Silent Musings

For those of us who have enrolled ourselves in the process of spiritual cultivation there is an inevitable result that few ever imagined at the beginning of the quest. Failure. Boldfaced, with a capital F. After all, when we think of cultivating our authentic selves, we are inclined to see spirits growing and blossoming into beautifully enlightened beings, wonderful sights for the sore eyes of our humanity. We certainly don’t envision a painstaking process of withering and dying, of burning up the vestiges of our forsaken selves.

Life can be a cruel teacher. She entices us with grand visions, and occasional flashes of luminous brilliance. In those flashes we imagine that there is some sustainable state of pure knowing and loving being. We imagine ourselves as that being. Conceptually, we may even believe that this is true, and yet somehow this vision remains tantalizingly out of reach. So we seek the correct path toward a permanent merger into our birthright. We may even find at times that we think we’re there. But then it’s snatched away again ever so torturously. What are we to do? Many of us wander this landscape for years and years.

Failure is not easy to take, especially not for the precocious such as we are. It is a total devastation of the constructs of our collective mind. It may not sound like much, but in fact, it’s everything. Our entire world collapses into death, moment after moment, ad infinitum. We must learn to let go of everything. Over and over again, until we are no longer capable of holding on. Completely adrift, we may find ourselves washed upon the shore of a strange new land. It is only here that we find real freedom. Not the concept of liberation that we’ve been pursuing all these years, but rather the complete willingness to die over and over again. To embrace the fullness of our failure, not identifying with it or anything else. Knowing nothing.

Worry not about the path that you are taking. The Beloved will destroy you eventually.

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.

-Rumi