...from the Field Center...
Since the launching of the latest incarnation of the Field Center just two days ago on 04 July, with its new focus on supporting the emerging community of students and other interested parties, I had a front row seat on how some of us meet change. Almost without exception, the response was excited, appreciative, and encouraging. Then there was the occasional reaction from someone taken hostage by the sudden disappointment that a class he or she had been waiting to take was no longer available under the new order. So ensued the email exchanges of the sort one might expect—mostly involving the larger issue of change and the authority we sometimes give change to determine who we are, especially when the change is disappointing. The few students who took the time to express this disappointment are appreciated, of course; they care, and care deeply. There is, however, as the Course tells us, “no time off from our consciousness”—and it is the unexpected development, the left turn we didn’t anticipate, the stinging disappointment that seems to come out of nowhere that reveals to us our intentions, how much we’ve reclaimed our creative authority to choose who we are, and how much we’re still willing to export that authority to the world and to others.
Such moments, obviously, have enormous instructional value, provided that we’re willing to recognize and accept the instruction. When I see a student in the iron grip of contradiction, immersed in blame, busy being the effect, and demanding that the world be this or that while all the while missing his or her power to rise above, to disengage, to refuse to let any worldly prize count more than the inner pearl of alignment, I remind myself that each of us walks the path of evolving consciousness at his or her own pace, and that sometimes suffering is the only instruction we’ll accept. It’s a hard way to go, but the Particle infatuation with its will coupled with its determination to assign the world causal authority, is a formula for suffering. It is a real consolation to remember that contradiction is dialectical—that is, it contains the seeds of transcendence. Pushed far enough, the will becomes exhausted. Denied long enough, the truth becomes unavoidable. Sooner or later, we’re compelled by our very resistance to put down resistance, accept things as they are, and begin again from a place of greater willingness. It isn’t a matter of whether or not we’ll awaken from the dream of willfulness, urgency, and demand, only of when.
It’s not the things we win that make us more than we were, but the things we lose. Change always involves the proverbial doors—one closing, the other opening. How we meet change reveals our intentions, who we’re willing to be and, correspondingly, who we’re unwilling to be. Informed by practice, who we’re willing to be includes coming into relation to the world with its ever changing events as something greater than our will, while who we are unwilling to be involves refusing to allow ourselves to be hostages to the world. So we have our desire, but it doesn’t have us. Poise, acceptance, the willingness to move with rather than against—these are the unmistakable features of the practice of what we call “alignment,” that state of self-honoring that has gained the winning perspective that knows that nothing in the world is worth the selling of our soul.
At the end of the day, what we lost is far less important than how we meet the loss. There is no time off, and the lesson continues to show up until we accept it. Resistance ultimately is a failure method. To catch the moment of opportunity in the disappointment, to take the instruction and “overcome the world”—these are the nuggets of gold waiting to be panned from the river of change.
