Confusion and Clarity

When we make an attempt to cross the threshold of where we are right now and move into other experiences, a few things get mixed up. If you do not develop the necessary discrimination and balance within yourself, handling this mix-up can lead to lots of confusion. It is good if you are confused. It means you are constantly stepping into new territory. If you live with the familiar forever, there will be certainty but there will be no progress.

When you are swinging on your own trapeze, it is fine. When you let go and try to catch the other, that in-between space is terrible because you are neither here nor there. This is the predicament of people who want to explore, know, and experience other dimensions of life. They want to know the other side but they are unwilling to release themselves from the familiar even for a moment, so the struggle becomes unnecessarily long. If you let go of your trapeze and jump, the trapeze on the other side is always in place so you would catch it. But instead, if you just swing and swing, if you loosen the grip or hold it with your little finger but never let go, it is torturous.

After having made the effort to step into the unfamiliar, there is no point in stepping back into the familiar. That’s a backward step. When things get mixed up, don’t step back. If you are stepping into unfamiliar territory on a daily basis, you will always be confused. This confusion needs to be handled properly and productively, rather than becoming a self-defeating process. You just need more vision to see things clearly. The ability to see life the way it is does not come free. You have to do the necessary things to get the discrimination. It won’t happen by accident.

The next thing is to be able to clearly see what is true and what is not, not from past experiences and conditionings of life, but out of a very keen sense of discrimination. If you want to do this, first of all you should have developed a razor-like intellect so that you can cut things clean and see. If you have a blunt knife, you cannot do this. It will mess up everything. It won’t give you a vision of anything.

If you are unwilling to cut up what is familiar and see the basis of why you are inclined towards it, you will not step into the unfamiliar. Unless you begin to see the hollowness of where you are right now, you will not begin to seek something else strongly. If the longing is not strong, you will hang in between forever, in limbo. The longing will not become strong unless we open up our lives, dissect everything and see what it is; what it is worth, what it is not worth. It is not about making it meaningless. It is not about making it ridiculous. Not glorifying it, not making it filthy, just seeing everything the way it is. If you see everything the way it is, you will see there is no point in stopping in one place, you must move; this will become very clear.

If these two things are not possible, you must give yourself to activity. Simply serve whatever you see as meaningful. Or, the next possibility is you crank up your energy to such a pitch that your mind says something, your emotions say something else, but your energies are so cranked up it doesn’t matter. Your mind can be wrong, you know that. It has been wrong any number of times and it continues to be wrong, but your life energies cannot be wrong. Your life energies do not know any right and wrong. They know only life and life alone – whether it is low pitch or high pitch is the only question.