…to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
That’s what we humans are mostly doing, living unskillfully. Ancient religions point to it. The Hindus call it the veil of delusion or maya. The Buddhists refer to dukkha, the suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery that is part of the human condition.
And then there’s sin, referenced in the Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths. Eckhart’s translation is quite different than what I think of as sin.
…to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
Sigh. What a different way of thinking of the that word! To miss the mark feels so much more forgiving than the Christianity I grew up with (Catholic in the Bible belt of the US). This feels more like a way to learn, not a reason to feel guilty and unworthy.
I believe many religious/spiritual beliefs have good intentions, but get caught up in that collective ego/dysfunction, and become blinded by righteousness, hierarchy, and superiority. This creates us and them, the very opposite of the peace and love that they supposedly stand for.
Our minds are deluded and wonderful, a curse and a gift. Whether you see intellect as a gift from God, merely as a product of our evolution, or a bit of both, you can see how our amazing intelligence manifests into so much good and so much evil.
Eckhart speaks about how, on a large scale our intelligence has brought about radical changes that improve our lives, allowing us to live longer, to be healthier, to tap into our creativity in new ways and more. While true, I think our ego mind doesn’t allow us to reap the benefits. All this is supposed to make us happier, but rather, we seem to be getting busier, supposedly able to do more of what we want, but when combined with a buzzy busy mind, the result is not happiness, but instead dukkha, that unsatisfactoriness and misery. We are weary from living like this.
Our collective intelligence has had horrific effects. More death of humans is inflicted by other humans than by natural disasters. Look at the 20th century; world wars and genocide. Or just watch the news to see how we are killing each other and poisoning our planet, driven by greed for what? Oh, right, my money, my power, and my profits over yours. It’s just business, right?
We forget, or for some perhaps never had the chance to even conceive that we are one, all connected, a single “body” of life on this planet, so that as we kill other people or cause death of parts of the planet we are killing off parts of ourselves, amputating something we think unimportant, only because we’ve not taken the time to get to know it.
I teach yoga and spend what perhaps is, to my students, a surprisingly large amount of time on stretching and strengthening the feet and especially the toes. Uhm, the toes? Why? Well, try walking or balancing without them. We don’t tend to think about our feet in general until they hurt or aren’t working like we want. We tend to take them for granted, abuse them, and push them into shoes that do nothing to make walking/standing easier, and then wonder why they ache.
This is how we treat other people we don’t know or understand and how we treat the resources of the planet. We expect them to always be there to do our bidding in the way that we want it, and when they complain, we often ignore or tell them to shut up. It doesn’t work in body, nor with existence on earth.
And it for sure doesn’t work in relationships. The fear and need to control that we operate with are not real. We wear them like protection but they don’t work.
Fear, greed, and the desire for power…bring about a distortion in your perception of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled.
But, Eckhart reminds us, the fear, need for power, etc. are symptoms of the dysfunction within. And this is the crux of this book. To learn how to release this deep seated dysfunction isn’t about changing habits; it isn’t about doing at all. It requires a shift in our way of being.
It reminds me of balancing, something else we practice a lot in my yoga classes. I remind my students that balance isn’t something you achieve and hold on to. Rather it requires awareness, constant adjustment, and acceptance of the moment as it is. So for me, with the lingerings of an ankle injury, it looks quite wobbly on one leg and I usually have to stand close to a wall or something for support. And that’s okay.
When we practice balance I remind my students (and myself) that it isn’t about control, but actually, a gentle willingness to embrace what is and adjust. It’s about receiving the balance as well as doing it. I think that in this book, Eckhart is inviting us to receive balance. He offers us a way to learn how to balance.
And, he reminds us that we don’t get there by trying to become better.
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.
It’s an unwrapping what is already there. What a gift. 🙏🏼
Speaking of gifts, thank you for being here with me. Share if you feel the urge. Maybe it’s your inner wisdom speaking. シ
It’s so lovely to hear his words. Thank you.