If I want to be safe, that is, protected from the flow of life, I want to be separated from life. Yet it is precisely this feeling of separation that makes me insecure. Being safe means isolating and strengthening the ‘I’, but it is the feeling of being an isolated ‘I’ that makes me feel lonely and scared.
In other words, the more security I can get, the more I will want. To put it even more clearly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same.
The meaning of life is simply to live. It’s so clear and so obvious and so simple. And yet everyone is running around in a panic as if it is necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to understand it. Indeed, you cannot comprehend it, just as you cannot walk away with a river in a bucket. If you try to collect flowing water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand and you will always be disappointed, because in the bucket the water does not flow. To ‘have’ running water you have to let go and let it flow.
I can only seriously think about trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, when I am split into two pieces. There must be a good ‘me’ that will improve the bad ‘me’. ‘I’, who has the best intentions, will get to work with the wayward ‘I’, and the battle between the two will strongly emphasize the difference between them. Consequently, ‘I’ will feel more separated than ever, thus increasing the lonely and disconnected feelings that cause ‘me’ to behave so poorly.
Facing uncertainty still doesn’t mean you understand it. To understand it you must not face it, but be it.
The real reason why human life can be so utterly irritating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear or hunger. The madness of the matter is that when such facts are present, we spin, buzz, writhe and whirl, trying to take the “I” out of the experience. We pretend to be amoebas and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting ourselves in two.
Mental health, wholeness and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found. Just as you want to understand music, you have to listen to it. But as long as you think, ‘I’m listening to this music,’ you’re not listening.
We have created a problem for ourselves by confusing the understandable with the fixed. We think it is impossible to give meaning to life unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be comprehensible in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the changing scene. But if this means ‘giving meaning to life’, we have set ourselves the impossible task of turning changeability into stability.
The only way to give meaning to change is to dive in, move and dance along.