Receiving the Gift of Life

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Wherever we go in our life, whatever we do, no matter how far we travel, we must always remember that we are not separate from nature. Nature is our being. When we rest in being it is the expression of our nature. Somehow, someway, for some reason, human beings have gotten too far ahead of themselves. I always say: “If you get too far ahead of yourself, you will have a hard time catching up.”

We can make wild, tremendous advances technologically, in our humanity, but if some other things don't catch up, it's rocky, it’s wonky, it’s difficult; it’s not stable and not sustainable.

All throughout the ages, the masters have always tried to remind us of what is important, where our values lie, what our virtues are, and what it is like to live a virtuous life. And they've sought to remind us of who we are and what we are with the age-old questions: Who am I? What am I? What am I doing here? What is all of this? Where does it all come from and where does it all go?

Because if we're not careful, we won't ask ourselves those questions, and we will just become another brick in the wall, as they say. Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”. And it is so, if we don’t live our life, a life unlived is a very sad thing. Because what we've been given is a gift, an opportunity. And a gift that is not opened is not a gift. A life without meaning is meaningless. 

This gift that we've been given, at the end of the day, we have to give it back, so it's only on loan. So, this life is something to take care of, to be kind towards, and cultivate a kind attitude towards because it is a very fragile thing, it is a very delicate thing. We think that we have a life and that it is our life to do with what we please. But we can also challenge that thinking and go the opposite route and say, life has us and life will do with us it pleases. Somehow, that finds its way closer to the truth. 

Yet, somehow we find that we want to conquer the world instead, to dominate nature and build larger-than-the-sky empires to other planets. But if we forget who has real dominion in the universe, if we forget what the true power in the universe is, then we are just playing a fool's game; we are just children making a mess. You don't have to look far to see the mess that we make. You don't have to look far to see the suffering of humans, the suffering that ensues when we stray far from what we are, when we don't ask what we are, when we don't look towards life, when we don't let life live through us, when we think we have life and we think that life is something that we get to decide how it is. When we let others decide how it is for us and we follow along, sooner or later we realise that we've wasted a very precious gift. 

So, you don't have to look far to see the sickness in humanity, to see the sickness in the mind of humanity, in all continents today. When the Europeans came to North America for the first time, the natives said they had a disease. And it's a very rare disease. The natives, the medicine people, knew this disease and could recognize it. They said it is a disease of the mind that makes the Europeans, the Westerners, feel like they are separate from each other, separate from Earth, from nature, from the universe. It is called Wetiko. And because of this mind-virus, they seek to conquer, they destroy, they seek to compete and compare, they are filled with greed. And maybe they are right; maybe there is a hereditary ancestral mental virus that exists in civilization, that has us on an unstoppable imperial treadmill, always reaching for something more, always looking for something greater, always trying to be better than somebody else, always feeling less when we compare ourselves, never quite having enough, never quite being satisfied. 

This is not a new predicament. This is exactly what the Buddha spoke about when he laid out the Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is the existence of suffering or dukkha. And dukkha is this: dissatisfaction that we can never quite feel contentment, that we can never sit still, that it is never enough. So, the translation of dukkha is never really being satisfied. We want to understand peace, to feel at home in the world, to truly find rest but we are restless and by this we are arrested.

And so we have this inner anxiety—this compulsion that always needs, that always wants—and because of that restlessness, we have recklessness. An old friend, Peter Hunt, has a wonderful song that sings, “One step at a time is a step in the right direction”. The first step is awareness. It is to recognize that, throughout life, we are subject to old age, sickness, and death. And nobody is exempt from that. Because of that we spend our lives running away from it, pretending like it won't happen. And it leads us in all sorts of confused directions. So, the first step is not just to say, "Oh, love and light and wonderful, beautiful things" and wish it away, but to recognize the suffering, to acknowledge it. Because when you bring light to the darkness, it doesn't matter how old the darkness is, it doesn't matter how long the darkness has been there. When you bring light to it, the light changes it, and the darkness runs away, it flees.

With the acknowledgment of the difficulty of the human condition comes the embracing of it. Because things don't get better unless we embrace them, acknowledge, accept and allow them. As long as we fight fire with fire, we burn the house down. As long as we cast stones, we fail to realise that we live in a glass house.

So, you can never fight the war. The way to transform is by loving. What the masters have taught us is through forgiveness, through compassion, we can love what is difficult; we can love what is unloved. In our society, when people are challenged, we put them in solitary confinement, we isolate them, we throw them in jail, in prisons, and institutions. When people are crying out for community, crying out for love, crying out for help, we isolate them. We hide them because we don't want to see it, because it frightens us, because we know that it's a part of us.

