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Letting Go

Look fear in the face and it will flee from you.
--Sr Yukteswar Giri
Life today is an art form. With all the changes coming at us, the art is deciding when and where we can make a difference. It’s a matter of balancing making things happen and letting things happen.

Societally, we’re way over on the making side. We don’t know much about surrender. But if you’re like me, a quick retrospective of your life reveals that many of the good things that happened for you happened without your efforting. It’s not that you didn’t earn them or deserve them, you just didn’t have a lot to do with their coming about. Knowing when and how to let go is a valuable thing to have in your tool kit.

Letting go may seem like the very opposite of doing something, but it can be a bear sometimes. I was in a ropes course in the California mountains and was relishing all the exercises--until we got to the Rappelling Station. I'd seen people do this before and was anxious to try it. Dangling by a rope, pushing off the rocks and dropping fifty feet, swinging in to the face, then pushing off and dropping again--what could be easier?

When it was my turn and I was all harnessed in, I went to the edge of the sheer cliff leaned out over it backwards and looked down between my legs at the treetops hundreds of feet below. The instructor said, "Let go." I nodded my head in agreement, knowing it was safe to do so. But my hands were frozen around the safety rope. They plainly had a mind of their own and were saying, ‘Are you crazy?’ The coach said, ‘Are you scared?’ I nodded vigorously. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Watch it all the way down.’ Somehow it was all right then to take that fear along with me. I jumped--and had the time of my life rappelling down. When I got to the bottom, I wanted to do it again!

Letting go is a skill I would recommend in these times. Sure, it’s counter-intuitive and scary, but when your mind’s been tied up in a knot it can be very freeing. The real skill from my experience, though, is about handling fear. Don’t look away. Acknowledge it fully. “Watch it all the way down.”

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Everything is Already

Sometimes things are so there for us that we don’t perceive their existence. They’re so so for us that we don’t think to question their existence or their origin. For instance, did you ever wonder where thoughts come from? Chances are you haven’t. If you’re like most people you perceive yourself as a thinker, and think of thoughts as being generated by your mind.

But what if thoughts came to us from a pre-existing state? What if they’re not mind- generated events, but rather are floating in the intangible ether, waiting to be grasped by ready minds? The great Indian sage Paramahansa Yogananda taught that every thought has a particular vibration, and that it is already out there. Just as we find a radio station by turning the dial on a receiver, “getting” an idea is simply tuning in to its frequency.

If you watch your mind for a while, you’ll see that you are, indeed, not choosing the thoughts that come to you; your mind is simply allowing them entrance. Try this for a moment: make yourself a mind-observer by dis-identifying a part of your awareness from your thought stream. Watching dispassionately as one after another thought-event floats by, you can notice how they are hooked up into threads, one idea suggesting another or inducing an image or memory-thought.

A digital designer using Photoshop treats pieces of text as objects that can be moved around, shaped and sized on a screen in the same way as pictures. Watching your thoughts as objects that are “not you” is more than a mental trick. If you can train yourself to do it, you’re practicing a high degree of detachment. No longer seeing your ideas and opinions as yourself, you can hold them as perceptions apart from you. When someone else disagrees with them, instead of defending them you can listen and seek mutual understanding in a calm manner.

You can even go farther and play around with mind-sets, reframing at will until you find ways of perceiving that are consistent with your perceived values. This makes you a truly self-evolving thinker, the shaper of your own destiny.
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The Magic Glasses

A friend introduced me to a man she said was a very wise person, and then left us alone. I was not impressed by the stranger. For one thing, he had an attitude. (I can always tell when someone has an attitude.) Besides, I didn’t like the way his ears stuck out.

As we shook hands, he said, “Why are you crying?”

“Me? I’m not crying,” I said.

“Not on the outside, but on the inside you are crying.”

My heart suddenly opened and I spoke without thinking. “I’m sad because I can’t stop judging people. It hurts.”

The VWP reached into his pocket and drew out a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. He handed them to me and gestured for me to put them on. When I did, I was dazzled by his beauty. Gorgeous light seemed to be pouring from his chest. I was speechless. He had seemed so ordinary before. Now he was the very embodiment of beauty.

He told me the glasses were mine to use, but that after a certain number of hours they would vanish. Then he walked away.

Having those glasses changed me. Everyone I looked at was radiantly beautiful. It was like I was falling in love with everyone. I still could not speak, so awe-struck was I by the beauteous light that glowed from each person I saw.

Then, suddenly, the glasses disappeared. People were back to normal. There again in plain view were all their faults and unpleasant traits and actions. I was shocked. I wanted those glasses back, for now my judgment brought me actual pain. I was sad for a long time. Then one day I met the VWP again.

“I wish you had never given me those glasses!” I raged. “They just covered up what people are really like.”

“You are wrong, my friend,” he said. “You were given a great gift, for the glasses showed you the actual truth of each person. Far from embellishing, they revealed the hidden gem within each which is the soul.”

Now I am working to train myself to look at people as if I have the glasses on.

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Smile Through Me

“I did not write it. It wrote me.” In such words, frequently used by writers, poets and musicians, is captured the secret of creativity. Humans do not create, they respond. Whether it be in words, musical notes, paint strokes, dance steps, skyscrapers or solutions, creativity is always a matter of finding and re-arranging.

O life is sweet, and death a dream
When Thy song flows through me.

These words of a chant by Yogananda remind us that there is a melody ready—and just aching—to push itself through each one of us. Our job is to stand out of the way. Jazz musician Izaak Ibrahim said it: “I am not the player; I am played.” When we allow ourselves to become Its music, beauty enters the world again.

