Peace In, Not Out
I never had a fantasy about Santa Claus in my childhood. Instead I cultivated a belief in his black-sheep brother, Out Clause (Santa had the surname shortened to be less ethnic). Growing up in a family where there was a lot of raging and emotional unsafety (not to mention the perceived threat of the physical kind), I created very resourceful out clauses; when things among the big people would start to feel threatening, I had methods both effective and not-so-much to get myself out of the line of fire.
The problem with the childhood fixes we develop from the limited perspective — and belief systems — of extreme youth is that they seldom age well. What may have saved my ass (or seemed to) as a kid, doesn’t translate well to an adult solution. There is no more poignant example of this than the ultimate out clause: When life hits a really bad patch, suicide seems like the fix.
This is the point in this particular conversation when silence descends with a thud of dread-full anticipation. Don’t worry — I’m not about to go into either an advocacy of suicide or a history. In fact, I’ve never tried it, or taken any practical steps in its direction. But I have periodically thought of it as the “ace in the hole” when bad patches became baaaaad; the out clause in case things became too unmanageable.
Adopting a serious spiritual thought system, along the lines of Buddhism or A Course in Miracles, makes it impossible to place any real (or fantasy) stock in the ultimate out clause any longer. When you start accepting the ramifications of these spiritual paradigms, it just stops making sense to ponder suicide. Not because you’ll “go to hell” if you do it, as some of the more strident religions would try to strong-arm your psyche with. No, it’s a little more subtle. If you take for a fact that this “Earth ride” that we’re all operating within is ultimately an illusion, and that the deeper Truth of us is a level (or three) deeper than this (as Buddhism and the Course would suggest), then how “bad” can a “bad patch” on this plane really be?
Are you still with me? I realize the “if” clause from that last sentence may have been a lot to chew on, particularly if you’ve never previously pondered the idea that the Earth ride isn’t your deepest reality. I’m not going to use this modest post to try and back up that idea; if you’re interested, you can hear more about it on the “spiritual” portion of my website (link to the right), or at my lectures in Ventura, or from Marianne Williamson or Eckhart Tolle or the Dalai Lama — or maybe by just staring at a llama for a while and realizing that all the answers don’t lie in our spinning li’l brains. As Shakespeare once said through his haunted homey Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
So I hit a pretty bad patch recently. But the things I believe in don’t really allow me to take bad-patch-ness at face value any longer . . . except when I do anyway. I won’t lie and say that the wallop of the bad patch isn’t as strong as it used to be; when I feel sideswiped by the apparent steamroller of circumstance, it still cuts deep and hard. Perhaps, however, the bounce-back time has diminished, and there has come a shift in where my home-base perspective lies. I used to be a person who believed in the drama/trauma, and entertained the idea of their unreality. Now I am a person who believes wholeheartedly in the illusory nature of the drama/trauma, and has occasional amnesia when it seems to hit a high-water mark somewhere over my perceived head.
An old friend/mentor of mine used to say, Serenity is not freedom from the storm, it’s peace amid the storm. We find so many ways to tamp down the brunt of the storm when we feel it: alcohol, sex, drugs, rock and roll, shopping, and even a worry-spiral (which seems like a valid response, but is really one of the subtler ways to stay numb). Perhaps it’s time to question the storm itself.