Our world is a world of duality. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to experience anything. There wouldn’t be anyone to experience anything. I am because the eventuality of I am not co-exists. That is duality. Evil can be experienced because we compare and contrast it with good, its duality pairing. If there was no good, there could be no evil.
Duality is the experience of separation. I experience myself and others because we appear to be individuated, separated. I can experience life in its myriad forms for the exact same reason. If there was no appearance of separation, there would be no me to experience anything, as well as no things to experience.
In spiritual circles duality is the fall guy, the curse to overcome, the trying life whose ultimate reward is nirvana. They couldn’t be more wrong, but it is a useful tool to keep the wheel turning, to keep the dāna (donations) coming in. Round and round we go, only the rare one or two spinning off into freedom.
It doesn’t matter if you are spiritual or religious the basic, most likely hidden, premise is escape.
In Christianity, that ultimate escape clause is death, or if you are lucky and considerably right wing, The Rapture. Did you know that The Rapture wasn’t found in historic Christianity. It wasn’t actually invented until the 1830s, so it’s a fairly recent phenomena, but one that has set the fundies on fire. With The Rapture you go straight to heaven without dying first. True believers are lifted off the planet before the End Times turn Earth into a living hell. Looking at the state of the world, they might be a bit screwed with their timeline.
Other religions have their own escape clauses that are slightly different. This is not a Christians only thing. There are also other escape clauses beyond the ultimate one: belonging to a community, feeling a part of something; the high that organically comes when thinking of something other than yourself (God in this case); believing someone powerful is watching over you, that He has your back (any surprise that we are a patriarchy), that you are being guided; the specialness of being saved.
In the US, many conservative Christians are doing everything they can to foment escape, electing a president and congress who will do their bidding, who will start the war that heralds the return of Jesus. In many minds, Iran is not just a war. It is THE war. In their untended fear, with their unacknowledged trepidation of death, they are trying to manipulate God, to force his hand. You’d think that people who believe they are saved wouldn’t be so damn afraid to die. Hmmm. Maybe they don’t really believe what they say they believe.
Until belief is a lived experience, balls to bones to quote The Matrix, it is just a bunch of words.
Before the spiritual folk get too jazzed up on superiority, in your language escapism is ascension, enlightenment, changing or upgrading timelines, graduating to the 5th dimension, participating in a major shift that will create heaven on earth, one that earth is supposedly undergoing right now.
Don’t you find it interesting that all the camps could literally be sitting around the same bonfire swapping hopes and dreams, and if you didn’t listen too closely to the specific language, you’d be right at home.
All the pretty pieces are interchangeable.
Escape, getting off the wheel of samsara or getting your free pass to heaven, it’s the same damn thing. The schools of belief or thought, call if what you want, just dance around wearing different costumes, pretending to be the answer, guarded in certainty that locks you in the dance, blinding you to what is actually going on, to who you already are.
And life dies in front of your eyes while you wait on what’s to come, not just yours but all life on planet Earth.
Fear of surrender is embedded into our psyche. Surrender to what is, as it is, is our boogeyman, is only for the weakest amongst us, is an act of giving up, giving in, and God knows, we can’t do that. That fear is the perpetual hamster wheel of right and wrong, of judgment and desire to belong, so we seek our answers, adapting our beautiful being to the ill-fitting costume that lets us feel okay, that dampens the terror, that allows us to make it through another long and sleepless night.
But it is never enough. It will never be enough.
The peace comes and goes. The sense that we aren’t right, that we haven’t chosen well, that perhaps we are—God, don’t say it—wrong, is an itch we can’t scratch because we don’t even know where to begin.
This is the human condition, and we wonder what Buddha meant when he said, ‘Life is suffering.’ Yes. That was tongue-in-cheek.
It’s no surprise that people are trying to end the world to escape the world. There’s no bombshell revelation needed to understand why people have convinced themselves that the planet is awakening, that a shift is happening, that there is an end in sight. Both versions are destructive, just in different ways. One way destroys life. The other tends towards elitism, capable of destroying empathy and love. Both ultimately end up in the same place.
Life is hard. It is also beautiful, poignant, heart-opening and mind-blowing, but it is almost impossible to fully experience that while you are trying to escape, while you are waiting for that moment of freedom that you’re certain is on its way, while you resist its multi-faceted magnificence with every breath.
Stop, for just a breath or two, and let that in.
Just stop.
You are safe. You are not in danger even though to your thinking mind that seems absurd. You have all the time in the world, a minute or two, or infinitely more, so lay your burdens down and simply be. Breathe. Relax. Breathe. Let your shoulders down. Breathe. Unlock your jaw. Breathe. Empty as best you can. Breathe. Let empathy fill you. Just breathe.
You are already okay. Absent the angst, your next step will simply appear.
Life has you.
Amaya is the author of 7 books, the latest Actuality: infinity at play. It is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and IngramSparks and others. Link to B&N https://bit.ly/4bXLFie
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