In October 2022, I seized a moment to take what I imagined would be a final jaunt to Asia, to explore the northern extremity of West Bengal and Sikkim, Darjeeling and back, a lesser-traveled territory of Himalayan culture. The condition of that choice was my shadowy health threat that would likely make it impossible to delay such a journey for another year, or even six months. The opportunity was now. I may have been idealistic in choosing this timing because what I encountered was a series of tests.
Throwing myself into radically different and unknown circumstances, my attachment to familiar comforts and the systems of life was tested. My physical capacity was tested. My patience and resilience, my tolerance for adversity, my western centrism, my spiritual principles, my health were all tested. But as I segued into a less challenging portion of that journey and my discomforts eased, I looked back and viewed it all as if it had been the fulfillment of some karmic destiny.
How we respond to adversity is always telling. I reminded myself that even calling it adversity is an unwarranted predisposition. After all, none of it was adversity for those living there. It was all part of the flow of life for them. I thought I was prepared for anything, but little did I know. Once I’d been there for a week, I realized I wasn’t ever able to completely relax into familiarity or expectations about anything. At the same time, realizing that brought an awakening of its own, remembering that nothing is ever guaranteed.
The sense that beyond my awareness I was being passively and progressively assimilated into Himalayan culture was inescapable. The territory stretched from Kolkata to Bagdogra to Gangtok, to the foothills of Kanchenjunga and Darjeeling and back. The unexpected and persistent deference accorded me, the odd western tourist, at every turn was a benign seduction, but I didn’t mistake it for reality. I could take refuge in the sense of being held apart, or that this was merely a temporary sojourn in an alien land and that I would soon escape back to my own alien land.
But being there was a reminder that every place is every place. All the rules and patterns of life are operative here as anywhere, only more starkly. The human drama appearing in a different disguise, forever struggling to overcome suffering, seeking permanence in small acts in a context of a universal perpetual primitive and precarious struggle against ever-advancing collapse. This place, more so than any other I had visited, embodied that drama. Impermanence was more apparent in every moment, as was devotion—because they do not exist separately and will always arise together. What other option is there? To realize the full and pervasive and immediate nature of impermanence is to awaken to the central drama of any spiritual path and to life itself.
It seems I had to encounter every extreme condition, every adversity to see the truth fresh again. On this occasion as it appears in hardscrabble lives carved out of a mountainside, the perpetual precarity, the half-completed, broken or neglected infrastructure, the innumerable near misses with death witnessed or experienced at every turn. Here, amid the virtual absence of environmental consciousness, the half-realized, humble, and entirely recognizable common aspirations of a land and people rest on some of the oldest and most enduring stories known to humanity: the absolute truth and ultimate benevolence of continuous creation and destruction. The proximity of death in every moment, in every breath. I say benevolence because it is only our limited view, being captured and entranced by the suffering that capture entails, that colors our perception of the so-called events of our lives. We remain in the sway of polarities when really, all phenomena have never been anything other than positive. In the grand sweep of time and in the micro-events of daily life, nothing happens to us.
The landscape of Sikkim is certainly different from home, where no such ancient stories permeate or temper our incessant grasping, our entitlement and hubris. There is nothing cyclic about the worldview of modernity. It’s a perpetual ascent of a pyramid of growth and the mythology of zero-sum. We’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated in a pseudo-Darwinian view that cannot come to terms with the intelligence or the benevolence of death, or even decay.
We all have our demons. They appear in different forms and under different circumstances. To imagine we will be free of them in the closing moments of life is likely to be an illusion. The Tibetans emphasize that we will die as we have lived, that whatever illusions we have carried about life (and death) and that whatever truths lurking beneath the surface have been denied will make themselves fully known as the light dims. If we have ignored the unconscious, then when we stand at death’s door, the unconscious will become our experience. And even if we are more deliberately prepared, we may still witness a grand array of apparitions arising.
We may expect either light or darkness. But there is light hidden within the darkness. Even darkness is a manifestation of the same intelligence. Are we not already meeting apparitions throughout life, especially at times of stress, each having a story and a purpose, a revealed message if we are properly attuned and open to the circumstances? And isn’t this life a story of how we meet our own monsters, whether we can learn to love them, resurrecting ourselves in negotiations with our own shadow? If we can recognize that shadow in life and not react with denial or terror, viewing these apparitions, whether benign or fierce, as manifestations of our own mind, perhaps we can discover that benevolence, even though it may arrive in the form of frightening ‘tough love.’
Peaceful and wrathful deities are operating right now in daily existence. They are our protectors, signposts of our own truth. The logic of their appearance may not always be apparent, but if we attune properly, we can discern their influence. This is not a new idea. This is a principle mentioned at the outset and repeated several times throughout beginning with the first chapter. We in the west have a limited view of what constitutes a person and because of our fascination with the individual, we have a misguided sense of personal agency. In both cases, we are ignoring the intra-activity of the inanimate with the animate, the influence of both macro and micro relationships. We reinforce the autonomy and inviolability of the self in so many ways, including imagining our very own skin separates us from ‘nature,’ all in service of being in charge of our lives. Maybe we feel some satisfaction for being able to manage a few of the variables. Yet it all comes down to grasping for permanence, living in a field of choices, believing the correct path lies within that field and that exercising discriminating control is the way through.
