Maybe We Don't Need to Know

Something strange happened to me on Thursday. In the afternoon I heard a helicopter circling and peered out my window to identify its location. When I looked out my bedroom window, I spotted not only the helicopter above me, but also a swarm of police cars on the street behind my house. I'm on a hill so the cars were not directly behind me but I could still see them.

I jumped on Twitter and used all the hashtags that came to mind to determine why police cars and a helicopter parked near my house. I googled local news and even called the police nonemergency number. After waiting on hold for nearly 10 minutes I hung up. I couldn't find an answer to my question. I thought about walking up to a police officer and asking about the fuss, but then I questioned that. "Do you really need to know? Maybe it's better if you don't."

Does this person need to know what they're walking on or is it better if they don't, being a sewer and all? Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

Confession, although I suspect you already guessed this about me, I don't watch true crime. I'm not a Law and Order junkie, or a CSI fanatic. I don't enjoy murders and murder mysteries because I'm too sensitive. That means my brain doesn't come up with gruesome scenarios, and let's be honest, reality is much grimmer than my personal imagination. Some of the things people do to one another would never occur to me. But if there are police cars and a helicopter involved, the situation is probably not because someone accumulated parking tickets. Do I need to know that person lives nearby? I do not. (Note: If your google search is more fruitful than mine, please don't tell me why the police visited my neighborhood unless it is for something innocuous like littering.)

This perspective is a huge shift for me because I want to know everything. My brain tells me I'll be safer if I know all the details. But is that really true? Does knowing about a murder in Omaha make me safer here in Oakland? Or does it only succeed in making me scared to go to Omaha? All weekend I've wrestled with this, itching to check Twitter to find out what happened on Thursday. I resist because once I learn something, that information cannot be unlearned. It's like trying to suck toothpaste back into a tube.

What also comes to mind is the converse of what I've shared: If I need to know something, I will. My higher power will arrange things so I find out information. I'll run into someone at a party, I'll overhear a conversation on the street, etc. I searched for a quote here from my spiritual teacher to throw in and came across this one: "[T]he source of physical knowledge is bound up by time, space, and person. With the change of time, space, and person, physical knowledge will change. Hence it is not a permanent knowledge."

I derive comfort from that quote because it means even if someone awful lives behind me now, it doesn't mean they always will. Maybe knowledge, like safety, is a snapshot in time. And if it's a snapshot in time, what's the point in scaring myself right now?

I dream of a world where we recognize sometimes it's better to stay in the dark. A world where we realize if we're meant to know something, we will. A world where we understand sometimes we don't need to know.

Another world is not only possible, it's probable.

Cosmic Arrogance

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about self-confidence and what I believe I'm capable of. At this point I'm paying attention to the universe and noticing over and over this year I'm making money from contract gigs and freelance assignments. Every full-time (or even part-time!) job I've applied for has rejected me. But the random contract gigs and freelance assignments keep rolling in.

I haven't ruled out getting a regular job, but I've also decided to pursue my own business. I'm actively searching for individuals and small businesses that need blogposts, which I can write as myself, or I can ghostwrite them. (Ghostwriting means I capture the person's voice, do all of the writing for them, but someone else is listed as the author of the piece.) You can check out my website for more information.

Seemed appropriate given the title. Photo by Free Nature Stock on Unsplash

All of this is a preamble to say I teeter on the edge of confidence and insecurity with this new venture. In some moments I exclaim, "I can do this! I'm talented! I got this!" and in others I moan, "Who am I to start a business? I'm talented but will anyone pay me what I'm worth? I'm not sure I can do this." It has me thinking about humility. The word humility gets a bad rap and is often associated with humiliation or low self-esteem, but the way my recovery programs present humility is "simply an awareness of who we really are today and a willingness to become all that we can be. Genuine humility brings an end to feelings of inadequacy, the self-absorption, and the status-seeking."

What I'm coming to is isn't it a kind of cosmic arrogance to think I can't do something if all signs are pointing toward yes, I can? Isn't it thumbing my nose at the universe to keep declining something, to choose to keep playing small because of a notion of who think I am? I guess you could say I have a bit of an inferiority complex.

Related to this topic, Indian philosopher, poet, and linguist P.R. Sarkar said neohumanism is a philosophy that will "make people understand that they are not merely ordinary creatures. This philosophy will liberate them from all inferiority feelings and defects, and make them aware of their own importance; it will inspire them to build a new world."

I identify as a neohumanist and that means I'm not ordinary, and neither are you. None of us are. It also means that something divine is working through me, that I'm used as a channel or a conduit. Who am I to say, "No, that can't come through me"? To be human, it seems to me, requires surrender, letting go, and accepting what is. And sometimes that's different and bigger than what I imagined.

I dream of a world where we practice true humility, which is an awareness of who we are and a willingness to become all we can be. A world where we accept and surrender to what the universe desires to express through us. A world where we accept sometimes the universe wants more for us than we want for ourselves, and in those cases we are still fully equipped to handle it.

Another world is not only possible, it's probable.

Whose Bliss?