If we want to rehabilitate our minds, our bodies, our families, and our friends, it first begins with opening our hearts. Because all of those things that are so painful close the door of our hearts. And as long as the door of our heart is closed, we cannot find the compassion, the forgiveness, the acceptance to transform the suffering. As long as we close our hearts, we deny that suffering and thus live in it, unknown to ourselves.

The difficult thing is to be open, out in the open. In our history, our survival mechanism has told us that being open in the open is dangerous because predators might prey on us. But now, as human beings, we don't have so many things that jump out at us from the bushes—nothing is under our bed.

And so, once upon a time, we had to close our hearts to survive. We had to round our shoulders like cavemen and have a big, strong rib cage to protect our most vital life force. Thus, opening the heart is not just a spiritual idea but also a physical, physiological, and psychological opening, making us vulnerable and open in the open, despite our ancestors' warnings that it isn’t safe. 

To be open in the open is to ask the question: Where is the source of your life? What is your life force? What is this gift that you've been given? What is this love inside of your heart? What is this compassion that is a healing balm to suffering? What is this joy, and why does a smile touch my lips when I see the laughter of a child? Because if we close our hearts, we don't get to feel those things. And so the first step is to recognize the elephant in the room of humanity and to love it anyway. We must not be confused about confusion but clear with clarity. Ask for love and strength to be a human being.

If you can, at some point in your life, evoke enough inside of you to never, ever lose faith in humanity, that would be a big sentiment. Not a small testament. No matter how sick and twisted and deranged, how much war, how much greed, how much hatred exists, that somehow you know somewhere inside of the human being, of the human heart, there is goodness, there is light, there is beauty, there is nature. So, if you want to take good medicine, a good medicine to take is an unshakeable faith in the presence of Love. An unshakeable faith. That whatever comes to pass, the universe will prevail. Nature will always prevail. A human being's arrogance is no match for that, but our humility is something that can catch up to that.

So we drink this medicine that is a medicine of nature. Millions of people all around the world have taken this medicine. This medicine of nature brings us back to our own nature. And sometimes we have to do really, really hard work to get through all of the shit that we've put in front of that nature. All of the stuff that we've consumed and swallowed and believed and put on top of it. For underneath it all, when you get rid of everything that you thought you were, is your nature. It’s not the things you collected along the way but what was there all along. It’s the sound of the crickets humming through the night. 

It is the natural peace of this moment.

This peace we seek is not something we hold, but is what is there when we let go, when we stop holding. Take a moment, breathe in this peace that is in the room. Because if you know this peace, if you know where its home is, then you can invite it into your home. If you know where this peace is, then you can contribute to its harmony and you can stop adding to the confusion and the chaos of the world. Because it's so easy to go into the city and find disgust. It's so easy to get caught up in the wave. It takes a lot of strength, it takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of sophistication, to stay in the heart and to know the simplicity of love.

In the jungle, they say we just drank the spirit of the forest, the medicine of nature. If you contemplate that nature and your own nature, there's no telling the difference. Both of our lives originated from stardust here on this planet. From an asteroid that once upon a time brought hydrogen here, that created an ocean, created single-celled organisms, plants, flora and fauna, and on and on and on. So, if we go back, we see that everything is related. Everything is our brother and sister. Everything is our family. Everything is our parent. Everything is our child. If we realise this, we see that we are not just an island, that we are not compartmentalised in our minds and this feeling of isolation, of being lost, stuck, solitary, and separate, is part of the disease.

When you step outside of yourself, to be present with this presence, to feel alive with this life, to share the smile, the joy, the laughter, and also the tears of others, you expand the capacity of your heart to embrace more than you thought possible. Doyou see that? There's nothing that is separate from anything else. That’s why we return to the age-old tenet, the golden rule that is found in many of the world's wisdom traditions which says something like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or even better we could say: love your neighbour, because your neighbour is yourself.

Recognising and acknowledging this peace in the room, this quality, this calmness after the storm, this capacity that allows our hearts to open, this capacity that gives us love, compassion, and strength to carry on. To acknowledge that quality in each of us here, to breathe it in, and not just to hold it for yourself but to lend it to everything that you touch. That is the secret–you don’t hold it all to yourself. This life is a gift that we have been given, however the right thing to do with it is to constantly give it away, to be so generous with it because every minute that you have you will never get back. That also means that every minute that arrives is like never before. It is completely brand new, never before seen, never before existed. 

So when you receive the gift, you receive the wonder of life. You remember the astonishment of what it is to be alive. Some say you have to act right now, you have to really get it, you have to do it, you have to grasp it, you have to act now because now is all you have and others say do not worry, for you have all of eternity to get it right.

Wherever you are at right now, may you be blessed with this peace, may you be blessed with this life that you have been given, and may you be a blessing to that life in ways you can't even begin to imagine.

Así