What’s The Secret?

What’s The Secret?

I have just returned from ten blessed, restful, de-lightfull days with my dear old ashram friend and mentor, Baba Ram Dass, at his home on Maui, a truly magical and healing place. Spending time with RD is awe-inspiring. Every moment of enlightened conversation or carefree laughter, dinnertime meditation or sacred chanting, opens up new worlds. Memory-making, I cherished and filed away an abundant array of happiness data as well as stories and teaching tales from the Great Path.

Spending time with this realized spirit allows me an opportunity to “see” and be more clearly. As I head into the tail-end of my life, and watch many of those close to me either struggle with health issues or pass on all too quickly, life becomes more obviously a gift, day to day as well as moment to moment. How can I forget and fall into thinking of this grace-full life like more of a chore than a joy? Why see it as an existential burden or wearisome, as one may very well feel sometimes when afflicted with various travails physical, mental, spiritual, socio-political and otherwise? Personally, I try to focus on the ¾ of the glass that’s full rather than the half that’s empty. Sure, my years of meditative practice have paved the way towards appreciating this. But I tend to think it’s more about the unbroken wholeness and underlying interconnected oneness and interbeing in the ever-flowing present, the great Flow, the tao. We need to let it flow and let it go. Grasping too tightly to evanescent things passing thru the fingers just gives us rope burn!

Profound teachings sometimes how up in unlikely places. My dear friend and long-time dedicated Dzogchen student, Dr. David Sugarman, who is dealing with the later stages of a terminal illness, recently shared with me this very thoughtful piece from Elmore Leonard’s novel “The Hunted” as an example of that venerable genre. Leonard (“Get Shorty”, etc.) is a master of mystery fiction whose superb dialogue creates memorable characters. In this scene the character, Rosen, has been shot and realizes he may be dying.

He had finally made it.  It had taken him fifty years to learn that being was the important thing.  Not being something.  Just being.  Looking around you and knowing you were just being, not preparing for anything.  That was a long time to earn something.  He should have known about it when he was seven, but nobody had told him.  The only thing they had told him was that he had to be something.  See if he had been told it then, he’d have had all that time to enjoy being.  Except it doesn’t have to do with time, he thought.  Being is an hour, or a minute, or a moment.”

The secret of letting go is letting things come (arise) and go, and letting be.  That’s the Secret. Catch and release; nothing’s big enough to hold onto for too long.