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05/23/2002 Archived Entry: "5/6/02- Finding the balance"

Sometime it is hard to find the appropriate balance between reacting appropriately to the needs of the times, and the danger of allowing oneself to live in a perpetual state of crisis. I spent much of my life as a young activist in that perpetual state of crisis. It is not useful, to the planet or to oneself to live that way. It is also not useful to turn oneself off to what is going on around us.

My first thought is to say that it is necessary to find the balance between the two states of being - which sounds very much like what a Libra would say, and I am a Libra. However, it feels like there is another choice, and that the choice lies in another plane of being. Ah! I see what it is. The problem is fear, and perhaps, also, a kind of generic fear that, "things will not work out." Is not fear a reasonable response when there is danger? Is it not healthy to experience fear when confronted with danger? Perhaps fear is useful when confronted with acute danger, but it does not feel useful when confronted with chronic danger. Rather, it feels counter-productive. It seems to work its way into the bones and to become enervating. Fear, when it is other than an acute situation, is an obstacle to coherent thinking and one’s physical well being.

Surrender. Acceptance. These are the things I am thinking of. No. I do not mean just roll over and acquiesce, to just give in. I am talking about what Ram Dass had to do after he had his massive stroke. It had happened. It could not be undone. What are the choices? To spend the rest of one’s life, bemoaning one’s fate, or to accept what has happened and find the opportunity in the pain. Ram Dass, being who he is, and after going through a necessary and unavoidable grieving process, chose to ask his Guru (who no longer occupies a physical form) what it is that he must learn from his experience. That process has taken him to a place, which he does not think he could have achieved without the stroke. Hence, his calling the stroke and subsequent lessons, "Fierce Grace." Which, by the way, is now the name of a beautiful movie about Ram Dass

People say things like, "everything is happening as it should." Or, "it is all part of the Divine plan." So, then, if the holocaust is part of the Divine plan is it OK? If you are dying from AIDS, is it OK, because "everything is perfect?" Is it the case that it doesn’t hurt you if you know it is part of the Divine Plan, if you know that "everything is happening as it should?" I don’t think so. There is an interesting line to walk here.

There was a time when I thought that if one could be good enough, divine enough, one could get a free ticket. One could get divine dispensation from the ills of the world. I do not believe that anymore. What we can get is the choice of how we react. We do not get to choose, for the most part, what happens to us. What we get to choose, is how we react to what happens to us. But what about what might happen to whole countries? What about all the suffering? Are we present? Can we call ourselves conscious beings if we do not feel the pain?

It is necessary to live on another plane of being. I can see, now, that it is not just a personal thing. I had thought that the impetus I have been feeling, the pull that I have been feeling, the need I have been feeling, to shift myself to a higher state of consciousness, was in response to my personal situation. And, in relation to my role as a teacher to those who find themselves looking to me as a teacher. But, there is a greater need than that. The human condition is calling upon those of who can (which is, by the way, many of us) to elevate ourselves to a state of mastery of the flow of our consciousness.

How to do so, right now, in the middle of everything? That is a question worth struggling with.