I feel drained from this weekend so I didn't write a new post, but this question keeps coming to mind: "How do I know if I'm on the right path?" There have been a few times in the past I felt sure I knew what to do and that doors would swing open for me. However, they stayed firmly shut. Does that mean I wasn't truly following my bliss? Or rather that my bliss hadn't been refined yet? With all that in mind, I'm resharing a post from March 2018.

The other day a friend told me he asks people, "How do you know your bliss is the right one?" in response to the slogan "follow your bliss." When he said that to me, I exhaled deeply. I've heard variations of "follow your bliss" such as "follow your bliss and the money will come" for years and it filled me with rancor. I published a book and started a publishing company and the money did not follow. Life didn't become all sunshine and roses. In fact, the years since my book came out have been some of the hardest of my life. To recap, I moved a jillion times, my health deteriorated, my finances took a nose dive, and more. I did not receive either the internal or external promised riches.

Normally I get pissed off like a child who did exactly as she was asked and didn't receive her reward. Where is my gold star? Why don't I have what I'm "supposed" to? I also usually start to look at other people's lives and say, "They followed their bliss and got what they wanted. Why didn't it happen for me?" It's a resentment filled adventure for sure.

I would like to see something like this all the time, thanks. Photo by Kevin Noble on Unsplash

When I ponder that "my" bliss isn't the right one, I feel better. Perhaps "my" bliss is ego driven and self-centered. Perhaps the bliss I'm following will lead me to a place I ultimately don't want to go. Maybe I don't know what's best for me and maybe I don't know what "my" bliss is.

I am strong believer in a power greater than myself. I've seen over and over again that I'm guided. And if that's true, that means there's something doing the guiding, and more often than not, that "something" knows better and knows more than I do, which also relates to how I pray. My prayer is a variation of, "I don't know what's best for me universe. Only you know what's best for me. I want what you want for me. Please align my will with yours." I think bliss is like that. If I had it my way, I'd live a super cushy life without any drama, with money flowing in due to little effort on my part, seeing beautiful things every day, and eating decadent food. That sounds lovely, but it also means I wouldn't confront any of my issues; I wouldn't deal with any of my demons.

In the same conversation with my friend, I told him I can't suppress anything and because that's true, I'd rather confront my issues head on. Confronting my issues has made me a better person and a happier person. I don't feel nearly as anxious as I used to and that's a direct result of bringing my demons out of the shadows and into the light. That leads me to believe that perhaps my higher power is thinking of my long-term happiness and bliss rather than a short-term gain. Perhaps real bliss then is not mine, but what my higher power wants and I'd feel happier if I aligned my will accordingly. It's difficult for me to maintain that perspective, but it seems worth a shot. After all, I'd much rather feel happier for a longer period of time than a shorter one.

I dream of a world where we realize sometimes our bliss takes us places that don’t serve us. A world where we understand there's a difference between the bliss we aim for and the bliss our higher power wants for us. A world where we understand whose bliss will ultimately lead us where we want to go.

Another world is not only possible, it's probable.

Becoming the Ocean

The other day I shared a poem by Khalil Gibran on Facebook titled "Fear." I'm sharing it again here because it's relevant to my life right now:

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

I am that river right now. I'm traveling through mountain peaks and crossing forests. The current of life is moving me along in a direction that excites me and scares me. I'm progressing toward something I didn't anticipate and for many years said I never wanted, yet here I am, traveling down this path. I want to run away, to turn back and go in the other direction, but like the river, I cannot. Too much momentum has built up. Will I change course? Possibly, but eventually I'll still enter the ocean, become the ocean. It's inevitable one way or another.

It all leads to this. Photo by Mathew Waters on Unsplash

I'm speaking in metaphors but that's because I'm not ready to talk about what I'm going through publicly yet. A part of me doesn't want to fully commit to this path and telling people what I'm doing means just that. Also, so much changes so quickly for me these days. The river current is rough and filled with rapids at the moment. I don't know how things will shake out.

And yet, there's something about becoming the ocean that speaks to me. When I look at what I'm going through, it feels like I'm becoming my truest self. I'm becoming the self I was always meant to be, which is lovely. Also, there's the spiritual level of becoming the ocean.

My spiritual teacher often uses the metaphor of a river and the ocean to talk about the spiritual journey we're on. How we're flowing back to the ocean and becoming the ocean. In essence, we're returning to Cosmic Consciousness and merging with it.

Sometimes the journey is fast and sometimes it's slow, but it's inevitable according to my spiritual philosophy. There's something comforting for me about knowing the general path is laid out, that even if this river changes course, eventually I'll still wind up in the same place: the ocean.

I don't know if this post is making much sense, but I want to close with saying we are each becoming more fully our true selves. We are learning and growing and changing. The process can be scary at times, we may be wending our way through the dark, but we're heading somewhere amazing and becoming who we're meant to be.

I dream of a world where we realize our greatness. A world where we flow with the current of life. A world where we understand sometimes there comes a point where we can't turn back and all that's left is to keep going. A world where we become the ocean.

Another world is not only possible, it's probable.