in Nature struggles against itself. It is only human beings that struggle against themselves. You feel shame, you feel anxiety, you feel paranoid, you feel insecure — that is the result of your struggle against yourself, your hatred of yourself, your refusal to love and accept everything about you. The stars do not struggle or complain about their place in the universe. It is only the human being who looks up to those same stars and laments and struggles against his or her purpose.
And when people are not struggling, they feel so worthless. They have to constantly be busy or be amusing themselves. They cannot face a moment when there is nothing happening, a moment in which they simply exist in that beautiful potential which accompanies all genuine periods of silence. This is a moment of real peace, of real serenity — people cannot stand that moment. Look at people when they are by themselves, they cannot stand themselves. They need other people, a friend or a boyfriend or a pet or anything that will take away the utter solitude of existence. Yet solitude is the only truth of this existence. You are alone, just like this universe is alone.
When you put down the struggle, you can really start to listen. You can listen to what this reality is trying to tell you. At every moment, this unified fabric of consciousness that we call reality is constantly showing you new things about the world and about yourself. When you start to listen, you will start to be happy, because you will come to understand more and more the paradox that you have both total control and no control over the direction of your life. This is similar to the paradox of the universe — that it is everything, and that it is nothing as well, just a perception of your own mind. In the same way, the universe controls everything, and you also control the universe.
This is the final mystery that must be unraveled, if you wish to be totally free.
In Daoism, it is written that when you cease to struggle, you become one with the Dao. Lao Tzu wrote centuries ago:
If any one should wish to get the kingdom for himself, and to
effect this by what he does, I see that he will not succeed. The
kingdom is a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing. He
who would so win it destroys it; he who would hold it in his grasp
loses it.The course and nature of things is such that
What was in front is now behind;
What warmed anon we freezing find.
Strength is of weakness oft the spoil;
The store in ruins mocks our toil.Hence the sage puts away excessive effort, extravagance, and easy
indulgence.
God is effortless. God does nothing with effort. God is the rolling waterfall that falls effortless and tumbles below, roaring with the power of certainty, of collision, of both creation and destruction. God is the ocean dancing to the beck and call of the gravity of the Moon, ever approaching and ever distancing, like two lovers who both hunger and fear the reunion of their essences. God is the Sun, continually pulsing through countless cycles of nuclear fusion not for any other purpose than because that is its purpose, and in so doing, bathes this planet with its energies and allows life to flourish.
Something we have lost in the West is the ability to let things go, and in a fashion, to tumble with the waterfall. Destruction is part of life. It is pointless to struggle against those things that have already been lost. We suffer so much because we insist on clinging to the dead, to the decrepit, to things that have outlived their usefulness.
In India, Hindus believe that the god of destruction, Shiva, lives in the Himalayas. Shiva is a destroyer god, but destruction is not feared in Hinduism; this is why millions of people worship Shiva. Destruction sweeps aside all the old habits, all the destructive patterns we accrue so thoughtlessly in our lives. The force of Destruction sees the filth that we put ourselves through and washes it off of us. It is good to wipe all that stuff away, every now and then.
When there is no struggle, there is total freedom. You respond to events in a new way. You create the future, and direct it to your will. You unite once more with the universe, and the universe unites with you. This is the Kingdom of Lao Tzu, and the Kingdom of Heaven. It is right there, right in front of you. But you won’t ever find it, if you struggle for it.
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