What if we were to suddenly realize it is all a trap? Or, as suggested in an earlier chapter, ‘What if we were to let go of the rope?’ To realize the path through that field is a life of anxiety and fear, of being constantly driven by dissatisfaction and insufficiency, and that this dissatisfaction is at its heart a denial of the essential benevolence of interruptions, diversions, and endings, including death. These forces are the dharmapalas, the spiritual protectors, the display of enticements each providing the appeal of further confusion or an opportunity to discern the nature of the only teaching, to make a choice between being reactive or fearful or to retreat into an artificial sense of security.
Each is an opportunity to relieve ourselves of suffering. And alas, not discerning the nature of such messages, we still repeatedly choose our own suffering, especially in the very act of resisting it. The end of seeking becomes the end of suffering because it heralds the end of the seeker himself. It is a surrender to faith. Otherwise, we are needlessly recreating suffering in every moment, mostly without even realizing it. We become lost in self-reinforcing cycles of disconnection, fear, and self-defeat. Instead, every breath becomes an act of faith, an act of trust and surrender, a recognition of the essential benevolence and uncompromising integrity of natural cycles, that life is always giving, even as it appears to be taking away. Life’s essential abundance is undiminished by any act, any loss, even any tragedy.
Writing these chapters has been like walking many paths to the same destination. I probably thought I was writing about different topics, but now that the whole comes into view, a moment at which I questioned whether I would ever arrive, I can take a backwards glance and see that I was always addressing the same issues from different angles. I was heading into the paradox of the micro view of every challenge as well as a vast view of the perpetual completeness of Being. Inhale the former, exhale the latter.
We’re all heading to that same place by different paths and according to different schedules. We are at the same place already. The image of perpetually living on an edge, being that edge, returns again and again, elaborating the congruence of appearance and emptiness. The paradox is not one of either getting there or being there, but of being both, simultaneously and perpetually, having no destination, living on a Möbius strip of arising and disappearing. Where do I stop and where does the world begin?
We are all engaged in the same project, feeling our way along, each of us one of the blind, ultimately destined to visualize the whole. But in life, it is a rare moment to witness a resolution of appearance and emptiness, en-tango-ed as they are. At least that is the extent to which our conceptual apparatus can grasp the paradox. Noting this, every step now becomes an act of surrender, of trust, an act of faith.
The idea of surrender brings us closer to experiencing things as they really are. Contemplating surrender, we see ourselves in a very open space. We can truly relax. I’m not speaking of garden variety situational surrender. I’m referring to a deliberate descent into an absolute space of unconditional compassion which lies at the heart of all we know, like walking into a river, step by step, sinking ever deeper until we are swept away into something much bigger than we can ever imagine.
All effort and fear can now be released. All knowing can be forgotten. All striving dissipates into a fog. The illusion of progress is fully revealed. Surrender is the only option, which is not so much an act of choice. It is an act of stepping completely out of the field of choice. If we can cultivate that knowing and learn to return to that space, what do we find there? I’m not speaking about resignation or collapse or helplessness. I’m speaking of fully opening to life itself. In surrender, whoever we imagine we are, all the complications and baggage and story we’ve accumulated and carried around for a lifetime dissolve into an essential wisdom. We come closer to connecting with the wisdom that bore us into this world.
In surrender, imagine how you might feel as you effortlessly slip deeper into the enveloping embrace of compassion in the form of whatever your terminal condition might be. We all have already been diagnosed with a terminal condition, after all. Realizing this, perhaps we will open to the nature of life itself as the incomparable, dynamic, and bewildering ongoing play of compassion. Imagine every disappointment, every celebration, every completion or incompletion, every obstacle, every triumph or failure, every emotion, every beautiful and painful moment of this life is and has only ever been the play compassion, of love making itself known in the form of joy and sadness. We could include every loss as well. Every life is the play of compassion in the world.
At the end of seeking, there are no more topics to put under a microscope of reason, no more controversies to debate, no more conclusions to be carefully wrapped and tied up in a bow. There are no further antidotes to layer upon ego or that even make sense. To continue indulging in such things is an avoidance of the truth. To surrender is to approach this quality of knowing. We were born in compassion. We live by compassion alone. And one day we will be swept away into compassion.
I have described myself as a pilgrim. That has meant exploring the frontier of our senses, of consciousness. Maybe there has been a question of self-indulgence or even a version of neurosis. To suggest I’ve reached the end of seeking, a zone of comfort within all paradox, may be a delusion or it may be the sanest moment I’ve ever experienced. It is to realize that striving and rest, presence and absence, story and the end of story, self, and not-self, every apparent polarity which captures our attention drawing us back into the whirlpool of choice are not polarities at all. They are finally exhausted. There is nothing left to be unearthed, processed, or accomplished. Complete escape—or resolution--has always been accessible, a subtle instant away.
We are in a continuous encounter with messages from the infinite, arriving from many directions, impinging on us in subtle ways. To imagine we can ignore them or overlook their importance, the role they play in revelation, always directing us to greater openness, is to deny our very nature and the truth of this life. If that isn’t enough motivation to realize global forgiveness and compassion, I don’t know what is. Despite all our struggles, temporary confusion, self-delusion or the seemingly endless search for remedies, release is always as close as the next breath.