Like a psychology teacher, she gives public talks on treating sorrow. Every conflict is a growth moment if we allow it; every enemy is an ally in disguise. Her implication is that life is a war, a struggle, and that is a good thing because it is through conflict resolution that we grow spiritually. This teaching is not uniquely hers. It is a hand-me-down stitched up and re-gifted through the ages. But is it true?
It is true for you if you have resigned yourself to the push/pull of opposites—the prison rules of psychological time. When we talk states like joy and sorrow, we think we need one to understand the other. We assume we need release from sorrow to feel immense, washing joy as a relief. Conflict… realization… resolution. But is that so? Does deliverance from one to the other have to be a perpetual motion in our lives, or is this a broken, mechanical outcome of thought trying to capture the timeless?
Timelessness has no opposite. It’s tempting to say that time is the opposite of timelessness, but, actually, time is included within timelessness. Time is an aspect of the timeless.
True deliverance, then, is from thought as time to the timeless. The timeless encompasses time whether or not you in-and-as time know it, believe it, or act on it in the hope that your action is of the timeless.
In blindness to timelessness, we self-identify as time. Thought is absorbed with itself and because this is a partial state masquerading as the whole, it is a lie. You are a lie. And so Truth comes a knocking at every moment, but the state of lying turns the wakeup call into another of its falsehoods.
The call to transform right this instant out of conflict—out of psychological time—to the state that has no opposite goes ignored. We muffle the sound and mask it with our own call: the call to slowly, creepingly, get-there-when-I-get-there wake through time as an “evolution” of self. Our fuse is lit by the promise of discoveries that will better us. The reward system of finding joy in sorrow propels us. But when we examine sorrow as if it is separate from us, a state we wallow in and get delivered from, we become our warden. We don’t realize it but our running toward discoveries is merely the delusion of betterment we’re dreaming up as we bang our head against the cage door.
We keep ourselves locked away from true deliverance every second of every day.