Dear Community,
Last week Benjamin, in paraphrasing Alex H's teaching the week prior, said:
Even if unwholesome activity is in the mind, the key is the intervention. So we don’t try to fix the fixer or criticize the critic. We learn to trust that when holding it in mindfulness, the wholesome naturally grows and the unwholesome dissipates. We do not need to create anything new — we are surrendering, and letting be.
The words that really stood out for me in this teaching were “learn to trust.” Trust is something that is earned; people are deemed trustworthy based on their behavior. How is it we learn to trust the dharma? What do we need to experience in order to surrender and let be?
Phillip Simmons, a father, husband, and teacher who was diagnosed with ALS at age 35, wrote about his experience of letting be in his book Learning to Fall. Here’s a passage:
At its deepest levels life is not a problem but a mystery. The distinction, which I borrow from the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, is fundamental: problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. Personally, I wish I could have learned this lesson more easily...But each of us finds his or her own way to mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all of our efforts to see it as a “problem” are futile. Each of us brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over. That is all, and that is everything. We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling, and the hardest.
Do we, as Dr. Simmons suggests, need to experience something so powerful that we give up any chance of control and let it be? Or can we learn to surrender in other, less dramatic, ways? And when we do, what is it like? Mysterious? Ordinary? Neither? What is your experience?
Please join us for practice and discussion this Sunday. All are welcome. Registration and Zoom information available here.
With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight