Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
Rumi
I love this relationship I have with you. Words cannot express how wonderful it is to connect with you – from my heart to your heart – above and beyond our thoughts or ideas of what is true or false or what is right or wrong.
I don’t know why I’m here and you are there. I don’t know why I’m writing these words and I have no idea why you’re reading them. You could be doing anything but here you are reading and engaged and open and ready. What will happen next? I want to know. I am about to find out and you are too.
I think we share a longing. I believe that to be true. A longing for more. A longing to connect to something deeper than the world of people and cars and stores and money and confusion and conflict. We seek a deeper prize: an experience of truth that is essentially good; an experience of goodness that feels essentially beautiful; an experience of beauty that rings essentially true.
Earlier in my career, I would regularly administer IQ tests, a process that could take about 90 minutes. One of the subtests was called Similarities. It is notable that it was not called Differences. It is easy to see how things are different. It is not so easy to see how they are the same. The more we see the sameness – the common thread within the fabric of physical phenomenon, the more intelligent we are; the higher our “score.” The more we “get it.” The more we nod our head and smile as we finally see what was there all along, waiting to be seen. And that which we understand, we bow our head and “stand under.”
“Can we find our self in the other? Can we find the other in our self?” ? Can we find the our other in the our self? When we wake up to what is real, we immediately realize what isn’t. The differences wash away like dust from a window when it rains, the fearsome illusion flushes down and away, leaving only clean colors, delightful laughter and an intense, particular presence that is pure and precious and pulsating with power and peace. Here becomes now and now becomes here. “There” and “then” no longer have meaning. They are the braces that fall from our legs when we are healed and find ourselves running.
Recently it occurred to me that “other” is an illusion. There is only self. Each of us is the center of the universe. From the point of light from which you experience material reality, the universe spreads and extends out from “you” in equal directions in what our small minds can only guess is infinite or eternal.
Your idea of “other” is not my idea of “other.” To me, you are an other and I am a self. To you, I am an other and you are a self. Or to put it another way, all humans properly define reality as consisting of two opposites: self and not-self. But which is right? Am I the true self or are you?
Perhaps that is what we share most essentially, this thing we call self. John Lennon once wrote, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” When we realize “self” is “real,” we grasp the other side of that clever coin: “not-self” is “not-real.”
When this thought of “no other” occurred to me I was driving home from work in my car alone and as I turned onto my street, I caught a glimpse of grass gracefully and obediently bending to the insistence of wind and I “saw” that even those slender green “leaves” were alive like me; and like me, possessed a “self.”
Every particular thing is sacred and a divine expression of universal is-ness. But you/I can’t know that with our thinking minds. This mind-dissolving truth is beyond the smooth, crumbling stone walls that contain the collected conceptualizations of the rational intellect like a cold museum of frozen reality.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
A single blade of sea-green grass “knows” its “self,” not with the inadequate and limited clumsiness of our dissecting, discriminating minds, but with the perfect wholeness of being that is beyond all thought or separation. Everything is sacred; all is divine; each thing is connected to every “other” thing in an infinite, triumphant tapestry that cannot be improved upon, added to or subtracted from. When we “sit with” this inner sight, the boundaries of self disappear and expand outward, up and beyond the furthest reaches of the wall-less mind.
Recently, Doug Bennett, a dear friend of mine, had the Rev. David Robinson, from the Center for Spiritual Living, on Unspun, his Saturday morning call-in show, the best show on the best radio station (KKRN) in Northern California. They were talking about spirituality and truth and grappling with the core conundrums of our age: What is the proper role of a “good” person in a world of horrible cruelty, intentional violence, deliberate deception and unrestrained injustice? What is our responsibility? How are we to love in the midst of hatred?
The last caller was Randy and he wanted to know where we go to find the answers we seek: within the sanctuary of our souls or out here in the world of women and men? To which, I thought, the short answer might be “yes.”
So many of our sisters and brothers are lost and suffering; struggling with soul-crushing pain and loss. So many structures of government, business and society seem rigged against the human experiment in a thousand different ways we can barely comprehend.
In the midst of it all, each of us stands tall, connected to one another through the center we all share, the sacred self and its window of endless light, waiting for each of us to see and wake up to our common truth.
Adyashanti wrote, “If you really look, you’ll find that spark of intuition that something about you is unchanging in the midst of all the change. That is the light above everything. That light has not been harmed; it has not been destroyed. Birth is not the beginning of that light, and death is not the end of that light. When that light fully comprehends its own nature, then it sees that everything came forth from that light and that it is everything.
“Everything – your hands, your face, the floor underfoot, the sky above, the birds, the flowers, the buildings, the cars, the pollution, the clear mountain lake – everything came forth from that light and is a manifestation of that light.”
YOU ARE THAT LIGHT. Thank you for shining. Please continue. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
