Just Connect to the Feeling
The title is a play on the Journey song. Though it was a massive hit, I’m not a fan of the band, nor the sentiment of the song. Don’t stop believing? What would we do if we didn’t have to believe anything?
Beliefs are things we have to squint our eyes to see. We have to force them. Beliefs are ideas. And, tho ideas can greatly affect reality, ideas are not reality. And isn’t attaching ourselves to a belief, or a belief to ourselves, clinging? Clinging often comes at the expense of alternatives. But not always. Sometimes a belief is temporary and leads us to a next stage of development.
But sometimes they become solid and last throughout our lives. We lug them around, even when they’ve become obsolete. They have such gravity they tend to warp what we see, bending reality to their particular point of view. For instance, many people hold strong spiritual beliefs that place our nuanced reality in black and white terms. This offers a great deal of certainty. I sometimes envy that. When I feel overwhelmed, it would be comforting to find such surety. Surety in what? People fill the tabernacle with song and praise, but are any two people of those people believing the same thing?
It seems to me that each of us has an inner life informed by our particular experiences. Beyond that, there is so much we do not understand. Yet we always seem to need to know something. If we can force ourselves into believing something that many other people believe along with us, we feel comforted and strong. And if we believe our belief is right, we are often inclined to define that by believing someone else is wrong.
We may even come to believe they are a threat to our belief. In this way, we turn the whole world with its colors and dynamics into a binary contention.
When we meet the world with inquisitiveness, we open ourselves to discovery. But all too often anxiety causes us to clamp down on belief with white-knuckled tenacity. We find it reassuring to be certain about something. In doing so, we cease discovering. We believe something is true and therefore imagine we have found something. That something becomes a fixed reference point.
A path of discovery is an open system. Once we decide something is absolutely real and true, we begin to close the system.
Buddhism speaks of “non-dual” experience. This is to say that subjective experience is inseparable from, and concurrent with, external phenomena. Seeing a waterfall is an experience that happens in the mind as it happens in the space before us.
If we believe the waterfall is self-existing and imbued with magical properties, we might conclude that the sound of falling water is speaking directly to us. We might align ourselves with others who hear these magical utterances and accept them as real. As we fixate on the experience, we may fail to notice how loneliness, longing, or need is shaping our faith.
There is nothing wrong with hearing the poetry of a waterfall or experiencing it as healing. But turning that into a universal truth may be an attempt to make ourselves feel important. When Buddhists speak of emptiness, they are not denying the existence of the waterfall. They are questioning the solidity of the mental interpretations and elaborations that arise between the waterfall and our direct experience of it.
The mind is very busy. Meditation trains it to rest on one thing while allowing everything else to unfold around it. We hear the waterfall and feel healed. But when we immediately reach for our phones, searching for likes and validation, we may be turning the experience into a commodity.
It seems we often lack the confidence to let life be what it is without turning it into something larger than necessary. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche often said, “NBD” — no big deal. Perhaps we make events feel significant so that we can feel significant. When others feel the same thing, the experience can become euphoric. And that can feel wonderful and life-affirming.
But euphoria is not reality. It is a temporary hijacking of the senses, including our higher mental faculties. Falling in love is so powerful that it has inspired centuries of poetry and music. It can be spiritually transformative. Yet transformation, by definition, is temporary.
Relationships that endure allow the feeling of falling in love to become something else. If the bond is strong, it may evolve through many creative forms. The Beatles eventually stopped writing love songs. As disappointing as that may have been for some listeners, it gave them the freedom to explore a much broader creative landscape.
And at some point, of course, the dream was over.
What do we do then?
Shorn of belief, we’re left with ourselves. With our experience. And our life does need not be explained, apologized for, fixed, aggrandized or diminished. Perhaps that has been the point all along. Not to believe, but to simply feel. To experience life directly before rushing to explain it, own it, or turn it into certainty. It will never be certain. Yet, the waterfall still falls. The heart still breaks. Love still comes and goes. Joy still visits. Grief still teaches.
Life continues to unfold whether we understand it or not.
Maybe our task is not to arrive at certainty, but to remain open to the mystery.