Death of Possibility
Why are so many people bound to perfection as a prerequisite for optimism? Why do we have to have guarantees of successful outcomes to be hopeful? Why does pessimism, doubt, and fear make us feel safer than the terrain of unknown potential? Is it because being wrong makes us feel like fools, or because being right is more respectable than being hopeful? Are we more driven by patterns of defeat than opportunity? All of these questions are spinning in my mind in the days after the 2020 election. Now that the possibility of change seems so close, so many who fought for and desired it are jumping ship into the dark and treacherous waters of doubt and fear.
Why? Because shit is still hard. The outcome of the election didn’t magically make things easy and right. But hard doesn’t have to equate with awful, unless that is the expectation we hold. Caution is often the most direct path to the feeling of certainty (otherwise known as the active avoidance of uncertainty). Holding ourselves at arms length away from possibility keeps us safe from disappointment, and it’s a game of ego twister that says nothing is ever more than we perceive it to be, and if it is, our inability to perceive it equates with danger. I don’t concur.
EVERYTHING is always more than we perceive it to be. When we center our own perception (or that of our groups of likeness), we forget the myriad possibilities that exist outside of our direct experience or perception. We make our story everyone’s story. And c’mon now, we know better than that. Regardless, we cling like cleavers to our fears and doubts as the actions needed to feel safe or “aware.” So it makes me wonder, how is fear of service to the whole (that which is beyond our individual perception)? Fear allows us to take control of our choices, it tightens us up around our survival, it encourages us to warn (or illicit fear) in others, it inspires us to fight against injustice, it keeps us small and confined, and often firmly planted on the sidelines, coaching without ever playing the game, or it calls us to rise into the unknown and follow without question the pulse of our heart.
Interestingly, there is an immense amount of power in fear, and learning to access that power and have agency over its use is a high level of skillfulness. It requires a great deal of responsibility and the willingness to take risks without any trustworthy outcome, behaviors that ultimately create lasting and meaningful change. Fear can shut us down, keep us small, fill us with doubt, cause us to hide and protect, or it can be a driver, a source of momentum, a propellent into risk.
Abaya Mudra translates into the seal of “never not afraid,” according to scholar and teacher Douglas Brooks, though it is colloquially translated as fearlessness. But maybe those concepts aren’t as far apart as we think. Fearlessness might be never not afraid and act anyway. If we dare to stretch the lens beyond our personal perspective, we can imagine that we are just a part of a much bigger, much longer story. Our part is important, but it doesn’t start or end the story. We are characters in the story of the soil, the ocean, the trees, the wars, the strife, the liberation, but the balance of it all might not actually depend on us. Death is the only certainty, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s the singular truth. It’s the primary teaching of most mystical traditions. When we stop living like our limited lifespan is important, then we become more attuned to a bigger picture, and less attached to our own security as definitive. We become willing to rise and meet the call of our time, we daringly turn toward the traumas of our history, we become more willing to take a daring leap into the unknown. We aren’t reckless, we are honest. We stop trying to preserve OUR lives and start trying to preserve LIFE.
This shift in perspective results in a lot of getting knocked down. It doesn’t insure that our attempts at risk or engagement will succeed. Matter of fact, there is probably way more being wrong than being right on this path. But, perhaps it’s being wrong for the right reasons. What do you believe in beyond all doubt and question? If it is that you will die, and that everyone you love (or hate) will also die, then you are liberated from the bondage of staying alive. The story of LIFE is so much bigger than us (or them.) This chapter isn’t as important OR as unimportant as you might think.
The Sri Sundarya Lahari (an arguably Tantric text written by the Advaita Vedantic convert, Shankara) states that “the world is an endless ocean of ambrosia, and the body is an island.” The whole story is a romance, and how you read that romance is up to your unique positioning in the midst of things, but your positioning doesn’t change the “truth.” Even if your experience of life is one of hardship and difficulty, that doesn’t rewrite the story of the ocean and the island. But, it does give us agency over how we are as an island in a story that stretches beyond time. Another premise stated in the text is “that EVERYTHING is simply waves rising and falling, neither inauspicious nor meaningful.” It is all experience, and we attribute meaning to our experience to orient ourselves in the vast ocean of existence. Humans make meaning, that is what makes us human, but it doesn’t make the meaning true. So how would you live differently if meaning were art making rather than reality defining?
Lastly, disappointment is a powerful teacher, maybe the most powerful teacher. The feeling of disappointment is so powerful, that it has become a cardinal direction on the inner compass of so many informing us about all of our choices, decisions, and feelings and often overshadowing any possibility of difference or potential for change. It keeps us on our island and tells us not to dare and venture out into the ocean. Disappointment has become the ultimate weigh point for meaning, one which we judge all experiences against. Disappointment weights the scales of change in the direction of well defined dichotomies of good or bad, right or wrong. It robs the opportunity for change to be its own reward, and demands that if things can’t improve from the change, they shouldn’t change at all. It’s an almost absurd thought when held in kind with the nature of that which is bigger than our own self importance. The world will perpetually change, inevitably and infinitely. Our demands on that change help us to feel more important in the story than we really are. Our requirements give us meaning, whether or not they align with the force of nature or not.
Is hope a risk because outcomes are uncertain? Is optimism flawed because the change that occurs might not be positive? Does our story have to end well? What happens when our meaning making becomes play rather than life or death? What happens when we allow ourselves to celebrate change without the demands of our conditions? I don’t know. But, maybe we will discover a new way to be, an uncertain existence free of the requirements of our perception. Think about it. What if humanity could change…what on earth would we do then?
