Awakening Comes When Chaos Breaks In

Whenever you’re experiencing any form of adversity, it’s important to understand that there is a law of polarities in the world. On the one hand, you have what we could call order. When order is in your life, you are able to think positively. You are able to create. You have structure. We all want to live in an ordered universe where everything is working as it should. But we tend to forget that there is not just order in this world, there is also the other polarity, which we could call disorder, disruption, or even chaos.

No matter how careful you are, how much positive thinking you practice, at  some  point you will experience the other polarity.   Something gets disrupted—you experience the painful breakup of a marriage or a close relationship, you lose your job, you lose your income, you lose your home, you fall ill, somebody close to you dies or suffers. All kinds of things can erupt in your life. Even people who are good at creating order will at some point experience disorder. And disorder is necessary. Real inner growth usually does not come when things  are  going  well. That’s  not  where  awakening  happens. Awakening comes when chaos breaks into your life—when you’re out of your comfort zone. You may then recognize that the most important cause of your unhappiness is not the outside world, but what you are thinking about the outside world, which is the mental narrative. Your state of consciousness is always primary. All else is secondary.

Disorder gives you an opportunity to become aware of what your mind is doing. Is your unhappiness actually produced by the situation that you’re in, or is the greater part of your unhappiness produced by a narrative in your mind that refuses to accept the present moment?

Sometimes people don’t understand what real acceptance is. They think, “Okay, I need to accept that my life has completely fallen apart. There is nothing I can do, and I need to accept it.” No. All you need to accept is this moment. Accepting the moment doesn’t mean that you cannot take action. In fact, more intelligent action arises out of acceptance of th present moment than out of rejection of the present moment.

Accepting the present moment means accepting uncertainty. During the pandemic, a huge amount of uncertainty has come into people’s lives, which means you don’t know what is going to happen. B  fore, you thought you knew what was going to happen. Ultimately, that was an illusion, too. But at least things seemed to be relatively ordered.

Now thoughts of uncertainty are creating a lot of worry. When you worry, you are creating a narrative in your mind about a future that is worse than what you have now—and the emotion you’re experiencing reflects the narrative your mind is creating, but it’s not the reality of what is going on now.

Spiritual practice is important for seeing the reality—for being able to observe this thing in your life that we could call uncertainty and, instead of rejecting it, coming to terms with it. This gives you a chance for a shift in consciousness. And if enough people experience this shift, the collective changes, and then the world changes—because the human-made world is a product of collective consciousness.

One of my favorite parables is in the New Testament, where Jesus talks about a man who built his house on the sand, and the winds came, and the floods came, and the house was swept away. Then there is a man who digs deep until he finds the rock and he built his house on the rock. And the winds came, and the floods came, and the house was not swept away—because it was built on the rock.

What we need to do is dig deep and find the rock, which means the foundation, the being of yourself, so that you are rooted in the being. And then when the winds come, as they are coming now, the floods come, and the winds beat against the house, your house will stand. The storm doesn’t devastate you. You are not threatened anymore. To some extent, your state of consciousness is no longer dependent on the outside world—because you have found the rock, which is the being.

When you find the being, you find love, because love is recognizing “the other” as yourself—recognizing that the being of the other is the being of you, also—the one consciousness expressing itself, disguising itself, in many, many forms.

Excerpted from The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening. Copyright © 2021 edited by Tim Shriver and Tom Rosshirt. Excerpted by permission of The Open Field.