It’s not that the instrument is unimportant. When one allows that secret theme to be expressed through oneself, the product is always unique. Just as each reed flute has its own resonance, each of our bodies, minds, characters and personalities shape the song. Creativity comes in all forms and specialties. It can be in the way you are with animals, the way you make people laugh, the way you bake cookies—anything. I have a friend who possesses a talent for seeing what people need before they do. Her solutions amaze them, for they are always elegantly correct.

“Oh, I’m not creative!” This oft-heard comment is like a cork in a bottle, a plug in a faucet, that merely results in stoppage, for which the world is poorer. We are here to add, not subtract. We cannot help but create. If we are alive, each of us is a song, a smile, a story. Each day awaits the unfoldment of that gift.



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Winks

Right after it happened, I looked up to find an old man at a nearby table looking at me with a knowing smile. I looked away, but he spoke.

“Are you paying attention?”

“Sir,” I said, “I have no idea—“

“Where I come from, they call ‘em Winks.” (I swear, when he said the word, it was capitalized.)

Then I knew that, incredibly, he had tuned into that serendipitous moment when, thinking sadly of my recently dead parents, I heard pouring over the restaurant speakers the words and melody of their favorite love song.

“It was only a coincidence,” I began, but his hand came up like a traffic cop’s signaling STOP.

“Where Winks are concerned,” he said gravely, “there are no ‘onlies’. After all, they’re not called Winks for nothin’.”

I sat gazing out the window for a minute. When I looked back, he was gone. As I left the café to join the sidewalk traffic, a woman’s eyes met mine for an instant. She reminded me of Carolyn, an old girlfriend. As she passed, I saw a large C embroidered on her jacket. Marveling at that, I thought of the old man again—and just then a car passed; it had the license plate PAY-ATTN.

From then on, the Winks have continued to come. Now I look for them, for I have come to relish the deep feeling of belonging that permeates a world that had been strange and alien to me before.

My limited research shows that if you are looking for Winks you get more of them. So believe in little miracles. They are happening all around you.

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A Different Way of Knowing

Once when I was consulting with the staff of a Navajo school I would sometimes see an old Indian man striding implacably across the desert. With his wrinkled face and flowing white hair he looked the very picture of a seer. I asked my teacher friend Calvin about him. “That’s John Whitehorse,” Calvin said. “There are many stories about him.”

“Tell me one,” I said. Calvin thought a moment, then told me: “My cousin’s driving to town one day and comes across John Whitehorse. He stops and asks him if he wants a ride. ‘No thanks,” the old man says, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ My cousin drives on, and a mile down the road he has a flat. He gets out to change it, only to find his spare tire is flat, too! He sits down to wait. Pretty soon here comes John Whitehorse, walking straight on by without a word. Hours later when my cousin gets to town the old man is long gone.”

How did the old man know? Whatever he had, we could really use the skill in our lives and work. Things are moving so fast we need a whole new way of learning things. That new way would need to meet the following criteria:

• It would not rely on sensory data from which to draw inferences.
• It would look beyond outside facts as being too small and short-lived.
• It would transcend temporal and spatial limits.

The only kind of learning that fulfills these criteria is learning by intuition. Most of us have flashes of intuition but have never learned to trust and train this inner way of knowing. Yet more and more business articles are focusing on the need for leaders and organizations to develop intuition in order to respond quickly and effectively to rapid changes.

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that most of us have formed a lifelong habit of trusting exclusively in one way of knowing--inferring from sensory data. The good news is that we do have what John Whitehorse had. Far from something outside us that must be added, it is a “sleeping giant” within us, a hidden source of wisdom just waiting to be tapped.

Nature of Intuition
What is intuition? In his Autobiography of A Yogi, the great Indian teacher Paramahansa Yogananda wrote:

Intuition is that directly perceiving faculty of the soul that at once knows the truth about anything, requiring no medium of sense experience or reason. It does not consist in believing a thing, but in knowing it directly and unmistakably. It does not contradict. It is always supported by a right sense of perception, reason, and inference, although it does not depend upon any data whatsoever offered by the senses or the mind. A real intuition can never be wrong. Everyone possesses this quality more or less. Like any faculty, it must be cultivated.

That last phrase--”it must be cultivated”--is the kicker. Most of us are so focused on data perceived by way of the senses that we tend to mistrust what comes to us any other way. This means we miss the inner signals when they are there.

The only way to train ourselves to tune in to these signals is to do what John Whitehorse obviously had done: undertake a long-term project of self-study and perceptual tinkering. We must train ourselves to recognize the ways intuition signals us. Each of us is different, so each must train him/herself to identify the particular pathways by which this hidden knowing comes to us. This tuning-in cannot be done while we are hurrying and scurrying. We must learn to create, grab, or steal opportunities to be quiet and “inquire within.”

Some Guidelines

• Seek solitude
The world will not give you this; you have to value alone-time enough to carve it out for yourself. Without periods of interiorized reflection, your mind remains in a constant state of restlessness.

• Develop calmness
The scripture says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The more still you become, the better you can tune in with the Source.

• Learn to meditate
Saints and sages over millennia have claimed that meditation is the only way to train the intuition. “Meditation,” someone has said, “is the only way to get out of your movie, and realize that it is a movie.”

• Keep attention on the heart.
Intuition, Yogananda taught, is perceived mostly through the heart. Whenever you are concerned about something, or trying to find the right course to pursue, calmly concentrate on the region of the heart.

• Question reality.
The enemy of intuition is the ego. By being willing to give up our “sure things” and be guided by some other way which we’ve not used, we remain trainable.

• Be willing to fail.
Those of us who are primarily mental in our approach to problems might mistake our bursts of intellectual enlightenment for intuition. Creative types might mistake intuition’s “still small voice” for imagination. Individuals who are especially tactile might think they are being led by feelings or sensations.
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