A character
of Flannery O’Connor in “The Misfit” famously said, “She would of been a good
woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her
life.”
A gun to the
head is too violent an image, but most of us do recognize how much we need to
be reminded of something we already know and trust in our deepest selves. Something
really important. Something that connects us with being “good” people. Something
that makes life itself really, really “good.”
When I read
and re-read the passage below from Eckhart Tolle, I’m reminded of what I keep
forgetting. And I feel a welcome immediacy confirming how good life is each time I remember it.
---
Most people
pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification
because they believe that those things will make them happy or free them from a
feeling of fear or lack. Happiness may be perceived as a heightened sense of
aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or a more secure and more
complete sense of self attained through some form of psychological
gratification.
This is the
search for salvation from a state of unsatisfactoriness or insufficiency.
Invariably, any satisfaction that they obtain is short-lived, so the condition
of satisfaction or fulfillment is usually projected once again onto an
imaginary point away from the here and now. “When I obtain this or am free of
that — then I will be okay.”
This is the
unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future. True
salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you
are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that
depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but
as an abiding presence.
True
salvation is a state of freedom — from fear, from suffering, from a perceived
state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing,
grasping, and clinging.
It is
freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and
future as a psychological need.
Your mind is
telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or
you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is
saying, in fact, that you need time — that you need to find, sort out, do,
achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or
complete.
You see time
as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to
salvation.
You think
that you can’t get there from where and who you are at this moment because you
are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the
only point from where you can get there.
