People ask me if it isn’t hard for me to think about leaving this place that entered my life when I was seven years old. Not really. Yes, there are some good memories and this piece of land has probably influenced my life by far more than any other single thing or person you could point to in this relative world. My father would be a close second, and this land is irretrievably intertwined with my father for good or ill.
But with all the huge birds nest of memories, intense lessons, lost loves, hard won victories, miserable defeats, sparkling moments, and tooth-gritting, endless bouts of endurance, there has been a stream of consciousness with direction, with goal, with intention and purpose and ultimate reward as far as I can make out.
A reward that is intangible and unprovable, beyond logic and reason, beyond hope and desire, beyond the goal of leaving here with some measure of compensation for sixty-seven years of captivity. And maybe that won’t happen, it remains to be seen. But my real goal at this point is letting go.
Letting go the tangibles won’t be hard. The beautiful land, the heavy investment in time and energy and money, they have pretty much been left behind already in my mind. It is the intangibles which the ego clings to that give me trouble, and this appears to be the last and most important gift that this land has to offer me.
Letting go of those things most precious to the ego would seem to be my big life lesson, and everything in my life up to now appears to have been geared toward this. It feels like a life crisis as big as any I have ever gone thru before, and it is. But this one is different in that this is the one I have to get right. I had the luxury of youth before when I walked away when things got too rough. This may be my last shot.
Anger, bitterness, pride, fear, these are all luxuries I can no longer afford, and they hang on with tooth and claw, desperate to survive, the very mechanism of survival thruout the evolutionary story from microbe to humankind. They got us here, and they are obsolete in the course of events that are unfolding before us as we speak. Tomorrow is here and I want to be part of it as much as I can. This is a hard lesson. This is the hardest lesson of all.
I have been greatly helped in all this by a man who died recently, David R. Hawkins. He was a doctor, a psychiatrist, a scientist, a philosopher, a mystic, and a teacher. He explored the vistas of spiritual enlightenment and reported back on his journeys in language understandable to Western consciousness. He is not easy to read but I believe he is far ahead of his time and has opened a way thru the apparent hopelessness of modern life, a way that both ordinary science and religion seem incapable of finding or understanding.
His last book is entitled, appropriately enough, Letting Go. It is by far the most accessible of all his books and the one I would most recommend to anyone in search of truth. His other ten books expand on his findings and can be tough going for the less than determined. As with any teacher I would recommend keeping a grain of salt handy, eating the fish and spitting out the bones.
I am convinced that the concept of letting go of the constraints of the ego is the key to success of life on Earth and the reason we are here. It is the hardest thing in the world to do and it is worth whatever it takes. It makes sense of science and religion and the teachings of the mystics thruout the ages. It shows us the way home and helps us to walk in it.
The way is hard. Sometimes I struggle in desperation and I very much need and appreciate your prayers and good thoughts and wishes, any high vibration sent my way. God is good and I intend to finish the course.