It happens

reality and the river of life

If you were in the Tao, you would feel things are as they have to be. ~C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars

The central task, my primary coping strategy - for good and ill – has been the struggle to accept that life is as it has to be. Although I can see all that is challenging and problematic about that superficially and would never prescribe such a strategy to anyone else – I paradoxically stand by it, stand upon it, and I do not believe that it is an even slightly passive way to live, or that it is a stance that tolerates avoidable suffering or injustices that can be alleviated.

But there are traumas, moral injuries, cruelties, and sufferings that descend upon us like fiery meteors falling from the sky, as if the gods have cast lots on our happiness and survival, that strike us as rock hard inevitabilities.

We generally seem to imagine that we are responsible for and can control far more about our lives, about our very being, than we can. And when inevitabilities pelt us, or unavoidable suffering rains down we can either get with the program, or resist the flow of life, the river of time – which in my experience only compounds our misery.

We can’t unilaterally avoid suffering but we can surely make it worse.

One doesn’t make it right; it just is right.  ~ C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars

Not morally right. Not just. Not fair. But “right” in terms of what the complex multi-directional, multi-dimensional web of causal chains that we are embedded in has lined up as the next structurally necessary event.  Our lives unfold in ways that follow natural and instinctive laws and patterns that we know almost nothing about, that proceed in the ways that they must, and that has little to do with what we prefer, desire, or think we are entitled to.

Similarly, forces, mandates, natural imperatives rise up from within us as well, through the souls and guts of those around us, and are lived out as an internal requirement. And again, these may have nothing to do with what we prefer, what we believe about ourselves or others, or what we think of as good or pleasant.

And there are moments when all the noise and culturally programmed expectations of what we think we deserve are silenced, and we might see, in a brief flash of clarity who we are, our real powers and limitations, what we can and cannot do as one small speck of fuzz in the vast fabric of an unfolding universe.

A speck, that can stand and fight, or surrender, or rail against forces that will overpower us - as we feel we must.

The world must happen, and we must happen too.

And when our “inner-attitude” to use Jung’s words, is in alignment with the flow of life, even if the role we must play is apparently futile or against the current - we may still understand that we are happening, and the world is happening, as it must.

Our inner-attitude is one of the millions of components in the Great Entanglement.  Our responsiveness, our response-ability must accept all the power and all the impotence that belongs to us at once, accept all that is here, real, and inevitably true whether we like it or not, from within and all around us. If we can tolerate it, we may see for a second, our sacred function as one speck among billions of specks and use our tiny capacities to direct the energies that pass through our speckishness in a direction we would like to see gain momentum.

When we feel that many “wrong” things are happening (This shouldn’t be happening!) we are not in alignment, we are standing against and attempting to leap over reality instead of accepting its force. “This shouldn’t be happening!” prevents us from engaging and addressing that which is in fact happening in and around us.

For me the first and most challenging step is surrendering to all that is real, whether it is joyful, horrible, terrifying, humiliating or enraging. This requires releasing my grip on all sorts of illusions, about myself, about the world, and never, ever fighting to restore a false hope or a comforting lie.

This is perhaps my most deeply held soteriological belief: that which is real is enough, more than any illusion can offer. Ugly, painful realities are more sacred to me than ideals or illusions. The starting point is merely a clod of mud and anything that I might hope for begins with dirty hands and no idea what might happen next.

A daily struggle to get down to the elemental and accept what is.

I fail hundreds of times a day, but for some reason I won’t give up wrestling my inner-attitude to submit to truths I do not like and cannot wish away. Sometimes this is a battle, sometimes a release, sometimes a surrender, sometimes a healing bath of self-forgiveness. Sometimes it requires that I touch the very bottom of my powerlessness. Sometimes this is dreadful.

For a long time, maybe for a decade or more, maybe for my whole life but certainly by the time my friends and family members started dying the first conscious experience of each new day was an overwhelming dread. What horror might emerge? What loss must I face?

Sure enough, sometimes one is in a valley of darkness, dark things happen, and then dark things belong there, they are what must happen then ~ C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars

I would take several hours and a strong pot of black tea to convince myself that I could face it, that I could find love and purpose amid all the excruciating real. And I would fall asleep after a long hard day of meaning-making and wake into dread and start the search again. It became my habit: The alarm rings. A moment to recall my dreams. A wall of dread to scale before I could find a way to embrace realities that included cancer, the climate emergency, grief, a pandemic, and launching my children into a precarious world.

But recently I began to simplify the process and cut to the chase. What was the dreadful preamble good for? I began to wonder if acceptance - at this point in a long life of accepting many fucked up realities- still needed to be such a struggle. Did I have to wake every morning resisting the day as it flowed toward and through me?

And that is so with the current of life. When you trust yourself to it you can never tell where it is carrying you, you never know what the goal of that winding river may be.  ~ C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars

So, I constructed a brief morning practice, one of my weird agnostic prayers. What if I assume that my inner-attitude is a part of the river, is one with the movement of life? What if dread is an unconscious practice of surrendering the illusion of control? What if I evolved to live on the world as it is, was designed, created, shaped to naturally negotiate even very hard realities that may come my way?

What if every day is a surprise, full of all possibilities from the miraculous to the boring to the traumatic? What if I trust that I am ready, nonetheless, for this exact day, whatever comes and whatever it is I am called to do?  What if I celebrate anytime I can extricate myself from a false hope or comforting illusion?

I wake now and remind myself that I am ready for this life, built to negotiate reality, living, and working as I have to be, inside of things, as they have to be.

One feels that it must happen. It is just as if one were inside of things. ~ C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars

---

Today’s Business:

• There are two openings in the Friday mid-day Vocation and Discernment Group for Helping Professions who are re-evaluating their relationship to their professional life.

• There are two available spots in the up-coming Group-Group - a workshop for folks who want to develop their community/peer group faciliation skills or who want to start their own community group. Starts March 31st.

• The next round of this Dream Workshop will be starting at the end of April on Saturdays 10:00 Pacific, 11:00 Mountain, 12:00 Central and 1:00 Eastern