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Peace and harmony exist in a world of duality. War and chaos must be present for them to Be. So perhaps we aren’t really wanting peace and harmony after all, because their violent and destructive friends will inevitably show up to the party with them.
Or maybe…we want all of it.
The existence of anything is dependent upon its opposite. What do we do with this information?
We allow it to expand our awareness and wake us up to the game we are here to play.
We’re here to play the game in which the world conditions us to believe in lack and limitation. The game of good and bad, right and wrong, highs and lows – all part of a desperate search for peace and harmony that inevitably carries with it chaos and destruction. This game eventually frustrates the shit out of us and brings us to our knees in a puddle of our own blood and feces and broken dreams. A hopeless place in which the only thing left to do is surrender to the madness of it all.
And that’s when a new game begins to present itself.
What is this “other game”? It’s a game in which we let go of our attachment to peace and harmony. To good and bad. To right and wrong. To seeking anything outside of the ecstasy that is already available to us in each and every moment. A game where everything simply IS. No judgment. No desire to escape. No impulse to cling and grasp.
This may seem far-fetched, but perhaps all that exists between us and this reality is our fear of surrendering to the unknown. And maybe we won’t be ready to surrender until life thoroughly kicks our asses.
And here’s the hilarious part: Life is us. We’re the ones kicking our own asses. We are creating everything in our reality, for our own benefit and the benefit of all. It’s all part of the perfection of the awakening game we are here to play.
Why would we do this? Why would we cause ourselves and others to suffer? Why wouldn’t we just skip right to the non-dual game?
Well, that wouldn’t be much fun now, would it?
Of course, it doesn’t feel fun in our moments of pain. It feels fucking awful and heart-wrenching. But we eventually come to see that much of the suffering we experience lies in our resistance to what is. And this knowing inspires surrender, a relaxing of our investment in the games of war, eventually leading us to a place of deep gratitude for our suffering – for the expansive awareness it has led us to and the liberating path it has laid out before us.
As we come to recognize the immeasurable gifts that our pain brings us, we stop fighting against life. We begin welcoming suffering as the messenger of love that it is and laughing at ourselves for the ways in which we attempt to avoid it. We smile at the “clever” strategies we’ve built against our own expansion, and the medicine of laughter carries with it a deeper level of surrender.
The moment we surrender to our suffering it’s able to do its job of expanding our awareness, and this paradoxically allows us to cultivate faith that we live in a benevolent universe. Because we come out the other side feeling better. And grateful. And this leads us to question why we ever resist anything, and to trust the universe that we are to “do its thing.”
What happens when we allow ourselves to consider the possibility that we are choosing everything, EVERYTHING, we experience, and that each and every experience is benefiting us in ways that we may not be aware of from our limited perspective? And what if we take this one step further and consider that perhaps everything that benefits us benefits all other beings impacted as well, because we are ultimately all One Being sharing one infinite experience.
We’re here to play the expansion and liberation game, and the conditions have been created for us to have something to break free from. What fun would the jailbreak game be if there were no guards or cells or danger? Why would we even want to leave, or to go anywhere at all?
Perhaps that’s exactly where we’re headed. To a place beyond the impulse to move toward or away. Beyond the desire to escape or transcend anything. A place where we are so deeply in touch with the beauty of life, exactly as it is, exactly as we are, that we have no desire to change any of it.
And from this place, we look up to find that the bars to our jail cell have vanished.
We are so blessed to exist in a time of collective awakening. The time of the collective prison break is upon us. And what we’re awakening to is the realization that the only prison that truly exists is the one within our minds.
As we recognize this, we open to possibility, and allow ourselves to consider the “impossible.”
We remember that possibility is nothing more than a belief.
Our beliefs begin to deconstruct themselves in the presence of our expanding awareness and the inevitable return to love that follows when we let go of what we think we know and allow space for true knowing to organically arise within us – a phoenix rising from the ashes of our shattered “understandings” and our choice to trust life and fully feel and embrace our suffering.
And here’s the paradox of peace and harmony:
When we start playing the game of surrendering our faith to the infinite unknown that we are – the game of appreciating the ISness of everything, just as it is, rather than attempting to create something different – we become One with life, and peace and harmony naturally become our reality.
…And here’s one final paradox to ponder:
Perhaps we must allow for the opposite of what we want to exist in order to create what we want to exist.
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A version of this post was originally posted on TroyCohen.Wordpress.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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