Loran,
I picture you, without knowing where you are, slipping back into a numbing confusion that had loosened its grip on you 3 weeks ago. If this has occurred or does occur, it would be going too far to call it a tragedy. It would be deep and maybe unnoticed suffering but tragedy implies some kind of permanence, like a stain in your history. You will never be doomed to stay trapped in that place.
If you have forgotten, let me encourage you to remember the goodness of freedom. And if you are uniting fear and freedom in your mind you have indeed forgotten. Freedom doesn’t necessarily suggest the absence of fear but the peaceful willingness to experience it.
It is funny, that only when we feel bound by fear and misery do we imagine that freedom is somehow the scarier choice, the more difficult one. And it is that moment of imagining in that place we hide from freedom that we suffer from fear. The absence of freedom, its opposite in a sense, is hell; a fear so strong that it can make a person consider whether it is more terrifying to live or die. I see all around me and in myself an unnoticeably desperate attempt to avoid this reality and I see that it can never be avoided. The greatest ignorance can never save a person from themselves. And while even just a few years of life may demonstrate this to us over and over we are so afraid and so desire confusion that we cannot see.
It has dawned on me that it is a fortunate thing that we are responsible for our own suffering…that suffering is in us and a result of our own perceptions. No matter where we are or what situation we find ourselves in we carry with us ourselves, and so we may always turn inward and study our pain. And we may always watch it closely enough to free ourselves from our senseless demands to be rid of it. This is a way we find freedom from suffering, what each of us seeks for the whole of our lives. Through whatever medium – an attempt at safety or success, a claim to misery, an unconventional life, a hand in “fixing” the problems of the world – we try to be free of suffering or to at least somehow survive it. And while we can observe that we all fail in this effort we stay loyal to the same methods of attempt, trying 1 thing or a hundred. Then we die.
This is not meant to be bleak nor is it. But an unobserved mind may find it to be worth ignoring, scary or unbearable. As long as our minds create the world we live in, we will not comprehend the neutrality of every circumstance, nor will words like these make any impression. A mind is not a problem. With it we play and create...It is a wonderful part of us. But it is not us.
There is freedom from suffering and a boundless beauty that accompanies it. And as the excerpt from the previous email I sent you suggests, it requires the decision to choose life right now, and then over and over until it becomes the way of things to say yes to everything that surrounds you and all the things inside of you.
What I am saying to you is not correct or true in any way we understand those terms, or meant to be trusted and go unexplored. If it were, the mind would use it to save itself from a certain kind of extinction. As I have eased myself into India I have felt the fear in me magnified a hundred times as it destroys itself. And even this is not necessary. It happened that way for me.
Each phrase that I have written could be made full of many contradictions and if you find it useful, find them.
If you want clarity it is there for you, right there inside of you. If you have suffered enough to look around the room and realize that nothing is wrong allow yourself. The lights will brighten. The objects around you will shine and delight you. I'm speaking of a space that you already trust more than other things or anything. You know it from being in-love, or watching your tomatoes ripen, or seeing your friends and family laughing together, happy. That joy is the very beginning of emptiness and free from the fear of loosing it, it will never leave you.
I don't know what is in store for you or if India is the place for you. If you come I do not intend to scare you into happiness. I'll be right there with you unless you ask me to leave. Do not think of not coming as a blow or disappointed. I have everything I need. And I deeply wish for you the same, whatever it means.
Jess