Overwhelmed

We spend so much time inquiring about other people. We find out many things about themwho they are, how they define themselves. We discover that all of us generally define ourselves by our accomplishments, our education, our family, our nationality, our age, our health, and all kinds of things that are transient.

We are always defining ourselves

by these things that come and go.

We never step back for just a fraction of a second to see if there is something more than these things. Maybe there’s something more than my being a doctor, a waitress, a mail carrier, a teacher. Maybe there’s something more than my being a father, a husband, a wife, a mother.

Maybe there is something else.

We may not know what this something else is. But just the stopping and asking, just the acknowledgement that there might be something else is enough to begin opening our eyes.

Our minds, however, are not capable of ferreting out something that is beyond our capacity to understand. As human beings we are very arrogant to think that our minds can figure these things out. Because we have been successful in understanding so many things, we think that this is also something that can be understood by the mind. But it isn’t possible for the mind to understand and comprehend what this is.

We use some words. But even these are impossible for the mind to comprehend. What is consciousness, infinity, love, emptiness and fullness, everything and nothing? What am I? How can a mind figure out any of these things? But we are so harsh and difficult with ourselves.

The more we get involved with our spiritual search,

the more we give our minds an overwhelming task.

We give this task to our mind. We say, “Figure it out for us. Tell us what all of this is. We want to know.” And we go from place to place, from teacher to teacher, from book to book, from one set of circumstances to other sets of circumstances. We search and search trying to find the answer until eventually something happens. It is unexplainable how it happens, but something happens where we are able to say to ourselves, “I give up!”

This giving up is not a giving up in defeat. It’s not a giving up as if we’ve lost some kind of war. It’s an I-give-up meaning that I am no longer asking my mind to figure out things it cannot possibly know.

It is a surrendering

to the reality of the situation

that some things remain a mystery.

I give up into the grace of the Unknown. I give up into the Beauty and Infinity of all these things that are such a Mystery. I don’t know what they are. In my heart it really doesn’t matter what the form is, what it came from, why it is here, where it will go, or how it all started. What difference does it make?

All I know is that something is

and at the same time I am.

And whatever that something is,

I am also a part of it.

How could I be separate from That? Since I am part of That, what could possibly take place that could damage this underlying, magnificent essence of who I am?

Embracing this understanding can ease so much of the burden we carry, so much of the anxiety that we have that we are somehow separate from what we instinctively know is the Essential nature of everything.