Believing
I am watching this show on HBO where the characters are caught in crisis after crisis and are repeatedly requested to come to believe…in something, anything really. Something other than themselves…their pain, their addictions, their trauma. Most of them can’t, they just keep repeating the cycle doing more damage to themselves and others daily. I can so relate…
I have been there and still go there sometimes. Circling the drain of my own great ideas…ideas that have only always kept me perpetually stuck and lost.
I woke up at 2:37 this morning. Fucking time change. Why can’t we just leave the time alone? Why is it ok for the government to manipulate time twice a year? Why do we tolerate this? It rocks my world every year and I resent it…
Wow, got a little off topic there…
Anyway I couldn’t sleep so I was watching the show until my alarm went off this morning. The last episode has a character leaving rehab to go party with a couple of other rehab buddies. The two he goes with just continue the party doing all the things that they were busy doing before they got to rehab. But this guy returns to the facility and isn’t found out because his roommate lies for him. And something changes in him. He has been resistant up until then, holding everyone and everything in contempt. He won’t participate in group, laughs at the silly things the other are doing and saying. Basically he is an ass in every sense of the word. But then after a night long bender, he wakes to a new consciousness…why does this happen? How do we go from non-believer to believer in what seems to be an instant?
For me, it has been an evolution. It has taken years, decades even. But here I am writing this at 4:34 on a Wednesday and if there is one thing I know for sure, I believe. I am not even sure what it is that I believe in. God is an easy word. Spirit works also. Benevolence and Goodness are also great. I guess that is where I have landed, is that it matters less what I call it and more that I just believe in some power that is greater than me operating for the good of all sentient beings….always. Not just when I am good or doing what I am supposed to, but always, like all the time. Even the “bad” shit that goes down is ok, because I can take my turn so that someone else doesn’t have too many turns in the shitstorm. Or because I keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again…so I keep getting the same lesson until I learn it.
Regardless of whether I am raking it in or on the verge of losing it all, and believe me I have been to both of those extremes far more often than my ego would like me to admit, I believe.
What happens in a person’s life that causes them to move from staunch non-believer to believer? I think it is pain, trauma, illness, tragedy, love, kindness, faith…but really after all that is done, I think we believe because life feels more purposeful, more manageable, more ours when we believe that we are cared for deeply by something. For me, it is this being cared for deeply that has allowed me to develop my own ability to care deeply for others. I had to believe first in something that I couldn’t see, touch, or taste, before I could believe in anyone or anything else, including myself.
I remember very distinctly where I was the first time I heard God’s voice or Divinity or whatever you want to call it. It was clear, almost silent and resonated truth. It wasn’t some profundity or even really all that deep…it was just a clear message that I was never, ever going to make it in this life so long as I kept doing the same thing, while believing that I would end up with some different result. I have no idea why that day I heard the truth and even less of an idea why I began to blindly, if somewhat haltingly, follow it. I just know that is the day that I began to believe…and my life has never been the same.
Today I believe and I can’t really remember life without it. I can’t even really remember who I was before. I am so changed by this desire to believe and in my seeking of truth on the path. It has consumed and altered my life forever. And what struck me this morning is that all I had to do was get out of my own way. That was the only thing that ever stopped me before, me being in the way. Too much of what I thought, what I hated, what I resisted. Too much me. And I guess that is my ultimate conclusion today: that all of us must remove ourselves from our own way to come to know any belief other than the one that our head’s conjure. Believing is simple when I remove myself from thinking that I know things, that I am capable of things. I am really only an instrument and until I saw that, I was limited by my own delusions.
Today I believe in Spirit. And in that belief, I have learned to believe in myself and you. I am not sure how it happened, I just know that it has. And I also know that my life is so much greater for the effort and belief.
