An effortless landing
Peace, control and wholeness already reside within the depths of our being.
The monkey mind,
Dreams restlessly summoning,
Illusions constantly conjuring.
Like a greedy pig,
Devouring mountains,
Without attaining satisfaction.
Like an ambitious eagle,
Flying endlessly higher,
Without grasping the heavens.
Like a cowardly emu,
Digging its head further into the ground,
Without finding safety and shelter.
This mind that is losing itself,
in a self-created whirlpool of activity,
Only attains peace, grasps reality, finds itself,
When it realises,
There is nothing to attain, grasp or find,
but each moment, thought and experience,
Exactly as it is.
Peace resides within
The more one strives for peace, control and wholeness, the more elusive these things become. It is as if our striving or our effort was a kind of force that instead of pulling us closer to these things, pushes us further away from them. So that no matter how much we desire these things, the way we go about pursuing them ends up working against us. In other words, no matter our intention, the actions that follow undermine the whole project. A question follows: how do we pursue our desires in a way that brings us closer to them? How do we go from striving for peace to possessing it?
The answer may seem paradoxical at first, but upon closer inspection makes a great deal of sense. Respectively, as long as the means we use for attaining peace, control and wholeness involve striving, clinging and restless doing, we will find nothing but disappointment after disappointment, and frustration after frustration. This is because clinging and effortful striving give rise to the forces that undermine the peace, control and wholeness that already resides within the depths of our being.
The things that come from the outside require some kind of doing (which inevitably involves some kind of straining and effort) to attain. However, when it comes to peace, wholeness and control, there is no pursuit of getting something that we do not have from the outside. Rather, the task consists of letting what is already within arise naturally, by itself, and recognising that striving and effort will only inhibit, hinder this natural process. We are not trying to get what we do not yet have, but to realise what is already within.
What is required from us in this process is a trust in the abiding sanity, the untarnished wholeness, and the speckless purity of our inner being (and most crucially, the providence and timing of the Spirit of God residing and acting within our inner being). When we trust, then patience and endurance naturally arises as we know that our afflictions are no more than clouds passing by. We are no longer trying to manipulate or resist our present experience, no matter how unpleasant it may be. Rather, we are embracing it with the compassionate gaze of the attentive observer. We do not cling to any experience as if it would be the sole definition of our person or the final predicament of our lives.
From the depths of our hearts, we forsake doing and descend into being. We lovingly let go of needing things to be different, gently detach ourselves from our experiences, sympathetically observe them with great curiosity. We surrender ourselves into, yield the whole spectrum of present experience to the hands carrying, embracing and nurturing us from within. Finding peace, control and wholeness then consists of letting ourselves fall back into these hands again and again, whenever we notice that we have unconsciously returned to the vicious cycle of doing. The more we can trust these hands, this shelter, this wholeness within, the more peace, control and wholeness will arise in response. The less we trust them, and make these things into a pursuit of our ego, the more we will find ourselves losing these things we so desire.